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This past year I have had the good fortune to talk about a subject I am most passionate about, "buzz marketing." The term was coined by marketing gurus who wanted to spread their message among people through word-of-mouth.
Advertising expenditures have now topped the $150 billion mark, with television accounting for approximately 40 percent of all spending. It's no surprise that the medium exhibiting the highest percentage of growth has been the Internet. The chief reason can be attributed to the evolution of websites.
Remember how the first generation of websites was all about human-computer interaction? Now the current generation is all about social networks - people not only interacting with their computer or with information, but also interacting with each other. The last published numbers I saw said there were approximately 20 million blogs in the United States alone, with roughly 350,000 daily postings.
Oh yes, let's not forget cell phones - three out of four people in the United States connect regularly, thanks to their cell phones. That is a lot of people talking. As a result, marketers now recognize that the new network technology is a great conduit to share information peer-to-peer and build customer loyalty.
True buzz is like a virus that changes to meet the challenge of a new environment. There are three distinct stages: inoculation, or the introduction of...