It’s been a while since I have recommended a book, but the last few books I’ve completed just haven’t passed the test and quite honestly have been rather disappointing, until I started reading Buzzmarketing! This book essentially says throw your traditional marketing out the window. Yes it’s one of those complete change of mindset type books and I really enjoyed the experience.
The book defines Buzzmarketing as:
Buzzmarketing captures the attention of consumers and the media to the point where talking about your brand or company becomes entertaining, fascinating, and newsworthy.
Buzzmarketing presents a new methodology for companies to consider when they begin a marketing campaign. Forget spending all your money on advertising in different media, this is what everyone else does; you have to find a unique and memorable angle that will stick in the mind of your target audience. You need to come up with a creative idea that will create buzz around your brand.
Do you remember a few years ago when a small company named half.com was covered all throughout the news for convincing a small town to rename itself half.com for a year? This book’s author, Mark Hughes, was one of main individuals involved in that crazy, brilliant, and extremely successful campaign. Mark starts the book off with this unique and extremely interesting story. From this story I was hooked as he informs readers of the six buttons of buzz and takes us through other case studies of companies unique marketing campaigns the amazing word of mouth buzz they were able to create around their brands.
The Six Buttons of Buzz
- Push the Six Buttons
- Capture Media
- Advertise for Attention
- Climb Buzz Everest
- Discover Creativity
- Police Your Product
You’ll have to read the book to learn what exactly how these six buttons are used to create buzz for your brand, but I promise you it won’t be a boring read. Bottom line is creativity is timeless and knowing how to get people talking about your business is MUCH more valuable than spending lots of money to attempt to push your brand through channels that people are increasing ignoring. This really is one of those exciting books that will stimulate you to start thinking in new and creative directions.
This post was written by:
Kyle James - who has written 178 posts on .eduGuru.
Kyle is an Inbound Marketing Consultant at HubSpot and formerly the webmaster at Wofford College. Kyle is an active contributor in the social media spectrum. Although his background is technical, he claims to know a thing or two about marketing, but mostly that revolves around SEO, analytics, blogging, and social media. He has spoken at multiple conferences on topics ranging from e-mail marketing to social media and Web analytics. He's definitely a fairly nice guy.
Ways to Connect with Kyle
August 13th, 2008 at 3:04 am
Sounds like a very prescient book. Looking forward to reading it.
August 13th, 2008 at 8:20 am
adding this to the endless list @markgr gave me at eduweb
can’t wait for winter reading corners
August 13th, 2008 at 10:13 am
@Linda & Melissa – It’s really one of those books that will suck you in and is such a quick read. Excellent story telling!
August 14th, 2008 at 11:17 pm
I haven’t read buzz marketing, but doing something really different has worked successfully since the days of P.T. Barnum.
If you do what everyone else is doing, you’re just average. But the new, the unique, the truly different helps yours to stand out in the crowd of businesses.
August 15th, 2008 at 7:29 am
Nice review, Kyle. Building buzz has always been an important part of my marketing arsenal, particularly because I don’t have any money to spend on huge marketing or advertising campaigns. You might be interested in a book called Beyond Buzz, by Lois Kelly. I reviewed it eons ago on my blog, so you can go there and search by that title if you want to read a bit about it.
August 15th, 2008 at 5:31 pm
Interesting post and it brings up interesting facts relating to how to build a brand that I sometimes struggle with. With limited ad budgets, a company must rely on new tactics to generate POSITIVE awareness.
I own a web analytics consulting company. We get some press, but not too much, this seems like an interesting book to set us down the path of getting more market tactics. Thanks for the review.