Lots of good stuff in this chapter. Examples and case studies are mostly B2C, but the concepts work well for B2B Marketing as well.

Emanuel Rosen defines BUZZ as “the sum of all comments about a certain product that are exchanged among people at any given time.” He goes on to list why buzz is powerful today – noise, skepticism, and connectivity.

• Noise – “Customers can hardly hear you.” Marketing and Advertising are everywhere. There’s no escaping it. We get it in the mail, we see banner ads online, when was the last time you searched Google and didn’t see a paid ad pop up? And let’s not forget all of the email spam we dread every day. As Marketers, we must figure out a way to stand out in the crowd if we want to be heard (or seen). This creates buzz.
• Skepticism – “Customers are skeptical.” This isn’t surprising. They have been bombarded by marketing and advertising everywhere they go, all promising to the best results. Who should they believe or trust? Rosen mentions a survey that illustrates this point - “37% of the public considers information from a software company ‘very or somewhat believable’.” Wow!
• Connectivity – Today people are easily connected. We all have access to new tools that enable us to better share information. As Marketers, wouldn’t we rather them talk about us to our face instead of behind our back? Create places and opportunities for people to speak out about your products or services. Be involved.

Rosen goes on to say “If you want to create buzz, you have to know who your customers are and how you are reaching them. Start by answering these questions:

• From whom do your customers typically learn about your product?
• What do people say when they recommend your product?
• How fast does information about your product spread as compared with competitors’ products?
• Who are the network hubs?
• Where does the information hit a roadblock?
• How many sources of information does a customer rely on and which ones are most important?
• What other kinds of information spread through the same networks?”

Not only will these questions help us create buzz, they’ll also be helpful as we are launching new products or services, introducing new features, and thinking about other social marketing strategies.

Generating buzz doesn’t just happen overnight. It takes planning, seeding and well thought out execution. A good seeding program can be the launching pad to huge success. Rosen listed four rules for building a successful seeding program, these are definitely worth sharing and talking about.

1. “Look beyond the usual suspects. Identify social circles, industry segments, or academic disciplines in which people don’t talk about your product or service, and seed them.”
2. “Put products in their hands.” Let your audience touch or experience firsthand what you are offering. If your solution isn’t one you can easily experience, offer a free demo or show real results via a proven customer success story.
3. “Reduce the price barrier. Make the product free for seed recipients if you can, or at least offer a significant discount.”
4. “Listen for silence. When you hear silence, the network is dead. Pay attention to dead networks and do further seeding to wake them up.”

Remember, the goal of seeding is to “plant the seed to stimulate discussion in multiple networks simultaneously.”

At ReachForce we are rolling out new SaaS tools that enable Sales and Marketing teams to better identify and target their market “sweet spots”. Here’s how we are trying to create some buzz around these new product offerings –

• We typically sell to Marketers but with these new SaaS tools Sales teams might be a better target audience so we are doing some test messaging via email programs to a custom role-based list of Sales decision makers.
• We are offering these people free trials of the real time analytics software. We started out offering the new tools bundled with ReachForce data services and decided that stand alone, the analytics tools added value and created a sense of wanting more (data services). So we now are offering the new tools free for a limited time. We are hoping this is going to create buzz for both the software and data services.
• We are also experimenting with some very targeted advertising programs. Hoping these are going to drive some awareness as well as generate some prospect engagement.
• We are tracking our buzz program by measuring how many people actually log in and try out the free software tools. So far so good and we’re just getting started!

With all of these things we are trying to create buzz that ultimately turns into measurable revenue.

Anyone else actively working on a B2B word-of-month campaign? If so, I’d love to hear all about it.