Two things are needed to create buzz successfully. The first one, as discussed in the last chapter, is to have a contagious product. But having such a product alone is not enough. Companies that get good buzz also accelerate natural contagion. Every new product starts with no one knowing about it except for a few insiders. The buzz at this point is zero. To spread the word, the creators of the product or service start reaching out and planting the news in other areas of the networks. This is a critical time in the life of a product. It is critical for a company at this stage to have at least one person who is obsessed with spreading the word. It sounds almost too obvious, but many new products fail because there is no obsessed person in place at the right time. In the following excerpt I describe how word about FedEx spread in its early days.

On the night of March 12, 1973, employees of the young company gathered near the new sorting facility in Memphis, Tennessee, waiting for the company's Falcon airplanes to arrive from eleven cities, loaded with packages that needed to be sorted. A night that began with a lot of anticipation ended in bitter disappointment. When the airplanes arrived and the doors were opened, the employees found only six packages. "People hadn't heard of us," one employee told Robert A. Sigafoos, who described the scene in his book about FedEx, Absolutely, positively overnight! In the same way that only six packages traveled that night in the FedEx network, only a few comments about FedEx traveled around that time among potential customers. One lesson the company learned from this experience was that it needed to get more aggressive in getting out the word about its service.

Ted Sartoian was one of those who made it happen. Previously a salesperson for UPS, he was hired by Federal Express in September 1973 as the head of their sales force. Business was still pretty bad when he joined—hardly the numbers needed to support a fleet of airplanes like the one FedEx was building. Sartoian remembered shipping about three hundred packages a night out of Chicago. Even today, more than twenty-five years later, he can't help but get indignant at this low number. "Three hundred packages out of Chicago—that's just sick!" he almost shouted over the phone.

Sartoian's approach was to lead a sales team of eight or nine people at a time into each city and stay there, conducting a sales blitz of a few weeks. "We'd get a bunch of people together and we'd take them to a city like Chicago," he remembers. "We'd sit down the night before or a day before and cut the city up into parts, and each person would have a territory, and you would go around and you would canvas. And you would canvas hard, get as many people as you could. And by canvassing I mean even door-to-door selling. It was very difficult." People of course didn't know what Federal Express was and had to be convinced of the concept. Sartoian and his people would sometimes take a sample package from a potential customer and ship it for free. They would come back the next day, with the name of the customer who signed for the package thousands of miles away. "That was a great selling tool," Sartoian says. This was the way that Federal Express leapfrogged into new cities, new industries, new networks. "We'd go in there and sales-blitz that city for four, five weeks with eight or nine guys, and all of a sudden now we're getting thousands of packages a day instead of three hundred." Sartoian wasn't the first to conduct a sales blitz. Originality is not the point here. The point is that you need to initiate these links somehow into a variety of networks to generate enough momentum for the word to spread. Without these links it is conceivable that, in time, almost every office in America would have received a FedEx letter and thus would have been exposed to the brand. But this is merely an academic hypothesis. In real life, with competitors and cash flow issues, companies need to get off the ground quickly. To get buzz going, a heroic push—beyond natural contagion—is usually called for.

Also in this chapter: •The Why of Leapfrogging • The How of Leapfrogging • Other Ways to Accelerate Natural Contagion • Misconceptions About Buzz