Article Body:
Creating something buzzworthy are often a challenge, but a challenge worth achieving. If you'll create something buzzworthy enough to urge everyone buzzing about it and spreading the message virally, then you’ve succeeded in doing something that the majority marketers only dream of.
Let’s take a glance at buzzworthiness from the attitude of the psychology of human motivation. If we will grasp the concept of what motivates us as humans, then we’ll have a far better understanding of the way to utilize the motivation factors to encourage the viral spread of our message through starting a buzz.
The famous psychologist Abraham Maslow presented what he called the “Hierarchy of Needs”. consistent with this hierarchy, if a person's doesn’t have their basic needs met, then they're going to be motivated mostly by meeting those basic needs first, giving less importance to the opposite needs. Let’s take a glance at this hierarchy below:
1. Physiological needs: Food, water, shelter, and sex.
2. Safety: Freedom from the threat of physical and emotional harm.
3. Social Needs: Friendship, belonging, and love.
4. Esteem Needs: Achievement, recognition, and reputation.
5. Self-Actualization: Truth, meaning, and wisdom.
After fulfilling one group of needs starting with physiological needs, then we'll become more motivated to satisfy subsequent set of needs, which graduates us to subsequent set of needs, until we fulfill self-actualization at the highest of the hierarchy. this will essentially be seen as a scale of motivation. the items that motivate us are the items that fulfill one or more of our needs.
So here’s an example of the way to easily create a buzz: Give out free food to famine stricken people. Those peoples primary motivation would be to achieve food, and if you provide it free, they're going to be buzzing to urge it, because it fulfills their basic needs. Does this instance have much relevance to modern marketing? What does one think would happen if you gave out free hamburgers to people at a festival? You’d create a buzz and other people would remember you. People walking away with their free burgers would meet people and say “They’re giving out free burgers over there”, thus propagating your message virally via word of mouth and creating a buzz.
Okay I admit, there’s another concept here that creates it buzzworthy. The concept is to possess something unique about your message/product/service. People will buzz about free burgers because A) it fulfills one among their basic needs, and B) the offer is exclusive because it’s free. If burgers were always free, then there would be nothing to buzz about.
For folks that have their physiological and safety needs met, it's easier to make a buzz through the motivation to satisfy their social and esteem needs. a couple of of the best samples of viral marketing like Hotmail, MyJournal, MySpace, and Friendster are all samples of this. These companies created a buzz because they offered something unique that fulfill the social and esteem needs through social communications, and social networking.
In these cases, the word of mouth buzz gets spread even faster because by spreading the word they fulfill their social and esteem needs at an equivalent time as fulfilling it from the service they’re spreading the word about. It works an equivalent even with the instance of free burgers. When someone walks away with a free burger, they're inclined to travel tell their friends about it, because it'll boost their reputation, recognition, and strengthen their friendship. Their friends are going to be excited and happy to urge a free burger because of you being the one to inform them about it. this is often a key point in buzzworthiness and if understood and implemented with the proper ideas and therefore the right messages, can increase your buzz exponentially.
If you've got a message, product, or service that's unique and fulfills one or more of our human needs, then you're on your thanks to creating a buzz. If it's something that's so good that people’s reputation and recognition becomes boosted amongst those they tell about it, then it’s definitely buzzworthy! the sole thing left is to inform people to spread the word about it, and make it as easy as possible for them to spread it (ie. Viral tools like tell-a-friend scripts, hand outs, pamphlets, e-mail forwarding, articles they will freely publish, etc…).
Good luck creating a buzz!