Creating Buzz Video: Stephen Hanson on “How I Built It”!
Published March 11, 2010 | 
Team Altman Great Creating Buzz Video!
We are always in search of Entrepreneurs that have found and developed their pathway to success and share the knowledge and experiences they have acquired along the way. There is no better way to learn entrepreneurial wisdom and not only “what to do,” but also “what not to do.” Stephen Hanson, founder of B.R. Guest Restaurants in New York, speaks with WSJ’s Colleen DeBaise about establishing a successful chain of eateries and surviving the recession.
As always enjoy, and share the Creating Buzz!
Why You Should Develop Buzz and Word of Mouth Tactics
Published June 17, 2009 | 
“Profit in business comes from repeat customers, customers that boast about your product or service, and that bring friends with them.” –W. Edwards Deming
Marketing is one of the most critical parts of business that entrepreneurs must learn and understand to maximize their potential for success in today’s volatile marketplace, as the cost effectiveness alone is enough to help insure the successful impact of the effective marketing strategies on the bottom line of business. Most of today’s marketing still focuses on how to use advertising and other tools to influence each customer individually, ignoring the fact that purchasing is part of a “social process,” and Buzz and Word-of Mouth don’t just happen without some effort that starts the “social process,” instead, they must be carefully cultivated and strategically crafted with an underlying architecture to direct the “natural forces” to a specific outcome.
An entrepreneur’s marketing agenda is vastly different than that of a member of the Fortune 500, although it is important to know that some of the same principles are the same and never change, and it is in the details where we find the differences, and it is just as important to understand the theory of creating buzz or word-of-mouth has the primary investments of time, energy, and imagination, so in other words, you are shooting for a high “return on imagination” as opposed to a high return on investment.
The public has long known the value of word-of-mouth recommendations, which is one of the most powerful methods of building perceived value for products and services, and no one creates value like family and friends, and networks of family, friends and social contacts. According to over 25 years of research, Americans today are far more likely to turn to friends, family, and other personal experts for value reinforcement than to use the traditional media for ideas and information. Thus the huge changes in marketing strategies from institutional hard-print media to methods of strategically placed and highly targeted messages using social media tools designed to create Buzz and grow Word-of-Mouth to the ultimate goal of the viral stage.
More than eight in ten people say that their personal networks are among the two to three best sources for new information for any service or products they are interested in purchasing, and this is extremely significant, since the response is nearly 50 percent higher than all other traditional advertising sources combined.
Word-of-Mouth doesn’t affect all businesses in the same way, and the role it plays in your business depends on four factors including the nature of your products, the people you are trying to reach, your customer connectivity, and the strategies used in your particular industry.
By the very nature of Word-of-Mouth communications, it is not possible to spread the message too widely, and luckily due to the six degrees of separation and the 90/10 rule there is no need to. The 90/10 rule, by which word-of-mouth is governed, says that 90 percent of the world is influenced by the other 10 percent, and a word-of-mouth campaign therefore must be based on such targeted communications.
Carefully chart and archive all official and unofficial opinion leaders, as a disproportionate amount of selling time can and should be aimed at highly-reputable, would-be adopters, and sales incentives should be encouraged and added when working with early-adopters. Also, events that pair happy new customers with a wider audience can and should be staged, user newsletters can be established, then circulated to targeted non-users, and testimonials can be systematically gathered and circulated. I highly recommend that all of these programs and others should be put together in a detailed, written, step-by-step Buzz and Word-of-Mouth plan.
A formal Buzz and Word-of-Mouth strategic plan need not be complicated to be effective, and a lot can be achieved by 
simply covering topics including discussion of the nature of your products or services, the idea or messages you are trying to spread, identity of your network hubs and connectors, are they individual people, or organizations, and include discussion of your customer networks and how they are connected, how often and how regular they interact, what influences them and their behavior, and what specific tactics you will employ to create Word-of-Mouth marketing.
Marketing on a Small Budget – Return on Imagination Part 3
Published March 18, 2009 |
Advertising agencies earn their money by receiving 15% discount from publications and broadcast stations where they place advertising, so what do you do if your business is too small to require the service of an ad agency? Set up your own in house ad agency, for example, if your business is called ABC Manufacturing, just call your agency ABC Advertising , get an Assumed Name Certificate (DBA) at your county clerk’s office, and with a separate checking account and some stationery, you are ready to save 15% on almost all the ads you place for yourself.
Invest in high-school students on bicycles, for example, a roofing business might pay students $1.00 for the address of each home in the community that needs a new roof, and a gardening business might pay $1.00 for the address of each home that could use some quality landscaping, or a paving business might buy the addresses that need driveway work and so on.
A jeweler wanted to attract attention to his business during the holiday season, so he invented outlandishly expensive gift ideas, such as a Frisbee with a diamond in the center for $5,000, an hour glass that used real diamonds instead of sand for $10,000 and a jewel encrusted backgammon set for $50,000. Of course, they rarely sold such items, but he attracted regional and national publicity and sales soared.
People often want things they can’t have, a tendency the luxury goods industry has long exploited and today other companies are increasingly using to their advantage. Walt Disney carefully controls the availability of its videos through its “Disappearing Classics” campaign by retire certain videos, and bringing them back every ten years for a new generation of young viewers. Consider making collectible versions of your products and limiting their supply to increase demand, for example, there are two words that help demonstrate this human tendency: Beanie Babies.
Lists are potent tools for creating buzz because they’re effective road signs for information-besieged customers who don’t know where to focus their attention. In 1998, Modern Library, a Random House company, surveyed its editorial board to compile a list of the top 100 novels of the 20th century, and within months, more than 1,000 articles and editorials had appeared about the controversial list. Four of the top five novels made their way on to Amazon.com’s weekly list of paperback best-sellers greatly benefiting Modern Library among other publishers.
When Phillips Electronics was developing a portable radio-cassette player for teenagers, the company conducted focus groups with its potential young customers, and the player was designed in two colors, yellow and black. The overwhelming majority of the teenagers said they would prefer the yellow colors, and after the focus group was over, Phillips thanked the participants by giving them a free player. A pile of yellow players and a pile of black players were placed outside the testing room, and most of the teenagers chose black.
Always trust internal logic over that of conventional wisdom, for example, in Detroit most product-development dollars are spent on improvements to existing products and most market research dollars is spent on studying what customers like among available products. Hal Sperlich, the father of the minivan stated: “In 10 years of developing the minivan we never got one letter from a housewife asking us to invent one. To the skeptics, that proved there wasn’t a market out there.”