The Palm Pilot. The novel Cold Mountain. The iMac. Hotmail. FedEx. The Blair Witch Project and There's Something About Mary. According to former marketing exec Emanuel Rosen, they all became successful not through traditional advertising or marketing routes, but through "buzz," that semitangible process through which information and commentary jump from one brain or mouth to another. Rosen also ascribes buzz to creating customer loyalty, which he says is built through the advice of friends, colleagues, or such trusted "mega-hubs" of information as Oprah Winfrey and Rosie O'Donnell. Rosen has spent the past few years studying the routes, nodes, and clusters through which buzz passes and grows, and the result is this well-researched book. While it doesn't throw much new light on the mechanics of buzz, it is at least instructive and entertaining, offering minisagas of the successful buzz behind such marketing triumphs as the dELia's catalog for teenage girls, PowerBars, and the BMW Z3 roadster. Buzz seekers, be warned, however: with the exception of a short chapter at the end of the book called "Buzz Workshop," you won't find much of a blueprint for starting the gears of buzz for your product or service. What you do get is a trove of real-life stories that, if they don't inspire and guide you toward taking your first buzz-creating baby steps, probably mean you're the type of person who should stick with conventional advertising and PR. --Timothy Murphy
Emanuel (Manu) Rosen is a bestselling author whose books have been translated into thirteen languages. His latest book is "The Life Machines: How Taking Care of Your Mitochondria Can Transform Your Health", which he coauthored with his wife, Daria Mochly-Rosen. His first book, "The Anatomy of Buzz," managed to generate quite a bit of buzz itself, as BusinessWeek noted. His third book, "Absolute Value" (with Stanford professor Itamar Simonson), won the 2016 American Marketing Association Best Book Award. Emanuel was previously vice president of marketing at Niles Software, where he launched the company’s flagship product, EndNote. He’s presented his work in numerous forums around the world, including at companies such as Google, Intel, and Nike. His work has been featured in the Harvard Business Review, Time, Advertising Age, and many other media. He is married to Daria Mochly-Rosen. They live in Menlo Park, California, and have four adult children and three grandchildren.
this was a book I read as a bathroom book.. I didn't try to read it cover to cover, but rather read it in 3-5 minute segments, skipping around in the book.. you don't need to read it cover to cover. I am an accountant by trade so I try to expose myself to marketing ideas and this is a great book to do that.. but don't try to read it cover to cover read parts of it over and over through the course of several years and it will be a very rewarding book...
Underneath it all a fairly straightforward book about viral marketing. Although it covers some interesting examples, it fails to deliver anything new and lacks a sense of delivering a strong framework which you can go out and make practical use of.
Overall, a good book to refresh your focus on the importance of word of mouth and how you should think viral, but doesn't deliver on ideas or implementation.
I read the older version of this because it's all the library had. It took me a long time to get through this book. It had some snippets of information that were really good and other times I felt like the author was just repeating himself. Because it was the older version it did not take into account the Facebook era of word-of-mouth. The new version might touch on this more and how to take advantage of what it has to offer.
It is a good book, outlining some of the major principles of word-of-mouth marketing. However, due to the fact that it was written in the year 2000 it is quite outdated. Understandably, there is nothing said about the emerging of the Social networking websites and their impact in word-of-mouth. I think that is worth checking the sequel: The anatomy of Buzz revised :)