I’ve been doing a ton of reading on buzz — and the art of it — lately. It’s been an interesting journey for me because I’m really tragically connected to cost-per-lead marketing and our word of mouth sources are tough to categorize. I’m on the record as a bona fide hater of word of mouth, as a matter of cold hard fact, as it’s been so very in the way of all my other marketing projects over the past two years. Color me transformed. Three months ago, the entire organization reorganized. The big(tm) budget I managed for our region was centralized to our corporate marketing office, leaving me a whole lot more time for tiddly winks, cross words, melancholy and porn, natch. Somewhere in there, I started listening more intently to buzz marketing folks and their points are making crystal clear sense to me now more than ever. One of them says that the amount of buzz your product or service generates is directly related to the amount of new information your producing about it. Take Apple, for example: over the past three OS releases, they always produce a list of “X new features”. In Tiger, it’s 200. In Panther, I think it was 150. In both releases, enormous buzz. I proofed a brochure the other day from our corporate relations team. It was pretty, as most of their material is. But it shows a distinct ignorance to what’s going on in the market. The copy listed exactly the same verbiage we’ve been using for over a year. The standard copy we used to rely on in yearly cycles is growing stale faster than ever, and our word of mouth buzz is falling even faster than that. I wrote an email to the team with suggestions. I doubt changes will be made, but here’s hoping. The tragedy of the commons in this case is that we’re so huge as an organization now that we’ve forgotten how to put our ears to the ground to hear the hooves rumbling behind us. In most cases, and here’s the bigger tragedy, when we do finally get the ears down, the rumbling has already passed. Challenge: How to re-engage a monolithic organization with fantasies of decentralization in grass roots buzz generation?