Marketing professionals have been interested in Word of Mouth communications and the spread of information about products and services since the early 1960’s.  More importantly, these professionals are concerned with the influence these communications have on the social networks in which they occur.  The evolution of Word of Mouth techniques has led to a new tactic which is utilized by many different companies in many different industries known as buzz marketing.  Buzz marketing involves passing on information about a product, service, or idea to social leaders in a social network, who become known as buzz agents.  Social leaders are, more or less, popular people or people with influence in a social network; leaders that people look up to and whose opinions they trust because they are often early innovators.  Because of the infiltration of the social network through social leaders, the thinking is that the support for the product, service, or idea will penetrate the network through a ripple effect.  Buzz marketing is looked upon by society in different ways, and it raises some ethical dilemmas for the companies practicing buzz marketing and for the social networks it is being implemented in.  The market for the practice of buzz marketing is only increasing, as some small firms who specialize in implementing buzz market plans for large corporations are being hired by more and more companies who are looking to reap benefits from buzz marketing.  As a marketing practice, buzz marketing is the most concentrated and most effective at penetrating social networks of any size, but it is important that companies using buzz marketing practice it ethically.

Chapter 1 of “Networks,” the Econ 204 course packet, deals with social networks and explains how distances are measured within networks.  If a company is a singular node in a social network, then in the case of buzz marketing, all buzz agents, which are the points immediately connected to the company, would have a distance to the company of one.  All people who have learned about the company directly from a buzz agent have a distance to the company of two, and so on throughout the network.  The major idea behind buzz marketing, or its ultimate goal, is to increase the awareness of the company and its product, service, or idea to the farthest distance possible, while only spending the resources to reach the people in the network with distance one, the buzz agents themselves. 

Below is a link to an article by Jim Matorin which talks about buzz marketing where a lot of the information for this post was learned:

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