What’s the Buzz? Tell Me What’s A-Happening
Session: Epidemic, Buzz, and Experimental Marketing (A New Class of Integrated Marketing)
There’s a lot of buzz about buzz marketing lately. Forgive me for saying it, but the phrase might even be on the verge of becoming a, well, buzzword. Malcolm Gladwell‘s schooled us on the importance of the Tipping Point. Seth Godin‘s turned us onto ideaviruses. But how can we take word of mouth, harness it, and reap the benefits?
This panel, while making a solid case for buzz marketing, fell slightly short of sharing real tips, techniques, and tactics. Which is what we need. It might be the case that the practice needs to mature some more before we have enough case studies to serve as a base from which we can learn. It might have been the panel’s size - almost all of the five-panelist sessions I’ve gone to have felt overly hurried - and it might have been the fact that it bumped up against tonight’s awards ceremony. But as I left the ballroom, I couldn’t help but want more on buzz marketing.
The beautiful thing about this panel is that it combined David Scott Carlick‘s robust analytical study of the phenomenon - to be revealed in a forthcoming Harvard Business Review article, I believe - with the advice of several leading practitioners, marketing agencies on the crest of the wave of the buzz phenom.
Carlick did well to highlight the importance of the lifetime value of a customer, and the value they offer after initial acquisition. Too many marketers and advertisers focus on pre-acquisition phases, and your existing customers might be your most valuable customers. Dan Mechem of Intelliseek discussed the value of mining the data in online discussions of all stripes and propagated the meme of “consumer-generated media,” or high-impact online word-of-mouth communication. And Samantha Skey from Alloy indicated that consumer-generated media is particularly important to millennials, or Generation Y.
Then we got to the real meat of the hour. BzzAgent‘s Dave Balter debunked several word-of-mouth myths - that it’s street teaming and spam, that only certain people can participate in it, and that it’s not something that happens every day. And DEI‘s David Reis offered three elements to keep in mind when designing buzz marketing campaigns: relevance, compelling content, and scope and scale.
The case studies Reis came prepared to discuss were given short shrift in the name of Q&A, which is understandable, but I expect that we’ll be hearing more about DEI and BzzAgent’s work in years to come. At least that’s the buzz from Ad:Tech.
A full transcript of this session is also available.
