Ben Neumann: Views From The Trenches

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September 22, 2005

Starting a "Buzz" or the Power of WOM (part 1)

I've always been a strong proponent of Word-of-Mouth (WOM) marketing or what is commonly known as starting a “Buzz”. It is certainly one of the most effective ways to market your business, brand, product or service and we have employed WOM techniques at Globat for years. It is also one of the most cost-effective forms of marketing as it does not require many tools or expensive services. The power of word-of-mouth marketing, however, is truly immense. One of the keys to WOM success is to have unique ideas that are trend-setting to promote your brand or business.

Let me give you an example to make the unique-idea-part of what I’m trying to say a bit clearer. Assume one of your friends wants to go to college, but has concerns about the financial hole he is digging himself into. Now your buddy decides to sit down and think about a way on how he could make a nice chunk of change, let’s say a million bucks - quickly and legally. Next your friend, who is somewhat internet-savvy, decides to create a home page on which he wants to sell advertising space; one pixel at a time for $1 per pixel. Well, since that seems to be a bit cumbersome he settles on selling advertising space on his, yet to he created, new home page, in 10x10 pixel blocks (100 pixels = 1 block = $100). Excited about his idea your friend registers a domain name that describes the concept and creates a home page with 100 x 100 of these empty $100 pixel blocks (a total of 10,000 blocks, all on one page). If your friend sells them all; he will earn a total of $1,000,000 (10,000 blocks x $100). It’s ambitious, but hey, what the heck, start-up cost for the whole venture were less than $100 ($10 for the domain, $90 hosting for the first year). Than your buddy starts to tell all his and your friends about his new site and idea, emails it to everyone he knows, calls the press, issues a press release, and spreads the words throughout the newsgroups and blogging communities. Next thing you know, and only 2 or 3 weeks into it, your buddy already sold 640 of his 10,000 pixel blocks, netting him $64,000!!!

Bullsh**? Sounds crazy? Will never work? Well, check out the true story of Alex Tew, who created TheMillionDollarHomePage.com on Aug 26, 2005. Alex is a 21-year-old student/entrepreneur from Wiltshire, England, who hopes to pay his way through college and university (and buy some new socks) by selling 1 million pixels of internet ad space for $1 each. He has sold at least 65,000-$70,000 of ad space over the past three weeks alone (Globat purchased a 39 blocks spot from Alex to support his efforts). My buddy Peter Cooper, who knows how I think about these type of ideas, was kind enough to forward Alex’s link to me (thanks Coop). Alex and his venture prove my point that properly executed ingenuity and innovation combined with WOM work almost every time!

For the WOM-interested minds I highly recommend Malcolm Gladwell’s “"The Tipping Point"! This books is one of the best ever written about why some ideas "tip" and others do not. It explains in simple to understand terms what connectors are and how mavens can have an immense impact on your business. The Tipping Point will show people how to start "positive" epidemics of their own. The bottom-line virtue of an epidemic, after all, is that just a little input is enough to get it started, and it can spread very, very quickly (think flu viruses). This point of view alone makes it something of obvious and enormous interest to everyone from educators trying to reach students, to businesses trying to spread the word about their brand, products, or services, or for that matter to anyone who's trying to create a change with somewhat limited resources. The book has a number of clarifying case studies of people who have successfully started epidemics - an advertising agency, for example, and a breast cancer activist. Gladwell's examples as well as his style of telling a scientific adventure story are really fascinating. He also takes a pressing social issue, teenage smoking, breaks it down and analyzes what an epidemic approach to solving that problem would look like. The point is that by the end of the book the reader should have a clear idea of what starting an epidemic actually takes. The Tipping Point is not an abstract, academic book. It's very practical, and it's very hopeful. It truly is brain software!

Earlier this year Chris and I joined WOMMA (Word of Mouth Marketing Association) to get a chance to mingle more with some like-minded people. Communication-wise it’s been a bit slow form the WOMMA front for my taste, but their website is full of interesting information and definitely worth a visit.

I'm currently putting together some examples and more in-depth explanations on how Buzz/WOM marketing may impact your business or brand and will post these as soon as they are ready to go.

To be continued…

Posted by Ben at September 22, 2005 02:04 AM

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Posted by: Daniel at October 17, 2005 09:42 AM

Posted by: Michael Frans at December 20, 2005 02:55 PM

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