Product Description

The first guide to creating the word-of-mouth magic that breaks through the skepticism and information overload of today's consumers, and drive sales--and profits--to new heights.

As Newsweek recently proclaimed, "Buzz greases the great conveyor belt of culture and commerce, moving everything from movies to fashions of the body and mind faster and faster."

Now available in paperback, The Anatomy of Buzz, written by former marketing VP Emanuel Rosen, pinpoints the products and services that benefit the most from buzz and offers specific strategies for creating and sustaining effective word-of-mouth strategies. Drawing on interviews with more than 150 marketing executives who have successfully built buzz for major brands, Rosen describes the ins-and-outs of attracting the attention of influential first-users and "bigmouth" movers-and-shakers, and discusses proven techniques for stimulating customer-to-customer selling–including how companies can spread the word to new territories by taking advantage of customer hubs and networks on the Internet and elsewhere.

Recent surveys show that 74 percent of young people rely to some extent on others when selecting a car, that 56 percent of moviegoers follow the recommendations of friends, and that 65 percent of the people who bought a Palm Pilot were inspired by the enthusiasm of others. With The Anatomy of Buzz, business leaders have what they need to reignite excitement about an existing product or service or turbocharge the launch of a new product.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #26090 in Books
• Published on: 2002-04-16
• Released on: 2002-04-16
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 303 pages

Amazon.com Review
The Palm Pilot. The novel Cold Mountain. The iMac. Hotmail. FedEx. The Blair Witch Project and There's Something About Mary. According to former marketing exec Emanuel Rosen, they all became successful not through traditional advertising or marketing routes, but through "buzz," that semitangible process through which information and commentary jump from one brain or mouth to another. Rosen also ascribes buzz to creating customer loyalty, which he says is built through the advice of friends, colleagues, or such trusted "mega-hubs" of information as Oprah Winfrey and Rosie O'Donnell. Rosen has spent the past few years studying the routes, nodes, and clusters through which buzz passes and grows, and the result is this well-researched book. While it doesn't throw much new light on the mechanics of buzz, it is at least instructive and entertaining, offering minisagas of the successful buzz behind such marketing triumphs as the dELia's catalog for teenage girls, PowerBars, and the BMW Z3 roadster. Buzz seekers, be warned, however: with the exception of a short chapter at the end of the book called "Buzz Workshop," you won't find much of a blueprint for starting the gears of buzz for your product or service. What you do get is a trove of real-life stories that, if they don't inspire and guide you toward taking your first buzz-creating baby steps, probably mean you're the type of person who should stick with conventional advertising and PR. --Timothy Murphy

From Publishers Weekly
Often generated within the hive of the Internet, "buzz" has become essential to a product's success in today's fast-paced business environment. As Rosen (a former marketing executive for Niles Software) explains, in pre-Internet days a new product would appear in stores; consumers would buy it or not; and the company would then take however long it wished to evaluate the launch. Today, however, consumers immediately voice their viewsAon message boards, review sites, company sites, complaint sites, via e-mail or on their own Web siteAand so have a strong and immediate influence on whether a launch succeeds. Covering the same territory as Seth Godin in Unleashing the Ideavirus (E-Publishing, Aug. 7), Rosen draws on his own experience with Niles Software's EndNoteAa computer program that converts bibliographic annotations from one form to anotherAto offer an overview of the mechanics of buzz. Topics range from how to seed the market at the grassroots to how to tantalize with scarcity and mystery, to how to accelerate natural contagion. The concluding "buzz workshop," complete with checklists and sidebars, is the most helpful, but marketers and inventors looking for concrete ideas may be disappointed by its brevity. Agent, Daniel Greenberg. (Oct.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
Buzz is what leads to long lines at a movie theater, what makes it impossible to get a reservation for that new restaurant, and what can send a first-time author to the top of the best-seller lists. Buzz is a lot like humor. It is easy to give examples of how it works; but just like dissecting a joke, it becomes an academic exercise, and investigating the anatomy of buzz is no guarantee that successful buzz can be cloned. Examples are myriad, but a definition is elusive. Rosen calls it the "aggregate of all person-to-person communication about a particular product, service, or company at any point in time." Rosen was a marketing vice-president at a software company that developed a product called EndNote, which could display references and citations in any bibliographic style. He observed buzz firsthand as EndNote's popularity spread through the academic and writing communities. While Rosen does discuss networks, nodes, and the diffusion of information, he also offers a fascinating look at our popular and consumer cultures. David Rouse
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Customer Reviews

Great Intro to Buzz Marketing
I found this book to be a great introduction to the idea of buzz marketing. Like its title suggest, Emanuel Rosen breaks down the elements and possibilities of buzz, and how information flows in our Web 2.0 society. Most helpful was his comment and illustrations of how traditional marketing can both stimulate and kill buzz, and the rules to following when integrating ad buys and buzz. Mr. Rosen offered some excellent examples, some we've heard before, but are nonetheless powerful. Overall an interesting and thought-provoking book for anyone wanting to learn more about buzz marketing theory and implementation.

Great resource and starting point on Buzz Marketing.
I enjoyed reading this as it was one of the first books on Buzz that I'd read.


It's packed with lots of great examples, for example I discovered the history of the term "Viral Marketing"


I was particularly happy, given my job (marketing board games), to find stories about Pictionary had been marketed.

As to hard takeaways and actionable items, I'm not so sure, but I have a feeling that most books on this subject lead you wanting more.

At the end of the day creating buzz is highly subjective and non-scientific. You can try and make things Buzz-worthy and designing Buzz into products is a great objective - you'd be mad to ignore this as its much harder to add these attributes later. Design your buzz into your product is great advice - adding it later is much harder.

It's a really good starting point and its certainly not one of those books to jump on the Buzz wagon.

Material is outdated
Great book, but even after just a few years, the material is outdated. Hardly touches the online world, which is what I was looking for.