Emanuel Rosen, god-father of word-of-mouth marketing is buzzing around again. Seven years after he wrote the original, groundbreaking treatise on the subject he has revisited buzz marketing in the new age of social networking.

Building on some of his original principles, he’s taking a new, state-of-the-art look at one of the most important societal and communications factors of our time.

You might be interested in seeing and hearing what he has to say on the subject.

Unless you’re time-crunched or video-impaired

In that case, I’ll give you a quick written summary that does not do him justice. But it does reduce his brilliance to bullet points and overly simplistic, numbered steps which, of course, is all that really counts on a blog post.

According to Rosen, two recent and major trends have affected the way buzz spreads today:

• Text-based buzz through social networking and media has reached a massive scale.
• Your customers have ever richer ways to communicate with each other. Including audio and video technologies as well as tools that give them more opportunities to observe each other.

Buzz in the land of twits and tweets
In this new marketing environment, Emanuel suggests eight principles at work in social networks that affect buzz in the era of LinkedIn, FaceBook and Twitter. Answer these questions in the affirmative and you’re on your way. If you can’t, then it would be a good idea to figure out the steps you’ll have to take so you can.

1. Do you have the right product / service … one that impresses people enough to get them talking about it?
2. Do you have the right approach … an attitude of honesty, directness and networks?
3. Are you listening … to customers, prospects and market buzz?
4. Are you working with network hubs … connected people who talk more than most people?
5. Have you considered all possible techniques for building buzz … including grassroots seeding, sneak previews and surprise?
6. Are you engaging people … helping them to create something, participate and involve themselves in experiences?
7. How can you keep the buzz alive … by keeping the offering new and associating it with innovation?
8. Are your ads building buzz … research has shown that the right kind of advertising substantially increases buzz?

You know what happens when you ass u me

All of which brings up an important point. There seems to be an assumption among many marketers that content in the form of blogs supported by tweets is audience engagement. It is not. Engagement is more about integrating those eight questions into your branding and marketing program and using many media to create brand relationships.

Pure, raw content is not engagement. It never has been. It never will be. You have to make that content engaging in one way or another or no one will ever get to it. It has to stand out, not blend in to the mass of content that is drowning business people around the world.

If you’d like to explore that idea in more depth (including the need to integrate traditional media like advertising into social networking programs) check out the free eBook entitled The Age of Engagement.

But that’s just my opinion. I could be wrong.

What’s your take?

The marketing techniques, programs, media and approaches that you relied on in the past are working about as well as a Celine Dion cover version of “Whole Lotta Love.”

If you have, then I’ve got even worse news for you, Spanky. They probably won’t work at all in the future. At least not in the same way they have in the past.

What a bummer

The reason is deceptively simple. The world you’re sending them into has changed. Dramatically. In many messy ways. In many specific, messy ways.

If you don’t think so, take a quick look at this video.

Shift has happened, my friend. Whether you recognize it or not, you’ve stepped in it. It’s unavoidable. It’s all over your shoes. And things will never be the same again.

The world takes a power shift

Somewhere between the inventions of distributed computing and the Mosaic browser, the age of information arrived. And with it, the biggest and most important power shift in communications control in history began.

If you’re a business marketer this is what you’d call a mammoth, major, mother-of-a- paradigm shift. And if you fail to recognize this change in who really controls information and sales communications these days, you’ll create a mammoth divide between your brand and your customers and prospects not seen since Carly Simon last yawned in public.

They don’t need you anymore, Bucky

Bottom line is your customers and prospects don’t require you or your assistance in order to get all the product, service and brand information they need to make a buying decision.

In fact, technology has enabled them to know more about their brand choices, know it more holistically from more sources and know it more quickly than you ever could.

But all is not lost

Change on this level comes with opportunities built in. That is if you know where to look.

So we’ll be talking about some of these specific customer-controlled changes and the marketing opportunities they create in future posts and comments. Please join in the conversation and let your views be known.

In the meantime, if you’d like to explore all this shifty stuff in more detail and discover some of the ways you can turn this shifty situation into a competitive advantage, check out the free ebook Shift This.

But if you’re afraid your head will spin off into oblivion with all this talk of change, here’s a ridiculously over simplistic management summary.

A quick and dirty overview of the future of the world in bullet points

• For the first time in history, customers and prospects control information, communications and the purchase process, and they will determine when, where and how they will access your brand and product/service information.

• Brands must be based on what customers/prospects believe is important in making a purchase or use decision and their perceptions of their other brand choices.

• Brands move from disruptive messages to brand experiences accessed by customers and prospects for their information and empowerment value.

• Marketing becomes a dialogue with customers and prospects based on listening and understanding their needs, and responding to specific requests for information rather than one-sided monologues controlled by the marketer.

But that’s just my opinion. I could be wrong.

What’s your take?

The evil deception

Content strategies are being skillfully developed. Complex message platforms are being devised, revised and restrategized. Elevator pitches are being crafted in one minute, two minute and ten minute units. Content is being prioritized, hierachtisized, maximized, minimized, mapped, scrapped and deployed.

And guess what, Skippy, no one who counts (as in customers and prospects) cares.

In an age of ever-expanding media, message fragmentation and ever-contracting time and attention, creative engagement (that is making content emotionally engaging) is a requirement. Even in b-to-b markets. Without it, the people who count never get to the content.

A few pathetic examples

In one category I know of, marketers very precisely target many minute audience segments exclusively with online media to dump unbridled and, for the most part, unvisualized content on them. All of  it without a compelling, unifying creative idea to support it. The net result of this precise content dumping is that awareness and familiarity of all the competitors in this category is almost zero.

Despite the fact these companies have been in the market communicating to customers and prospects for almost a decade, no one knows who the heck these purveyors of online content are.

This is beyond pathetic. It borders on tragic. Especially in a category where sales are driven by prospects finding vendors to include in their consideration set for rfps.

Follow me, I’m a twit

You don’t have to look far to see other examples of the evil confusion of content and engagement. Go to Twitter and you can follow it. Every minute of every day

One marketer wraps his followers in an orgy of ego that makes Donald Trump look like Mother Teresa. Apparently he thinks we have the time or the desire to care about where he is and what he is doing every hour of the day. Especially when it revolves around killing wild life back home in Montana, being interviewed by various publications and appearing on a variety of red carpets. Not as a celebrity, mind you, but rather crawling on all fours in the background as an almost invisible sponsor.

I tweet therefore I am

In the middle of the Twitter spectrum are those marketers with their own self-serving, well-planned content agenda. They push out the same stuff on a repetitive schedule driving people to the same self-serving blog content hour after hour over and over and over again. This is the modern equivalent of the old paradigm of telling people what to believe about your products and expecting them to accept it just because you said it.

None of this is engaging. It is content for content’s sake. In and of itself it does not stand out and get attention, nor keep attention, nor sustain a dialogue.

A special tweet

At the other end of the Twittiverse are people who use their tweets to expose us to information we never would have known without them. Some are about their products but many are not. In fact, most are not.

They create a compelling personality for themselves 140 characters at a time by creatively providing what we value in an engaging voice that we want to follow.

Chris Brogan is one of those people. It’s well worth following him. Guy Kawasaki is another. So is Peter Cashmore. As well as Sean Duffy. And  if you are totally research challenged, Mashable will show you what’s going on online right now right here in a straightforward but none-the-less engaging way.

We’ve been sold a bill of goods

As the digital world developed someone declared that content is king. You can pretty much bet the declarer was a techno nerd with the creative flair of a C++ manual and the engagement quotient of a 35+ year-old guy living in his parent’s basement with a bunch of goldfish.

Content is not engagement, my friend. It never has been and it never will be.

Because without creatively and emotionally involving your audience they will never get to your masterfully developed content.

As a great man once said

“However much we would like communications to be a science – because life would be simpler that way – the fact is it is not.”

“Finding out what to say is the beginning of the communications process. How you say it makes people look and listen and believe. And if you are not successful at that you have wasted all the work and intelligence and skill that went into discovering what you should say.”

“It’s not just what you say that stirs people, it’s the way that you say it.”
Bill Bernbach

Content is a carton of eggs

I don’t mean to denigrate content. Obviously, it is vitally important. It is the strategic base of all that a brand is and does. Especially these days. Because content now is not only what you say, it also includes the interactive devices, brand experiences and social interactions that make content more involving.

But before people will ever get involved in your content you will have to emotionally engage them.

I define engagement as the creative elements that gain attention, keep attention and make people want to have a dialogue with you around your content.

Engagement is a soufflé

So let’s get the two straight. To say that raw content encased in media is engagement is like saying a carton of eggs is a soufflé.

It is not. It never will be. It is what you do with the content of the carton that makes it special.

If you’d like to delve a little deeper into what makes content engaging you might enjoy the Mobium ebook entitled The Age of Engagement.

Because without this special, creative, emotive element of being engaging your brand and your marketing will be about as interesting and involving to your customers and prospects as Ben Stein’s Audio Book narration of the tax code.

But that’s just my opinion. I could be wrong.

Clients seem reluctant to commit to full-scale digital campaigns.  They are worried that they will waste their already limited budget in trying something they have no idea will work for their marketing efforts.  And they are right.  There needs to be a smarter, more gradual entry into the world of social media, mobile advertising and other digital tools du jour.

I recall an article discussing the “tech-morphing landscape” in an issue of Adweek a couple months ago.   The author postulated that in a world of many different Internet-enabled devices with fragmented formats, any attempt at building a single portal to your content/story/offer will fail; that “the only way to succeed . . . is to treat device proliferation as a new form of media inventory and to increase placements in each category.”

While this advice appears more of a shotgun-approach philosophy, there is a logic to this that might guide us all as we try to convince our clients or corporate management to start finding new and different/better ways to get our messages out and build our brands and create new client advocates.

Let’s call it what it is — digital experimentation.  It’s about conducting various marketing experiments using all or a few of these new media tools, separately or in combination.  It’s testing them to see what makes sense for the target audience or a particular portion of the audience.  Some tools might be better used as pre-sales contact points, other to help facilitate purchase decision-making, while others are better for keeping in touch with existing customers or building customer loyalty.

The beauty of this is no one has all the answers.  And what works will likely be different for virtually every marketer.  But in order to not be left behind, budgets need to be allocated to aid in these digital experiments.  The article talked about allocating 3-5% of your marketing budget to explore media formats that don’t involve traditional broadcast, paper-based media or web sites.   Whatever amount you can afford, don’t be afraid to experiment.  Some experiments will be successful, others will likely fail.  It’s trial and error at its best.  While you learn and get smarter what each tool can do, you’ll also learn which tools are best to reach the different portions of your target audience.

Hey, I gotta go.  I’m late for my meeting in the digital lab.  We’re conducting an experiment on using LinkedIn and FourSquare to reach HR executives in Memphis who are interested in rating the best barbecue sauce while having lunch.

So, this CEO is sitting in on a focus group session in this dark, kinda crummy-looking focus group facility in mid-town Manhattan.  We’re conducting the groups to better understand what’s important when the participants are involved in making a decision for their company to purchase the products and services the CEO’s company offers.

The moderator is asking questions to determine which brands come to mind when they think about these kinds of products and services and what their perceptions are of the brands that they mention.

The CEO, I notice, seems to be quite engaged in this session.  It happens to be a group of customers (though the participants do not know it is the CEO’s company that is sponsoring the research.)  He’s listening intently, taking notes, positive head nods, guffawing when they participants talk about his competitors, popping M&M’s like they were candy. (Oh yeah they are candy.)

Then the customers start discussing their perceptions of his brand, their products and services.  He starts to nervously tap his right foot and drumming his notepad with his pen.  He bites his pinky. He becomes noticeably more silent, seemingly agitated and actually gets red under the collar.  Oh, Oh.  He doesn’t seem to like what he is hearing from his customers.  I don’t know if he’s angry because these people are expressing some negative perceptions of his brand or if he’s thinking his employees are doing a piss-poor job of delivering the brand or if he’s angry with us for inviting him here to sit through this negative rap session.

Finally the session ends and we re-group with the moderator to discuss what went on.  The moderator gives her feedback and we all give ours, including the marketing director for the client.  Then the CEO says, “Well, I’ll be god-damned if I let some customer tell me how to run my business!”

The CEO was true to his word and continued to do things his way versus listening to his customers and his marketing staff.  Sales continued to tank and the perceptions of the brand continued to remain low.  He was eventually sent packing by the Board of Directors and the marketing director was appointed CMO. Programs were implemented that were based on listening to the needs and perceptions of the customer.  Today, the company is #2 in its category and has extremely high perceptual ratings in the marketplace.

Okay.  It’s been a while since I’ve blogged.  There are lots of good excuses.  Like a ton of client work, following up new business opportunities, getting started with several new clients and keeping the business running smoothly.  One other excuse is the iPhone.  I finally got one last autumn and to be honest, it’s been taking up a lot of my spare time.

Not that it is hard to use.  It’s more about all the ways you can use it, the thousands of applications that make using the iPhone so much fun.  I’ve pretty much stopped using that horrid PC that I have at home unless I absolutely need to print something out or scan a document and email along to someone.  I find myself taking the PowerBook G4 home less and less.  Only if I have a pressing assignment and I need to use Word.

Like everyone else, it’s been kind of like “how did I ever live without it?”  I have access to my different email accounts whenever I want them.  I can listen to my favorite music or my own personal Internet radio when I’m riding the train to and from work.  I can Twitter, LinkedIn, Tumblr and check Facebook when ever it is convenient.  Watch the stock market and check the weather forecast.  I can play slots, horse racing, hangman and solitaire to my hearts content  (and not lose a dime.) Lately it’s getting to know how to use Foursquare and Yelp to find local services no matter where I am.

It’s so much fun to use, it doesn’t seem like a business tool.  Even though that’s really why I got it in the first place.  And contrary to public opinion, I find my AT&T service to be great.  Other than in the basement of a parking garage, my reception is exemplary.  It’s a great toy (‘er business tool) to take on the road.  Indispensible I might add.

But they sure took baggage security seriously. They wouldn’t let us have our bags until they checked the tags.

I guess they have to do that here; otherwise people would steal them.

We’re supposed to meet the Peruvian hosts at 9. But people aren’t very punctual here. Maybe they need a time management seminar.

What I wouldn’t give to have something normal tonight! A good burger, an ice-cold drink and a salad would taste so great. Instead I expect another round of beans and rice…” (from Leading With Cultural Intelligence by Dr. David Livermore)

So begins a journal entry from a North American business person traveling in South America.

We have met the enemy and he is us

This example of ethnocentric arrogance is a good metaphor for the underlying reason US business brands have taken a dive all over the world.

If you don’t think so, check out a 3-year Mobium survey of the sorry state of US business brands abroad.

But, luckily, cultural ignorance doesn’t have to be a permanent condition. We can all grow to understand the power of culture in how brands and marketing programs are perceived in other countries.

And we can all do something about it. Even if our programs only reach domestic markets. Because even if your marketing effort doesn’t cross international boarders you can be sure it crosses cultures.

Check your IQ and your humanity

You can start the fight against cross-culture ignorance by getting an assessment of your own cultural IQ at cq-portal.com

And you can get some ideas on how to improve your cultural empathy and smarts by checking out a video of Dr. Livermore’s presentation at Mobium’s recent New Paradigm event.

See and hear what Dr. Clotaire Rapallie, the international perceptual research guru, has to say about why people in different cultures buy as they do.

Then do something about it. Because if your marketing crosses cultures in one way or another, the chances are astronomically high that it needs a attitude adjustment.

But that’s just my opinion. I could be wrong.

Can’t we all just get along?

More than 1,800 responses later (roughly 1,300 from U.S. marketers and 500 from business buyers of U.S. brands who work overseas) the results show that we can all agree on one thing.

The perception of American business brands has declined dramatically.

But the stunning thing about the results of this three-year study is that despite that decline in U.S. brand image 96 percent of U.S. marketers believe that their companies will continue to do business with their current customers across the pond.

Denial isn’t just a river

Unfortunately, on the other side, almost 20 percent of overseas buyers say that they will switch from American business brands to brands from other countries. One third of these changes were attributed directly to U.S. foreign policy prior to October 2008.

The full report and analysis is worth checking out.

Be sure to scroll down past the numbers to the verbatim quotes to get a sense for the depth of these feelings on both sides.

Four ways to keep your brand from falling off the planet

If you even remotely suspect that your brand might be in this situation there are a few things you might want to consider.

• Don’t think that just because you have a b2b brand with strong personal relationships with foreign buyers that you are immune from this decline in U.S. brand perceptions around the world.
• Check out the strength of those relationships through an objective third party. You may be surprised what foreign buyers say when someone else asks them about your brand relationship.
• Listen to what your overseas customers and prospects have to say. Take it to heart.
• And then initiate actions that connect with them on their cultural terms. Not on yours.

But that’s just my opinion. I could be wrong.

The spine-tingling experience was brought to you by a creaky old elevator. One you’d expect to see in a vintage black and white French film. It was tiny. Two people could barely fit in it. Its padded walls were made of old brown leather which surrounded you on three sides with a cracked, pot-marked, dark and foreboding patina of gloom. Worst of all, it had one of those spindly sliding cage doors you had to push hard until it locked before the elevator would move.

Where fear will get you

But despite all the effort it took to make the trip, I’m convinced the main reason no one came to visit was a little sign in the elevator. Surrounded by scratch marks in the leather all around it, the sign read, “Fear and panic will get you nowhere.”

Good advice when it comes to dealing with the dramatic and sometimes-scary paradigm shifts that continue to take place in communications.

Lord, have mercy on the frozen man

Before plunging in with fear and panic its always a good idea to take a minute, take a deep breadth, get your bearings and then start the rollercoaster ride. This is especially true when trying to figure out what social media can do for your company.

Before you throw your marketing program into the vortex, get your feet wet first by personally experiencing what’s going on out there.

• Buy an iPhone. Download a bunch of apps. It will change your life.
• Set up a twitter account and experience the breadth of trivia and the depth of learning you can be exposed to quickly. You can follow my tweets @gordonhochhalte if you think it will help.
• Learn the rules of the community
• Get experience understanding that you cannot control the message.
• Learn first hand how to give to get.
• Experience what transparency and sincerity mean in this new space.
• See for yourself how participation and feedback lead to co-creation.
• Get help.

But that’s just my opinion. I could be wrong.

It came with your PC

It plainly marques for your revue

Mistakes you cannot sea.

You strike a key and type a word

And weight for it two say

Weather your wrong or write

It shows you strait away.

As soon as a mistake is maid

It nose before two long

And you can put the error rite

Its never, ever wrong.

In fact, I have run this little ditty threw it

So I am shore you’re pleased to no

It’s letter perfect to the end

My spell cheque told me sew.

But that’s just my opinion. I could be wrong.