Understanding the motivation behind word of mouth is the first step in stimulating people to talk about your product, so in this chapter I step back to examine the reasons we talk. It's important to understand that talking is not an incidental activity we engage in when we don't have anything better to do. It is rooted in some basic needs we share with other living creatures. The following section illustrates this point.

Buzz is powerful because it is in our genes. Just look out the window and consider the communication patterns of a simpler life form—in this case, birds. To understand why birds communicate, I talked to Dr. Bernd Heinrich of the University of Vermont. He studies, among other things, ravens. And ravens, as it turns out, have their own buzz. Heinrich and his colleagues wanted to know how ravens find out about food in the cold winter of Maine, and therefore they ran some experiments to study the issue. They obtained the carcass of a cow from a farmer, then went in to the forest and put the carcass out in the snow. They waited in a nearby cabin or behind a snow-covered spruce-fir blind. After a few days a common raven appeared up in the sky and discovered the carcass.

This bonanza of food could feed a single bird for the entire winter. But, to the surprise of Dr. Heinrich and his colleagues, the raven flew away without taking a bite. A few days later the raven was back—this time with dozens of other ravens. The scientists repeated this experiment twenty five times, and the results were always the same: When one or two ravens detected food, they came back several days later with family and friends in tow.

But isn't a raven better off keeping the secret to itself? Apparently not. "Having more pairs of looking eyes increases the likelihood that all birds will be fed, and on a continuous basis," the scientists explained. We're all familiar with similar behavior among ants and bees: Bees (who really should get the credit for inventing buzz) communicate through dancing. A honeybee that finds a patch of flowers goes back to its hive and performs a dance that tells the other bees where to go. A black carpenter ant that finds food sprays a secretion that excites the other ants to follow it to the food source. The most fundamental reason we talk is no different from the reason ravens communicate about food. Sharing information is an effective survival mechanism for ravens, bees, ants, andÉ people. We may no longer need to trade knowledge about bison hunting, but we're still programmed to do so.

Also in this chapter: • We Talk to Connect • We Talk to Make Sense of the World • We Talk to Reduce Risk, Cost, and Uncertainty • How Many People Do We Tell?