Catching-On to Blog Buzz

Only-blogger-I've-ever-met-in-real-life Rob May, who runs BusinessPundit.com, was invited recently to meet nutball business superstar Richard Branson and take part in panel discussions as part of what is ultimately an American Express campaign to sell financial services.  Having a gazillion-dollar company like Amex pay attention to lowly bloggers (sorry Rob, but you're lowly) turned a few heads.  But it didn't surprise me at all.  I'm surprised more companies aren't working the blog beat and, given the marketing-saturated world we live in, I expect certain bloggers to become key players in the flow of information from marketer to market.

It all comes down to hype vs. buzz.

First, definitions: Hype is something that is generated from above. Hype is what big companies have always done.  It's a movie star going from talk show to talk show to recite the same lines and laugh at the same clip of a $100 million movie being released next weekend.  It's coordinated magazine covers and advertisements and promotional stunts and big billboards out on the street, and everything about it feels slick and bought and paid-for.

Buzz is something else completely.  Buzz is bottom-up.  Buzz is what people are saying to each other.  Buzz is real.  Buzz connects.

Buzz is better than hype because the person doing the message delivery -- say, one of your friends -- is more trustworthy than, for example, a TV commercial.  People are getting very good at filtering out hype; people are totally open to buzz.  In fact, people desire buzz.  They want to be part of it, to be the first to know and see and hear.

What Amex and a number of other big corporate endeavors like about blogging is that it's a "buzzy" medium. Bloggers are in competition to be the first to know...anything.  Politics, show business, outrage, whatever: Bloggers search out new information -- buzz! -- and translate it into a form their audience can digest.  And the people they present it to are more like welcoming friends than they are wary consumers. 

Blog readers form trust relationships with blog writers; writers and readers interact through comments and email, and get to know each other. Messages that come through blogs are thus more readily accepted than, for example, billboards on the sides of buses. 

The very aspects of blogging that make blogging ridiculous make it incredibly valuable. Here are two reasons conventional media dismiss blogs as unimportant:

1. Everybody has a blog, and most blogs have about 4 readers
2. There's almost no original information on blogs

From a conventional media standpoint, those are two deal-breakers. That's because conventional media are in the business of assembling audiences: They create original content to assemble an audience which they then sell to advertisers.  The bigger the audience, the more valuable the sale.  Content that doesn't draw a big audience is content without value.

Blogging is a different thing entirely. Bloggers might dream of having a big audience, but most blog out of a different desire entirely.  It's the desire to be connected, to be be part of a community, to express something whether people read it or not.

The two big negatives of blogging -- everyone does it and there's no new information -- are exactly what makes the blogosphere valuable. Place the right message in the right blog and other bloggers will pick it up, spreading it like a virus to readers who are very close to the person -- the blogger -- delivering the message. 

A placement in a decent blog can create millions of cut-and-paste impressions. In the aggregate, those impressions are buzz, not hype. They're trusted, not ignored, in the same way that a friend's movie review carries more weight than a newspaper ad.  Something read in a blog is more interesting and valuable than the back-page of People Magazine.

Lots of companies are exploring blogs as a medium, with varied levels of commitment and success. The chaotic nature of blogs makes them difficult for the risk-averse to accept, because buzz can turn instantly nasty. The old adage, "There's no better way to kill a bad product than to advertise it," applies here. When blogs go snarky on something, it never stops. 

But get it right and there has never been a more effective "buzz" medium than blogs. That's no doubt what Amex had in mind.  That's what Pamela Anderson's publisher had in mind when it sent people like me copies of her latest book.  And it's what lots of other marketers are going to have in mind as they try to figure out how to turn blogs into a viable marketing tool.

Comments

[Gimpy Mumpy]

Well put!

[laurence haughton]

Tom
So where do those Bzz Agents (http://www.bzzagent.com/) fit in your definition. They've hype some stuff very well... but is it buzz?