What is buzz marketing?

Buzz marketing is the ability to spread awareness for your product or service through word-of-mouth. The goal is to create enough positive buzz that it feeds back into business success.

Sounds simple right?

It is, and it isn’t. There are basic ways you and your employees can generate buzz. And there are some more complicated ways. The crux of it is twofold:

1. You have to do it, and not enough people do; and,
2. You have to keep doing it, and too many people give up.

Ron McDaniel of Buzzoodle has written a book called Buzzoodle Buzz Marketing – 57 Word of Mouth Marketing Challenges For The Entire Workforce.

It’s an easy, quick read, made up primarily of the 57 challenges.

One of Ron’s key messages that most people don’t “get” is that everyone in your business can be a buzz marketer. It’s not just your marketing department, PR team or a couple of honchos at the top. The more that everyone participates, the more buzz that’s generated, the more successful the company becomes. That’s Ron’s model.

He writes:

Buzzoodle Buzz Marketing is a book about teamwork and the cultivation of a workforce that not only does a remarkable job, but also understands that everyone in the organization is responsible for creating a bit of buzz to help gain visibility, market share, and success.

In theory it sounds wonderful. In practice, I’m sure many people struggle with the notion of getting everyone involved; including the marketers/PR people and everyone else. In fact, Ron says that the inspiration for starting Buzzoodle and writing the book was his inability to get others at another company he owns to do the buzz thing.

Still, there are plenty of challenges (or exercises) in the book that are extremely easy to do. This is an important point – in 5 minutes a day, each person could create a bit of buzz.

The biggest disappointment with Ron’s book is that there aren’t enough examples of companies executing successful buzz marketing campaigns. He uses some examples with a few of the challenges, but they’re often quite vague. I would have loved to see many more stories about companies – big and small – using buzz marketing to their benefit. The stories would have made a very compelling argument for why buzz marketing is crucial and why getting everyone involved is a must.

Nevertheless, you need to recognize the importance of buzz marketing. When you consider how powerful word-of-mouth can be in terms of generating positive awareness for your business as well as direct leads and referrals, you’ll realize the need to get going. Combine buzz marketing and your understanding of how important the Web has become, with blogging, podcasting, social networks and social media and this is a no-brainer.

With that in mind, I’m embarking on a 3-Week Buzz Marketing Challenge.

My goal is to accomplish as many of Ron’s challenges as possible, and report my efforts and results here. Given that I’m doing a bunch of different things it may get tricky; but I’ll be picking specific businesses and endeavors to promote for each of my buzz marketing challenges and we’ll see how it goes.

Wanna join me?

I hope you’ll participate in my 3-Week Buzz Marketing Challenge. You can buy the book or watch for me to announce each buzz challenge that I’m undertaking and follow along.