The Anatomy of Buzz: Creating Word-of-Mouth Marketing Book

The Palm Pilot. The novel Cold Mountain. The iMac. Hotmail. FedEx. The movies The Blair Witch Project and There's Something About Mary. According to former marketing exec Emanuel Rosen, they all became successful not through traditional advertising or marketing routes, but through "buzz", that semi-tangible process through which information and commentary jump from one brain/mouth to another, and customer loyalty is built through the advice of friends, colleagues, or trusted "mega-hubs" of information. Rosen has spent the past few years studying the routes, nodes and clusters through which buzz passes and grows, and the result is this well-researched book. While it doesn't throw much new light on the mechanics of buzz, it is at least instructive and entertaining, offering mini-sagas of the successful buzz behind such marketing triumphs as the BMW Z3 roadster. Buzz-seekers be warned, however: with the exception of a short chapter at the end of the book called "Buzz Workshop", you won't find much of a blueprint for starting the gears of buzz for your product or service. What you do get is a trove of real-life stories that, if they don't inspire and guide you toward taking your first buzz-creating baby steps, probably mean you are the type of person who should stick with conventional advertising and PR. --Timothy MurphyRead More