News & Media

The most important aspect of buzz marketing is being able to create a story that consumers as well as the media will find interesting and relevant. That story can be simpleâ??but it must be visual. It can start with a product, but it must have a contagious element added in. The reason that people talked about the Palm Pilot, for example, was its “wow” effectâ??and it was visible. Some may say this is not part of marketing. Our panel disagrees.

I love Google as much as the next person, but their official blog just doesn’t do it for me. The “voice” just does not seem real, or anything I can relate to. It feels scrubbed by the PR department; I might even go so far as to say it comes off as a mouthpiece of […]

Your brand, products and services all benefit when people are talking about you in positive terms. Word-of-mouth can be a wonderful tool to add to your marketing arsenal. Of course, it’s not new, so how has word-of-mouth marketingâ??also known as buzz marketingâ??evolved into the 21st century? How does it differ from viral marketing or customer evangelism? And how do marketers use buzz marketing strategically?

Steve Spangler of SteveSpanglerScience.com leapt in — boots and all! First time attendee and speaker on my panel “What Happened when eTailers dove into Blogs, Podcasting and RSS” at Shop.org in Las Vegas last week, Steve didn’t let the thought of mingling with billion dollar online retailers intimidate him. And he has a message for […]

You may already be familiar with the concept of character blogging, where the blog is actually a fictitious charcter, such as a cartoon character from a cereal box, or a doll perhaps. I think an interesting twist to this concept would be to have an historical character blogging from the past, as if it were […]

Late last month I spoke at the “Successful Online Advertising conference in Auckland. One of the questions that came up during the session on paid search was around the tactics of gap surfing and bid jamming. A lot of people in the audience didn’t know the definitions of these terms; in fact, many had not […]