Marketing and all things related

These days generating a buzz about your product, service or brand throughout the blogosphere can equate to a limitless amount of word-of-mouth advertising and publicity.  In fact, a study conducted by Nielsen Buzz Metrics and Nielsen's BASES research division, shows a signigicant and strong correlation between ad spending and resulting buzz throughout the blogosphere.  According to MediaWeek:

"Nielsen's research, which analyzed factors such as buzz volume in blogs, spending, purchase intent among consumers and actual sales, has found that a big advertising budget is the best predictor of significant blog buzz, rather than tactics that attempt to specifically influence such online world of mouth.  Among 80 consumer packaged goods brands launched in 2005 and 2006 that Nielsen studied, the top 10 percent of products with the most buzz spend nearly $20 million in advertising. In contrast, the products that accounted for the bottom 50 percent of buzz generated spent roughly $5 million, or a quarter of what the most buzz-generating brands spent.  However, ad spending is not the only factor in play, found the report, as certain brands simply lend themselves to more buzz. Just 10 percent of the brands studied accounted for 85 percent of total buzz generated, indicating that select brands drove more than their share of interest."

So what does this tell us?  If just 10% of the brands in the study generated 85% of the online buzz, I wouldn't recommend making drastic changes to your marketing plan, but the results of the study are something to consider.  As Kate Neiderhoffer, director of methodology at Nielsen BuzzMetrics suggests, innovative and creative new products or ad campaigns generate buzz with little to no effort.  I don't think that's a mind-blowing revelation.  In fact, I think most of us knew that generating awareness through creative advertising will (hopefully) get people talking about your product. 

It appears that the biggest lesson learned from this study is that traditional advertising remains a critical element of the marketing plan and resulting word-of-mouth buzz marketing.  If you're spending a great deal of time and effort trying to generate your own buzz among the blogosphere and online community, you may want to rethink your efforts and spending.  It's possible that a shift in spending to focus more heavily on advertising (particularly highly creative advertising) and innovative ways to differentiate your product from the competition will generate a bigger online buzz than any of your other efforts to manufacture that buzz.

What do you think?  How would you modify your marketing plan to leverage the findings from this study?

Photo courtesy of Flickr.