Unit of 1 - Creating a Buzz with Your Marketing

by Andrea C. Carrero

To Mark Hughes, "buzz marketing" is more than just thinking outside of the box. It's thinking outside of the box and getting people to talk about it.

Hughes, CEO of Buzzmarketing.com, was the guest speaker at the March 10, 2005 Unit of 1 Breakfast Club meeting in Conshohocken, PA. Marketing, he said, needs to "follow more than a traditional path. It needs to be entertaining, fascinating and newsworthy."

Some of the ways to create a buzz in your marketing, Hughes said, include being unusual and giving consumers and the media something to talk about. "People don't talk about the expected," he said.

Hughes cited a few case studies of well-known brands that changed their marketing strategies to create some buzz. One, he told the group, was AT&T Wireless, who spent millions of dollars trying to get customers to increase their use of cell phones for text messaging, to no avail.

Then came the television show American Idol. The carrier (which joined forces with Cingular Wireless at the end of 2004) changed its tune and began encouraging people to vote for their favorites contestants--by cell phone text message.

According to Hughes, this new effort raised cell phone text messages from 11 billion in 2002 to 31 billion in 2003. Not only did the company increase the use of text messaging, but people began talking about who they were voting for--by text message!

Another company that Hughes cited was his former employer, Half.com. As vice president of Marketing for Half.com, Hughes explained how he used buzz marketing to get more customers for the Internet company--and capture media attention at the same time.

While eating Chinese food, Hughes opened a fortune cookie and a light bulb went off in his head. Ultimately, he used the back of fortune cookie messages to promote a $5-off coupon to the company's products. Coupon redemptions increased sixfold, which ultimately caught the attention of the media which was closely watching the failures--and successes--of Internet businesses. The rest is dot-com history.

Hughes wrapped up his presentation by telling Units of 1 to focus on three efforts:

Getting press.

Leveraging the media.

Using the Internet's power.

In order to do this, Hughes told the audience to focus on getting press about their products and services. Then once you have it, he advised using it to market your business by sending copies of those articles to prospects in your database. "People don't want to read direct marketing," he explained. "They want to read news."

As for the power of the Internet, Hughes recommended optimizing your website for searches by using keywords for your business not just in the HTML meta tags but also repeatedly in your content. He also noted that you can "suggest" your site to The Open Directory Project (www.dmoz.org), which describes itself as a web directory "akin to a huge reference library."

About Mark Hughes
Hughes is a word-of-mouth marketing expert both in consumer marketing and internal employee communication marketing. His career includes stints at PepsiCo's Pizza Hut division and American Mobile Satellite (now XM Satellite Radio), Pep Boys and, most famously, Half.com, which was sold to eBay. Hughes, who has an MBA from Columbia Business School in Marketing and International Business, is a guest lecturer on creative marketing at New York University and the University of Pennsylvania, and serves on the Board of Advisors for several companies. He is a contributing columnist for the magazine of international advertising knowledge, Admap. His forthcoming book, Buzzmarketing, arrives in July 2005 from publisher Penguin/Portfolio.

About Our Sponsor
The March breakfast meeting was sponsored by Topular LLC, www.topular.com. Topular provides topic-based headline feeds, proprietary software development and technology management consulting to companies that are seeking an outsourced solution to help solve their content-management needs. Topular's core product line leverages information-harvesting technology to revolutionize how topic-based information can be assembled automatically.

To sponsor an upcoming Unit of 1 meeting, contact sponsors@unitof1.com.

About Unit of 1
Unit of 1, founded in 2001, is a group of independent contractors, free agents, and business owners who all run small businesses. The group supports all members in running more successful practices by sharing lessons learned, advice, and horror stories. Unit of 1's Breakfast Club meetings are a popular way to network with a virtual peer group of other business owners.

Andrea C. Carrero is president and founder of Word Technologies Inc. (www.wordtex.com), which provides freelance writing, custom communications and technical documentation services. She can be reached at info@wordtex.com.