Understanding the Buzz About Buzz Marketing - Beyond the Sales Letter
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Other examples of buzz marketing have been used effectively without the pesky sales letter. Let’s look at Google’s Gmail. Google spent zero dollars on advertising their Gmail program. It wasn’t a program you could just sign up for, though, initially. Google provided “invitations” to an exclusive and select few, with the “power” to give out more invitations to others, who in turn received more invitations to pass along. At one time, these invitations were selling for big money on eBay! Being in the “know” was the huge draw to the Gmail program. The word spread like wild fire with no advertising dollars being spent at all, which is fairly impressive for a buzz marketing campaign in general, especially for a company we know has plenty of dough for advertising.
Even Yahoo’s Web 2.0 uses massive forms of buzz marketing in their attempts to encourage use of a new social search engine. In fact, a good percentage of the new program relies upon voting on sites from its members, and the other part is from a computer generated algorithm. Yahoo encourages its users to vote for websites that have been helpful in their search efforts, and then uses the votes of confidence to boost the SERPs (search engine results pages).
In a definition provided by Whatis.com, they say that although buzz marketing is not new, it is clear that Internet technology has drastically changed the way it's being used. Campaigns are now being perpetrated in chat rooms, in email, on discussion boards, and even in peer to peer downloads, where “marketing representatives assume an identity appropriate to their target audience and pitch their product”; people who are just like you and me, or someone we could certainly relate to.
“And as technology continues to facilitate the delivery of an electronic buzz marketing message...and software applications make message deliveries easier to quantify, some advertising experts predict that electronic buzz marketing techniques will become a standard component in all cross-media advertising campaigns. Others warn that abuse of this potentially powerful electronic marketing technique will be its downfall.”
There will always be critics, of course. Last year, 46 percent of marketers said they had no intentions of using RSS in any of their marketing campaigns. This year, that number has fallen to a mere 12% of marketers, according to Jupiter Research. Buzz marketing is the absolute oldest form of marketing, and while its delivery may have drastically changed since the Neolithic Era (that’s the Stone Age to those of us who are not paleontologists), word of mouth marketing will always be the absolute most trusted form of advertisement, because usually the person saying it has a high form of credibility. After all, if your mom or your best friend said it, why shouldn’t you believe them?
Next: Drawbacks of Buzz Marketing >>
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