The Anatomy of Buzz : how to create word-of-mouth marketing
Emanuel Rosen Doubleday 2000

Over the last wee while, there has taken place within commercially-focused discourse a fascinating confluence of two themes.

On the one hand, marketing specialists have begun seriously to explore and to theoretise about the role of informal communication networks and how they can influence brand-building and sales in ways which may well confound conventional advertising logic and (certainly) the wisdom of conventional advertising spend.

On the other hand, many economists and forecasters have tried to illuminate what we may still have to call post-modern consumer behaviour : the growing tendency not to follow standard / stable behaviour patterns, nor to respond to mass advertising in appropriately mass ways - and yet to pursue a road of hidden rationale, to access all manner of closed advice-sources and to share in hidden language crucial intelligence with other consumers.

The book Butterfly Consumers by UK economist Paul Ormerod is one good example of how even the mathematician's gaze can be usefully brought down on the apparent volatility of consumer choice : how it is that new products (such as movies) can spectacularly fail even when backed by spectacularly large promotion budgets when others - in marketing-spend terms, less well endowed products - can all too frequently sleep their way to the top of the charts. The very existence of this phenomenon confirms the need for more advanced models by which to understand real-world choice-cultures and choice-mechanisms.

This, in an age when the eventual end of "interruption marketing" is being heavily predicted, is no small issue. No small issue in an age when the most colossal marketing campaign can still manage not to connect with the invisible networks that actually drive choice. No small issue in an age when the Net has multiplied the number of informal, advice-giving, recommendation-providing networks than can exist within any market or sub-stratum thereof.

So, a warm welcome, therefore to The Anatomy of Buzz. Emanuel Rosen works real hard to devise a realistic, planning-enhancing approach to what he calls Buzz : " the sum of all comments about a certain product that are exchanged among people at any given time". Buzz "is all the word of mouth about a brand. It's the aggregate of all person-to-person communication about a particular product, service or company at any point in time". These are dry-tasting definitions for what becomes a genuinely fascinating review of how the sociology of informal communications is dynamically interacting with the Internet to create invisible networks of critical comment.

How can the marketing community explore and, if possible access, "this vast depository of opinions" that the new world techno-order is forming? This might seem like a good question for marketers - but a deeply boring one for ordinary-joe readers. But we think there is a lot in Mr. Rosen's analysis for thinkers of all kinds everywhere.

How do we, these days, know what we know? How do we know what we know is right? How do we know what is good? Whom do we trust in those moments when our knowledge is limited but a choice has to be made? What is the velocity of opinion these days? Does the Web create as much bad information as good and will citizen-consumers in time react / revolt against it? With such questions hanging fire, Emanuel Rosen's book is a handbook for marketers and probably has no great ambition beyond that? But we found a real contribution to contemporary epistemology across its many premises, principles and examples.

Consider the shifting meaning of the phrase "opinion-leader" in the modern world. Buzz-theory confirms that in the new world of network and human "hubs" all of us can, in different moods and modes, take the role of opinion-leader and/or opinion-taker. So once again notions of authority, reverence, trust, credibility - so many of the important themes for social researchers and marketers alike - have to be re-scrutinised and re-defined.

The sub-title to The Anatomy of Buzz is "…how to create word of mouth marketing". We hope that this does not put off the general reader. For a lot of this becomes a fascinating glimpse at how life and meaning are changing around us. And the intellectual can find lessons everywhere - even in marketing handbooks. We thought The Anatomy of Buzz was really rather good.