In this introductory chapter I define buzz and explain why it's important. By "buzz" I refer to all the word of mouth about a brand. It's the aggregate of all person-to-person communication about a particular product, service, or company at any point in time. The following excerpt describes how I became interested in buzz and brings some statistics about the importance of word of mouth in different industries.

I first witnessed how buzz travels years ago. In 1988 I was working at a typical start-up software company in California: five people, four Macs, one PC, and a lot of hope. We had a single product, EndNote, a reference tool for researchers, and it was still a few months away from release. We hadn't advertised it. In fact, only a handful of people in California knew it existed. Yet we had just received our first order in the mail—and that order came from Princeton, New Jersey. All five of us stood around that purchase order, staring at it and trying to figure out how someone a continent away had learned of us.

Too curious to go back to work, we called the customer who had placed the order. How had he heard of EndNote? Apparently, one of the few people who had attended a sneak preview of our product in Berkeley several days earlier had been so excited about EndNote that he posted an enthusiastic message on an electronic bulletin board used by academics. One of those academics had just become our first customer.

Before I joined that start-up, I was a copywriter in an advertising agency, and in my mind marketing worked like this: Companies advertise, customers see the clever advertisements that copywriters like me worked to create, and then—and only then—customers buy the products. But this obviously was not what was happening with that EndNote purchase order, and in the following nine years I was reminded thousands of times that in the real world things operate very differently. Since that first order more than two hundred thousand copies of EndNote have been sold, and most customers have told us that they heard about the product not from advertising, not from dealers, not from magazines—but rather from friends and colleagues. That's how I became interested in buzz.

After this experience I started to pay more attention to word of mouth. But I was still not sure how important it was in other markets. Maybe, I thought, word of mouth played a significant role only in the academic market or only for software? Once I started researching the topic, however, it became clear that this is not the case. Buzz plays a major role in the purchasing process of many products:

• Sixty five percent of customers who bought a PalmPilot told the makers of this device that they had heard about it from another person.
  
  
• Forty seven percent of the readers of Surfing Magazine say that the biggest influences on their decisions about where to surf and what to purchase come from a friend.
  
  
• Friends and relatives are the number-one source for information about places to visit or about flights, hotels or rental cars, according to the Travel Industry Association.
  
  
• Fifty three percent of moviegoers rely to some extent on a recommendation from someone they know, according to a study by Maritz Marketing Research.
  
  
• Seventy percent of Americans rely on the advice of others when selecting a new doctor, according to the same study. Sixty three percent of women surveyed for Self magazine cited "friend, family or co-worker referral" as one of the factors influencing over-the-counter drug purchases.

And yet most of today's marketing still focuses on how to use advertising and other tools to influence each customer individually, ignoring the fact that purchasing many types of products is part of a social process. It involves not only a one-to-one interaction between the company and the customer but also many exchanges of information and influence among the people who surround that customer. Len Short, executive vice president of advertising and brand management at Charles Schwab, summed it up this way: "The idea that a critical part of marketing is word of mouth and validation from important personal relationships is absolutely key, and most marketers ignore it."