Here's some advice on buzz from people interviewed
for the book.

To generate buzz you often need to use nontraditional marketing techniques, but it's hard to tell in advance which will work. Jim McDowell, VP of marketing at BMW of North America, suggests that you start several simultaneous initiatives. "You have to be prepared to do ten initiatives with the hope that two of them will work really well, five of them will work just fine, and three of them could be minor disasters," he says.

"Creating buzz is an enormously hard job, and it has to be done both on-line and off-line," says Marleen McDaniel, chairman and CEO of Women.com Networks. To spread the word about Women.com, McDaniel and her colleagues talked to dozens of women's groups, evangelizing the Internet. Charlotte Stuyvenberg , VP of marketing at Wizards of the Coast which markets trading-cards such as Magic and Pokémon makes a similar point. The company's Internet presence accelerates buzz, but letting users personally try out its games is key. "Reading about something on the Internet is not enough," says Stuyvenberg. "They have to be able to experience it themselves." Touring, sampling, and demo programs are important elements in the company's marketing mix.

Jim Callahan of The Dohring Company, a marketing research firm which conducts surveys for about five hundred car dealerships around the country every year, says, "There is a misconception that if a dealership gives good service it would automatically get good word of mouth. What we have found is that the dealerships that make a conscious effort to promote word of mouth are the ones that are most successful in getting word of mouth."

Network hubs are opinion leaders who can help you spread the word in their clusters. Certain kids spread the word about yo-yos; certain engineers spread the word about a new programming tools; certain readers spread the word about new books; and the payoff for capturing these special individuals' attention is high. "If you get them on a book, then twenty five other people know about the book tomorrow," says David Unowsky of Ruminator Books, a bookstore in Saint Paul, Minnesota.

Heidi Roizen, one of the best-connected people in Silicon Valley, asked Walt Mossberg, the influential columnist from The Wall Street Journal, to meet with an entrepreneur she works with. Mossberg agreed to meet him the next day. When the two met, the businessman expressed his astonishment at Roizen's power. "I do everything she tells me to do," Mossberg told him. The reason? Because she doesn't ask him to do much. Roizen has a good relationship with Mossberg but is careful not to abuse it. "I'm on the board of six companies, and I've only called Walt once," she says. It's pointless to nag someone like Mossberg about a product that wouldn't interest him. "In order to use my network wisely, I don't call someone unless I'm absolutely certain that the product is ready and the idea is good." The same respectful attitude should be used with all network hubs. Keep in touch with them, but don't overdo it.

Ed Niehaus, president of NRW, a PR firm in Silicon Valley, uses a rock concert metaphor to explain this point. In the old days it was clear that the stars—the press and analysts—were up onstage and "regular customers" were in the audience. "The Internet suddenly puts a next ring of people, the people in the first twenty rows, onstage," he explains. "Pay attention to the people who are onstage, and there are a lot more of them than there ever were before," says Niehaus.

Outrageous stimuli get more buzz. A beautiful model who appears at a fashion show wearing beautiful dressy shoes is just another beautiful model. Let her wear the ugliest Birkenstocks and suddenly everyone will be talking about it. That's what designer Narciso Rodriguez did. He chose what importer Margot Fraser calls "the ugliest thing that we have" and put it into a fashion show with chiffon dresses. "It's so outrageous it's in every magazine," says Fraser, "and suddenly young women want to buy this." The same principle—outrageousness—helped build buzz behind There's Something About Mary, a politically incorrect comedy filled with scenes that are so shockingly unexpected you just have to share them with a friend (though probably not with your mother).

How can you spread the word about new running shoes? In the case of Brooks Sports, part of the answer was to identify retailers who enjoy high credibility among serious runners. Helen Rockey, the company's CEO, hit the road to meet them. "Creating validity in the specialty running store channel was crucial," she explains. Many of these retailers, serious runners themselves, liked the new products and started spreading the word to customers and friends.

"I can't think of an example of a product or a service that really generated a firestorm of positive word of mouth that didn't market from a platform of truth and honesty and directness in its relationships with its consumers," says John Yost, an advertising professional who's advertised brands such as Saturn and Yahoo! "As a generation, we've been so overly marketed to and we've been so exposed to hype, that at this point we're pretty savvy customers and don't fall easily to some of these traditional pitches anymore."

"You never know where something's going to lead," says Ava DeMarco of Pittsburgh, cofounder of Littlearth, a producer of fashion accessories. In 1999, DeMarco and her partner Robert Brandegee were invited to The Oprah Winfrey Show. When she traced back the origin of that invitation, DeMarco came up with the following chain: the researcher for the Oprah show learned about Littlearth from a book put together by the editors of Entrepreneur magazine, who in turn learned about DeMarco's company from an article in a local newspaper. "We ended up on The Oprah Winfrey Show due to some press that happened almost two years ago," she says.

Such promotions are very easy to test. Next time you mail something to your customers, slip in a tell-a-friend offer and monitor its impact. I asked Barry Berkov, former executive vice president at CompuServe, how well these campaigns worked for his company. "They were reasonably successful. They always produced a higher total response rate than a standard direct mail," he said. Since these promotions are hardly ever done independently—usually they piggyback on another mailing to customers—they can be quite cost-effective. In fact, says Berkov, "they're such low incremental cost that you can hardly not do them."

"Strange as it may seem, a lot of the engineers don't necessarily know what the company is really up to." One VP Marketing at a software company told me. "You have to make sure you find out who the activists are in your own engineering organization" he says "and make sure they are up to date on what your company strategy is." You need to keep informing them, so that when they do speak on a newsgroup, expressing their personal opinions, they are aware of the facts.

"In effect, our grassroots marketing [started] before there was even a product," says Brian Maxwell, founder of PowerBar. When Maxwell and his colleagues developed their energy bar, they went out to running, cycling and triathlon events and bombarded athletes with questions. How much did they exercise? How often did they compete? What did they eat before they exercised? Maxwell estimates that they talked with about 1,200 people during the development stage. These people were the first to receive samples when the product was ready and the first ones to tell their friends about it.