I have been a bit quiet for a few days. We will soon be launching a new product, revamping websites and blogs, and launching some new services (better packaged services) as well. Keep an eye on this blog and we will let you know as things become ready.

If you are interested in Beta testing our new product, drop me an email and I will put you on the list. ron@buzzoodle.com

We have also quietly built and launched a new, double opt-in eNewsletter subscription. We will be launching a weekly tip email and improving on the monthly eNewsletter.

Thank you very much for reading. I hope the improvements we are making will serve your needs even better in the future.

I am no expert on movie marketing.  I have an older kid and a 2 year old, so movies at the theater have been limited for the last two years.

So today is mother’s day and we decided to see a movie.  Maya, the two year old, will now sit through a movie and enjoy it.  We decided to see Shrek 3.

Guess what!  Shrek 3 is not out until next week.  Nothing in our theater had a rating under PG-13.  We would have seen anything, as long as we knew the baby would enjoy it.  This really baffles me.  Mother’s day and no family movies?  Don’t get me wrong, I would love to see spider man and so would the older daughter, but we were looking for something we could all do.

And if you are thinking that is OK and we will probably go see Shrek next weekend, I am here to tell you we will not.  Movies are kind of a special occasion thing, and otherwise we rent them and watch them at home.  I guess we will see Shrek in 9 months or so. $2 instead of $20.

Don’t take this as some big rant.  I really do not care.  I was just surprised that on a day when families spend money doing things together, no one had something I could go spend my money on.  It would be like shutting all the bars down on St. Patrick’s Day.

Tracy Sheridan of Waxxi invited me to an interactive podcast with Seth Godin.  I am looking forward to this because I am curious about the technology and want to interact with Seth.  Below is the email she sent (reprinted with permission) and you are all invited.

After having read your post about The Dip, and Seth, I thought I would personally invite you to our next Waxxi ‘cast, which features Seth. What we do is allow people, globally, to talk to our guests via phone and/or IM. We allow them to be a part of the podcast experience (hence, the interactive podcast’) vs. just listening.We’d love it if you could join. The date is June 6th (1:30pm ET) and more info is here: http://waxxi.us/sethgodin.html

I’m a big fan of Buzzoodle Buzz Marketing Blog, and a big believer in WOM marketing.

Seth Godin has a little post on the New York Time Effect. What he talks about is how buzz works and can you really plan for it. His conclusion is NO. He compares it to buying lottery tickets as a retirement strategy.

I agree you cannot count on huge buzz. You can, however, create a steady buzz that will do the following:

• Make more people know about you and your product
• Generate more visitors to your website
• Get more word of mouth referrals
• Land you more media exposure

And when those things start happening, the odds of one of those really great, big buzz victories increases significantly.

In case you are wondering, that is how we help clients. We create well crafted, interesting messages and get them to more and more people, creating steady buzz and eventually creating a sensation, if we are lucky. You just have to improve your message and increase your visibility.

I will be on a panel discussion July 11th from 4:00 – 5:30 p.m.
Solar 2007 – Cleveland Ohio – More Info

Cleveland 2007 Non-Profit Seminar on May 23, 2007

More info to come…

In my most recent post, Is Buzz Marketing the Next SEO, I discuss how more people are doing more things to serve their customers.  SEO specialists are doing Buzz Marketing, Buzz Marketers do SEO, Advertising agencies are doing buzz marketing and SEO, Programmers are saying they do this stuff as well, sometimes.

This can make it easier or harder for you to partner with people.  And having partners is a great buzz technique, whether it is a formal partnership or just a loose agreement.

The key is to define what you want to do.  Not what you can do, because you can do a lot of things.  What are you exceptional at and passionate about.  That is what you should be doing.  Now if you have a big company and are providing a full group of services, wonderful.  If you are a small company trying to do too many things, then it is time to create a few of these partnerships.

Now the trick is to work through the details of your partnership.  Here is a list of things to consider when working out these details:

• Who maintains relationship with client they bring in?
• How does each person get compensated?
• If you are working together on a project, who bills?
• How do you represent each other on your websites?
• Create a strategy to buzz about each other.

My experience is that we often talk to people about partnerships, but they rarely become reality because they do take work, planning and a win/win attitude.

SEO – Search Engine Optimization – is a specialty that has been around for a long time. Buzz Marketing is a vague term that seems to be taking on more the meaning of creating a buzz in social media / Web 2.0 stuff and less meaning around the big and crazy stuff that gets people lots of buzz.

At a conference on Friday, it was interesting to hear an SEO person say she was now doing Buzz Marketing. I always thought of her as an SEO specialist, but more and more, buzz marketing is generating more content and getting more links, which is a great SEO strategy.

So you might ask yourself, are they the same thing?

No. SEO is the practice of targeting particular keywords and getting particular pages to rank highly for those keywords. A good SEO specialist will look at how your website is structured, the words in links, the text on the pages, the invisible (META) information of a webpage and who is linking to the pages. They will recommend places to buy ads and pay for directory listings. They will also attempt to get people to link to your page with the keywords anchored in the text of the link, because search engines use that information to help them rank pages.

Buzz Marketing helps SEO a great deal because it creates more content on a regular basis, which gives you more chances to appear in search engines for a higher number of terms, even though it is unlikely you take the time to optimize the message. – For example, this blog gets lots of hits from search engines because it has over 650 articles, not from any intentional optimization strategy. Buzz Marketing also encourages participation in the Internet as a social media. So you can generate inbound links all over the web to your website.

Those are simple definitions and in both cases, much more can be done. But for the sake of this post, let me move on.

I see that more and more of us are moving to some middle area. I do some SEO. I program sometimes. I am a marketer, a software developer, a data analyst, a PR specialist, a publisher, an author, a speaker, a blogger, a graphic designer, … I am not showing off. We are all taking on more and more rolls. I cannot hire someone every time I need an image cropped or a simple form put on the web.

So are SEO people morphing into Buzz Marketers? Probably.

Here is why: SEO serves some clients really well. Buzz Marketing has some other advantages that serve some clients really well. It just depends on the client and their needs.

Take cost out of the picture. Having someone do these things for you is time consuming either way. It takes research, analysis and tweaking all the time for either of these things to work well.

Advantages of SEO

The advantage of SEO is that it does not take constant creation of new content. Instead, the website owner opts to focus their attention on getting a few pages to rank on the first pages of search engines like Google and Yahoo. This is a very good strategy if:

• Owner does not want to create content regularly.
• Owner has specific terms they can target for. (This works really well with specific product names)
• Website plays small role in company marketing plan.

Advantages of Buzz Marketing

Buzz Marketing has some advantages as well. It captures more listings in search engines for a particular term. For example, you may be listed 3 or 4 times in the top 20 spots in search engines. You may also get incredible spikes in traffic from word of mouth or viral messages that you did not even create. You are a good candidate for Buzz Marketing if:

• You like to create regular content or can pay someone to do so. (Such as blogging)
• You enjoy surfing the web, participating in online groups and doing online networking.
• You would like to be seen as an expert in your field.
• You can make creating buzz a daily habit, or can hire someone to be your online advocate daily.

SEO and Buzz Marketing are different. If you can do both, it is great. If you must focus your time, use the above information to decide which approach is right for you.

Would you like to get more people to create word of mouth about you?  How about refer you to potential clients?  How about introduce you to cool people?

Today I was on the way to a board committee meeting, and realized I could help the organization much better if they first helped me focus.  It comes down to respecting other people’s time and understanding just how busy everyone is.  The organization I am involved with does well, but could get better results from me if they help me focus on specific goals.

At the meeting I made sure I was highly focused on a few goals that could have a big impact.  I had to contact two people and set up a database we could all share that would help us coordinate our recruitment.  I was able to do that in a half hour, and provide a lot of value to the organization.

When you or I go to networking events or meet with people, we hope to get some value.  This same focus can really benefit you if you are trying to get other people to take (free) action on your behalf.  You have to help them understand the exact action you can benefit from and be the kind of person they want to help.

Here are some things to consider when you are talking with people that could create a buzz for you.

• Is your story simple and easy for someone to repeat?
• Do you clearly state one easy thing they could do to help you? – I like to meet interesting people that are marketing savvy…. for example.
• Do you mention one clear benefit you or your product provides?  Not general (We make people more financially secure) but (We help high net worth people pay less taxes.)
• If you are in a networking group that meets regularly, have a clear, different objective every meeting.  – It would be great if you guys can help me meet this weeks goal of meeting three people that need to buy a new car.
• Set a deadline – You cannot tell someone to refer you to someone by January, OR ELSE!  But you can set a sense of urgency.  – If you know someone that needs a widget, tell them to contact me before Monday.  We have a special that ends this week…. 
• An offer to help?  If someone offers to help you, be extremely specific on what they can do for you that would give you the most value from the least effort on their part.

Each situation will require some thinking on your feet.  Meeting someone for the first time is not the same as talking with someone you run into regularly.  The common denominator is encouraging someone to focus and understand how they can help you.  I think that the best way to do that is to first help them.

I am not done with this book yet, but WOW.

I have been doing email marketing for years and I am learning so much from this book. Chris Baggott has written a great book with all kinds of input from other smart people on the topic too.

What I am enjoying the most is the level of detail.  Yes, I have a pretty good idea about email marketing and we have been doing it for years with some clients, but this book is providing me with the details that make me rethink every nuance of the process.  If you want to successfully do email marketing, this is a must read.