The buzz on buzz, revealed

'If
a new show premiered and very different people with different interests were talking about it, that’s very
important'

The buzz on
buzz, revealed

Where it starts. How it works. When it works.

By Heidi Vogt

   The office water cooler. The break between yoga class and the treadmill. The line at Starbucks. A friend’s living room.
   These are the places where ideas gets spread the old-fashioned way, by word-of-mouth. But this oldest of media also remains today’s most powerful, even if just how it all works is only vaguely understood.
   Its power comes from its ability to convey buzz.
   What is buzz, exactly? We all know it evolves from conversations, but which conversations? When does everyday small talk become buzz?
   Let us define buzz thusly.
   It is foremost a transfer of information from someone who is in the know to one who isn’t, or if you prefer, from the hip to the less hip. This is according to David Godes, co-author of a new study that measures word-of-mouth interaction.
   “It’s before I’ve formed my own opinion that word-of-mouth matters,” says Godes, a professor at the Harvard Business School.
   Godes and co-author Dina Mayzlin of Yale’s School of Management measured the buzz about new television shows by monitoring conversations about the shows in internet chat rooms. They chose chat rooms because the transfer of information in text messages is much easier to monitor than a typical around-the-beer-keg conversation.
   Godes and Mayzlin compared the amount of discussion about new television shows in the 1999-2000 season with the shows’ Nielsen ratings to discover if there was a correlation between internet buzz and the number of viewers who actually tune in.
   They found that buzz can indeed matter.
   The most important factor is whether talk about a new show crosses community lines. Communities can be any group whose members share some commonality, from a physical community, a town, say, to a college fraternity, to the patrons of a particular saloon.
   “In this case the communities were newsgroups about existing shows,” says Godes. “If a new show premiered and very different people with different interests were talking about it, that’s very important.”
   Effective buzz, buzz that matters, is about reaching taste-makers, those members of society who tend to set trends for the rest of us. It could be Tiger Woods in golf or inner-city kids in music.
   The new study suggests that reaching different demographics and niches is equally important.
   Buzz also has a brief shelf-life, if you will, a certain amount of time in which to do its work. Buzz must set in early and spread quickly, before the topic enters the realm of public knowledge.
   Buzz is learning about a hot show before you are bombarded with network promotions telling you that everyone is raving that said new show is hot.
“We found that it only had an effect in the first few weeks [of a television show]. By week six, word-of-mouth had very little effect,” Godes says.
   Buzz plays a major role in entertainment. Motion pictures and broadcasting are two of the categories a 2001 McKinsey report found to be largely driven by buzz. The report also says that 54 percent of sales across industries are affected by buzz or lack thereof.
   One might think that only the hippest new things, products and entertainment on the edge, are the subjects of buzz.
   Not true. Any product can be the subject of buzz among a certain group that values information about such products, whether they be movies or pharmaceuticals.
   The Godes/Mayzlin study looked at television shows that weren’t necessarily groundbreaking, just a little new and different: "Judging Amy," "Stark Raving Mad," "Once and Again," "Malcolm in the Middle" and "The West Wing" were all high on the buzz meters.
   The urge to understand how buzz works is being led by marketers who want to use it to move products.
   The McKinsey report explains how buzz can be created by people who are not even target customers of a product--celebrities, for example--and how rationing supplies of a product can be used to create buzz.
   Along with entertainment, toys, sporting goods, and fashion are all heavily influenced by word-of-mouth, and
the McKinsey report concludes in these areas buzz isn't something that just happens but more often is the result of shrewd marketing.
   The problem for marketers is that sometimes word-of-mouth is just that, with the media not taking part in the transfer of information at all.
   In his book “The Anatomy of Buzz,” Emanuel Rosen offers up an example of how the novel “Cold Mountain” became a surprise best seller. As Rosen reconstructs events, one woman heard about the book from a friend, read it, and went on to tell 50 people about the book.
   She told her husband, then family and friends in other states, then found herself mentioning the book to passengers she met in her job as a flight attendant.
   “The word about products doesn't disseminate only from the media to opinion leaders and from them to the rest of us,” explains Rosen in the book.
   Godes and Mayzlin’s study may have found a fascinating new way to figure out just what these webs of people are telling each other.
    “We found that for television, for anybody, they should look to newsgroups or online communities for information on word-of-mouth,” says Godes.

-Heidi Vogt is a staff writer for Media Life.

Printer-Friendly Version | Send to a Friend
Cover Page | Contact Us