Here follows a recap on last night’s seminar ‘Accelerating Buzz about Contagious Products’ at Grey London with Word of Mouth UK:
Emanuel Rosen, the author of the very much talked about book “The Anatomy of Buzz” and expert of word of mouth marketing, gave an eye-opening talk with examples from his books and life experience. He claims that there are two main factors that contribute to the success of generating word of mouth – how contagious the product is and what action are made to accelerate its buzz. Rosen shared his top list of characteristics that will ‘make it contagious’ including compatibility, making things simpler, allowing for creativity and also evoking emotional response. Note that many of these are internal factors that derive from the product itself.
Emanuel Rosen on Buzz at WOM UK
What about the external factors? What could we do to accelerate contagiousness? Here are a few actions that could help in increasing word of mouth for your product:
• Wide scale seeding. We live in small social clusters, so by seeding the product into multiple social clusters in different areas will increase the chance of the product getting buzz.
• Surprise. This may seem old and used but it always works! The element of surprise will always catch people’s attention.
• Find a hook. Introduce an interesting or unique conversation piece about the product and people will talk about it.
• Uneven distribution of information. When you know something that others don’t know about, word of mouth will happen. Secrets tend to spread…
• Stimulate interactions. Whether in forms of competitions or viral campaigns, if you can get people to interact with each other then buzz will emerge.
• Connecting to passion. Take the example of American Express’ and their campaign to renovate local landmarks in different cities in the US. By introducing a poll to the public they were able to get communities that are passionate about landmarks to gather up and vote.
Do you have any other useful hints and tips for creating buzz? Do you think that the effort marketers put in to producing buzz will see results if the product itself is not contagious?
Tags accelerate buzz buzz contagious products creating event marketing social CRM UK word of mouth