Opportunities - Buzz and Word of Mouth

A good friend of mine is publishing a book on marketing tips. He is getting 100 tips written by various people to be included in the book. He already has some big names involved. The cost is only to buy 100 books at $6 per book. You can sell them, give them away, etc. He has about half the slots full. This is a good buzz opportunity because you will be in the book, and you will have a gift to give people when you talk to them. Win/Win. Check him out here Also check out the upcoming WOM Conference in England - They have done a good job of simply asking me to talk about them. That is all buzz usually takes.

Great Deals on Buzz Marketing

What? Great Deals on Buzz Marketing? What does that mean, you ask. I consider a great deal on buzz to be something that I spend less than 5 minutes on and it is likely to get 2 or more people to spend more than 5 minutes on my website, blog or making a purchase. So what are some great deals on buzz marketing? Great Buzz Deal #1: Email - Each day follow up with two stale contacts and touch base. This should take under 5 minutes and all you have to do is filter through your email achieves. Great Buzz Deal #2: Social Bookmarks - Go to del.icio.us or another social bookmark site and bookmark an interesting page on your company website or a post on your blog. Be sure to use compelling descriptions and tags so that more people are likely to click on it when they see it. Great Buzz Deal #3: News Voting – Go to Digg or GoBigNetwork and post a link to your blog or website. With the right title you might generate a huge buzz return on your investment and it should not take more than 2 minutes once you have an account and have done it once or twice. Great Buzz Deal #4: Drop an email to a popular blogger. - If you provide a link and something interesting to say, they may add it to their blog and you will get buzz. Great Buzz Deal #5: Forum or Blog Comments- Add a thoughtful comment to someone’s blog post or message board/forum. Provide a link back to your site or blog to get more traffic. You could do it right now, right here. That saves you at least a minute! These are just five of the many great deals on buzz marketing that are on the internet these days. Be creative and bargain hunt for deals that give you a bigger bang for a smaller investment of time and keep doing them frequently.

Newspapers and Blogs

Yesterday the local Akron Beacon Journal did an article on business blogging that heavily featured me. Including a huge picture of me smiling that made me look fat, my wife says. The funny thing about the article was that it did not have a link on the web and did not generate any internet traffic at all. I was actually down yesterday. What it did generate was a lot of emails from people, some of whom I had not spoken with in a while. That was nice. Then, local Small Business Guru and blogging expert Anita Cambell mentioned it in her blog the next day. That did generate more traffic. The moral of the story is that buzz is not isolated. One thing leads to another, that leads to another, and can build up to nice buzz for you.

VOIP and Viral Bad Buzz

When you change your phone number, you have to tell people. When you change it back, you have to tell them again. VOIP easily spreads good and bad buzz when people send out their new contact information. Consider the email my sister just sent out to 50 people: ------------- Hello Just wanted to let you all know we are back to our old phone number. # 610-xxx-xxxx We tried the voice over internet protocol (VOIP) and it has been an absolute nightmare. I will be glad when it is all over!!! Hope all is well! -------------- If you are in the VOIP industry, you need to be sure to make people happy, because bad experiences from you and your competitors travels fast. As a side note, I have been very happy with our VOIP 2nd line in the office.

Buzz and Busy - Now Hiring

Buzz is good. It makes you grow. Sometimes buzz makes you grow fast. I am looking for at least one good software engineer. Must be in the greater Akron area. Ideal candidate will enjoy how technology can enable content management and marketing. Send resume to jobs@outstanda.com

Make It Great - Phil Gerbyshak

I finally got my copy of Phil Gerbyshak's new book, Make It Great. It came to the office, and I took it home when I went home for lunch, planning to reread it again in the evening. (I'd read the advance copy before.) When I got home, my wife, who met Phil on a trip to DC, had already read it. So instead of me rehashing my thoughts on it, here are hers.

It provided a nice wrapper for the other business and leadership books I have read. Phil mentions Zig Ziglar and others that I have read, and ties them up into an actionable work book. - Neofita McDaniel

The Soul of an Amusement Park

I have been working long hours lately and wanted to do something fun with the family on Saturday. At the last minute we decided to go to Geauga Lake Amusement Park. It is less than an hour away and with young kids, it is not necessary to drive the extra distance to Cedar Point, as it is famous for bigger roller coasters, which I could not have gone on with them anyway. For those of you that do not know the history, Geauga Lake used to be an amusement park across the lake from Sea World. Then they bought Sea World and merged them. Then they became Six Flags. Then they closed the Sea World section and made it sort of a lame part of the park, with some minor attractions. Then Cedar Fair bought it and really changed things up. All of this happened in about a 8 year span. There is buzz marketing relevance coming, stay with me…. The constant changes have left the park without a vision or a soul. The coasters are still fun, and they have invested heavily in turning the old Sea World side into a water world theme park, but there is a real lack of identify. There are lots of places that once used to be cool restaurants on the lake and great little shops. Now many of them are boarded up or employee only areas. It was fun in the past to listen to live music and have a drink in the late afternoons. Riverboats still sit on the lake and I have not seen them move in years. The whole park seems like a carnival in a parking lot. Here today, vacant tomorrow. Amusement parks usually thrive on the buzz they create by adding the next “world’s largest rollercoaster” – replace largest with fastest, highest, etc. Sometimes you do not need buzz. In fact, you are better off without it. In the case of Geauga Lake, it is fine but I hope the current owners stay in place for a few years and care enough to make it seem special. To give it an identity it has clearly lost. Maybe next year it will be the Aurora metro park zoo and video arcade.

Generating Sales Leads with Buzz Marketing

Sales leads can be generated with buzz marketing only if you are prepared. Buzz Marketing is not going to make people come and get in line to buy your service. It is going to create curiosity that will cause an investigation. If you are trying to generate sales leads with buzz and word of mouth marketing, consider the process a prospect will go through for your particular product or service.

To increase sales leads with buzz marketing:

• Make sure your website has clear, easy to find information about the product or service.
• Make sure it is easy to purchase online or request to request more information.
• Make sure your product or service name is memorable and you are ranked high on search engines when people start investigating.
• Have every staff member know how to handle a call from a sales lead.
• Make the purchase an easy to understand decision with multiple ways to find out about it. Acknowledge and reward people that do a referral and generate a sales lead for you.
• Be ready for a sudden increase in sales.
• Don’t let your buzz die. Keep generating a steady stream of buzz and word of mouth. When people hear about something from multiple sources they are more likely to investigate.
• Follow up with your sales leads quickly and multiple times. More than likely the buzz has made your lead curious, but you are not their top priority.

If you take the Buzzoodle approach and keep generating a steady stream of buzz, you will generate more sales leads. Be prepared to educate and handle the leads well, or you may be wasting your time.

- And yes, this is one of those many things I have learned the hard way.

The Unfortunate Fact of Customer Service

I am lazy. If I am spending a nickel, I expect to be treated like a king. Not like during some revolution, but like a king during a good, stable, firmly in control of the countryside kind of way. Tomorrow is a meeting I am scheduled to go to. It is a membership organization that requires a sign up. I am already in another group, and told the owner to add it to my bill and I would join this one as well. He told me (nicely) to go out and sign up on the website. He does not realize how lazy I am. (I am actually busy, but lazy seems cuter.)

Now I will miss the next meeting because it took too much effort. Far less effort than writing this blog post, but I write this post because I want to.

If you want to create buzz you have to make your story easy to spread. If you want more sales, you need to make the purchase as easy as possible.

A Little Buzz Here, A Little Buzz There

If you are a regular reader of this blog, you know that our thing is creating a little buzz all the time with as many advocates as possible. Doing that can lead to a long tail effect for buzz and grow your organization. I have a form up where you can sign up to get information on my book, Buzzoodle Buzz Marketing as it nears release. I have been promoting it in a variety of small ways, and the funny thing is that each different way gets me a little more results.

• My Network - My personal network is the only thing that has resulted in a lot of interest right away. Some people have pre-ordered copies for all of their employees already.

The rest are all about even. All of the following areas have generated 1-5 people interested.

• My Squidoo Lens - Had I not taken 15 minutes the other night in bed to update my Squidoo Lens, I would have lost out on a couple of interested people.
• This Blog - Even with 50-150 readers a day, this blog has underperformed with sign ups. Only a few.
• eNewsletter - I have not made the announcement in our eNewsletter yet, but it landed in someone else's and resulted in someone being interested.
• Trackback on Seth Godin's Blog - Making comments and doing trackbacks on popular blogs also generate interest, and has generated conversions.
• Google Search - Yes, even the traditional search engine is bringing in contacts, and I didn't even pay anyone for SEO.
• The great unknown - Several people have personality flaws and refused to let me know how they found the page. I might delete them, but then again, I might not.

This is in about 10 days of working at it in my spare time. The real lesson here is that Buzz Marketing should not be about hitting a home run. It should be about creating a little buzz here, a little buzz there and building it into a roar that sticks around and grows.

Agency.com

Tim Raines pointed me to his post that points to what agency.com is doing to win subway business. If you have not seen the video yet, it is interesting. Thanks Tim.

Yellow Pages

We are doubling our office space soon and it was time to do some cleaning. One trip out to the dumpster was with my arms full of yellow pages phone books. New ones, because I throw the old ones away. It is expansive to buy a yellow page ad. You could create a great, interactive website for less than the monthly yellow page ad cost. I'd kept the phone books because I used to keep the phone books, but I always look up people's phone numbers online now. It took a layer of dust on the cover to get me to realize I was never going to need the phone book again. Even if the power was out, I would look up a bill in a filing cabinet to call the power company. If you want to create buzz, you have to have a buzz-worthy message and you have to put it in a place people will find it.

Win the Buzz Game

Creating buzz really can be thought of like a game. There are lots of ways to measure your success (points.) Here are the different point options you have. And by the way, you can help measure ROI with this as well.

• Sales Increase - Are your sales going up and Buzz is the only thing different?
• Website Sales - Can you track where sales are coming from on your website through your ecommerce store?
• Website Traffic - Is your website traffic growing faster? Do you see a bump after a buzz marekting effort?
• Blog Mentions - How often are you mentioned on blogs? Is it going up?
• Google Trends - If you are popular enough, google trends will show you website search trends.
• Call and Email Volume - If you are getting more calls and emails for information, it is a good sign that buzz is paying off. Be sure to ask people how they heard about you.
• Search Engine Ranking - Believe it or not, Buzz effects search engine ranking. Every time someone links to your page from a credible site they are helping you achive better ranking. Measure your search engine rank for main keywords.
• Inbound Links - The same as search engine ranking. You can measure your inbound links on the major search engines.
• Referrals - If you are creating good buzz and have good products and services that people understand, you will see an increase in referrals.

I am sure there are more ways to measure your results. I know of some more sophisticated products out there but this is a simple list you can start with today. Be sure to write down your measurements so you can compare them over time.

Seth Godin for Authors

As I am going through the final stages of publishing my first book, I was very pleased with Seth Godin's blog post with advice to authors. If I could get on Oprah, Seth would have to blog about me and then my evil plan would be complete. One thing I will adjust on his list: He says blurbs are not very important. I agree on the back cover they may not be very important to selling the book, but blurbs are a good way to build advocates (people that are not famous but are quoted on your book will talk about it.) and a good long list of blurbs with names and titles is going to produce a lot of search engine hits on a website or blog. Thanks for the advice, Mr. Godin.

WOM BUZZ VIRAL Marketing

This post is my personal opinion on the differences between Buzz Marketing, WOM - Word of Mouth Marketing and Viral Marketing. There is so much overlap, that some people think that it is all just word of mouth marketing. Some people think Viral Marketing takes place only on the internet. Some people think Buzz Marketing is when you go out and pay people to fake buzz. WOM - Word of Mouth - Word of mouth is really people recommending something to someone they know or writing about something in a public place, like the internet. Referrals from a friend are very likely to trigger a purchase, and this is the goal. Viral Marketing - Making something viral does not necessarily mean someone is willfully recommending the product or service, as in word of mouth marketing. It could be that the message attaches itself to something that someone does, such as an email footer for hotmail, and spreads. Or it could be something that is easy to spread and people enjoy spreading it. Viral marketing spreads very quickly and with little effort once the marketing virus is released. Buzz Marketing - Buzz Marketing I refer to as word of mouth marketing with the volume turned up. It is the art of getting more people to talk about you more often. Word of Mouth Marketing experts are often trying to do the same thing, but buzz has a stronger focus on increasing volume and passion about the topic. Good Internet Marketers will use all of these to be successful on the web. Their Internet Marketing Strategy will include:

• Word of Mouth Internet Strategies such as a Refer a Friend website feature
• Viral Marketing Internet Strategies such as a video that is funny or options to easily Digg a page.
• Buzz Marketing Internet Strategies such as creating more content and connections that get people to link to them, write about them, reference them and email about them. One way is to be controversial or exciting, another way to achieve this is with volume of smaller buzz efforts.

With Buzzoodle Buzz Marketing, we prefer a disciplined approach to creating consistently more buzz over the long term with your existing advocates. My upcoming book will address how to do this on a limited budget.