Building Buzz

Apple has it. Google has it. Microsoft fails at it. Yahoo! some­times does and some­times doesn’t. What I am talk­ing about is buzz and coolness.

It seems every time Apple or Google intro­duces a new prod­uct, the buzz is high. For exam­ple, Apple recently intro­duced a $350 speaker and, while the reac­tion was more tepid than it has been for other Apple prod­ucts, no one seem to point that the emperor was look­ing very very naked. Yet, Microsoft keeps throw­ing out new prod­ucts and few peo­ple seem to be very inter­ested (no mat­ter how Scoble tries to brow­beat us into think­ing of Microsoft as cool).

Sim­i­larly, today, Google intro­duced a finance sec­tion that mim­ic­ked much of what yahoo! finance has been doing for years. It has a cou­ple of nice AJAX-based fea­tures but, all and all, it’s not enough of an improve­ment to be con­sid­ered like some­thing that could poten­tially dom­i­nate the tech news cycle. And yet, every major tech pub or main­stream pub­li­ca­tion has cov­ered the release.

why?

Try­ing to divine the source of coolness

What Google and Apple seem to have under­stood is that there are ways to make one­self look cool. I’m going to try to lay out some of the things I’ve seen (and I hope that oth­ers will chime in in the comments):

Rumor Mill

First, let the rumors float or give the appear­ance that you don’t want rumors spread­ing. Google Finance has long been a rumored prod­uct (as is Google pay­ment, for exam­ple) but no word ever came out of the com­pany about their inten­tions. In fact, Google is rel­a­tively stingy in terms of pro­vid­ing advance infor­ma­tion about their prod­ucts. They have learned to let the rumors run wild, leav­ing their com­peti­tors tear­ing their hair out try­ing to divine what Google will do next.

Apple takes a dif­fer­ent approach to this. In the past, the com­pany has been rel­a­tively ruth­less in its attempts to shut leaks down. How­ever, it seems that, when leaks are pre­sent­ing com­pelling prod­ucts and the com­pany doesn’t really have any­thing to announce, Apple is happy to let the rumor mill run wild. So, before the release of the iSpeaker, uh, iPod Hi-Fi, Apple did not crack down on rumors about a new video iPod.

The two approaches speak to two dif­fer­ent traits: one is to be extremely secre­tive about your action and the other is to let rumors go wild as long as they paint a pic­ture of your com­pany that is far cheerier than its reality.

The one feature

When sell­ing tech­nol­ogy, there are two publics to serve: the early adopters, and the gen­eral pub­lic. The early adopters are a fickle bunch but they can have some influ­ence on the gen­eral pub­lic. So giv­ing the early adopters one fea­ture that they will like is an impor­tant fea­ture of cre­at­ing good buzz. Sim­i­larly, when deal­ing with the gen­eral pub­lic, empha­size the one fea­ture that makes your prod­uct dif­fer­ent. It doesn’t have to be some­thing that is actu­ally inno­v­a­tive (many com­pa­nies were mak­ing MP3 play­ers years before the iPod; many com­pa­nies have offered ser­vices (other than search) which did what Google did in cat­e­gories like mail, web host­ing, clas­si­fied, news, etc..) but it has to be pre­sented as such. The early adopters may groan but they are even­tu­ally drowned out by the masses.

Thus, Apple did not release a fea­ture­less MP3 play­ers with­out a screen, they released the “Shuf­fle” which allowed peo­ple to get a lit­tle more ran­dom­ness out of their music col­lec­tion. Or Apple didn’t release a $350 speaker, they release a Hi-Fi sys­tem that will work with an iPod (iPod sold sep­a­rately). Sim­i­larly, Google did not release a Geoc­i­ties rethread, they released pages, a cool online web edi­tor and page host­ing ser­vice. They did not release a me-too ver­sion of finance: look at the cool graphs they have.

I may sound a lit­tle cyn­i­cal in that last para­graph but I believe it is this kind of cyn­i­cism that infuses the mar­ket­ing of cool prod­ucts. They may not be the top tech­nol­ogy in the mar­ket but they are dif­fer­ent. And empha­siz­ing that they are dif­fer­ent gives a chance to the users to feel like they, too, are different.

Cool by association

The next item on the list, in terms of gen­er­at­ing buzz is to cre­ate an appear­ance of exclu­siv­ity from the get-go. Thus Apple does not com­plain too much when the police report rise in theft of iPod, due to the high vis­i­bil­ity of the white head­phones (see, our prod­uct is so pop­u­lar, peo­ple steal it). Sim­i­larly, Google did not offer a free web-mail ser­vice for all, you had to receive an invitation.

By cre­at­ing a cer­tain level of exclu­siv­ity or belong­ing to a cer­tain tribe, Apple and Google have man­aged to go beyond the prod­uct. They’ve cre­ated an aura of cool in being asso­ci­ated with them. When a new prod­uct comes out, you have to check it out or you will be out of the loop. The trend folds on itself, ensur­ing that future prod­uct launches ben­e­fit from the buzz of pre­vi­ous prod­uct launches. Over times, the duds are for­got­ten, and the com­pa­nies are seen as innovative.

Look! Feel!

One of the other things to con­sider, when cre­at­ing some level of buzz is the fizz and whiz of look and feel. Apple is known for design­ing beau­ti­ful com­put­ers (in the main­stream PC world, only Sony puts as much thought into how their com­put­ers look). The energy they put into the design allows them to bypass some of the tech­nol­ogy issues that other ven­dors would encounter.

Sim­i­larly, Google has become an expert at using AJAx for their inter­faces. As a result, new prod­ucts gen­er­ally look more pol­ished than the com­pe­ti­tion. In the case of Finance appli­ca­tion, it was inter­est­ing to see com­ments by peo­ple in the finan­cial space on the per­for­mance of the prod­uct in terms of delays giv­ing stock quote prices, etc.. How­ever, few users would drill in and dis­cover that stock prices were about 20–25 behind, or that

What value does buzz have?

At the end of the day, though, much remains to be seen about the value of such buzz. While Apple gen­er­ates a lot of buzz about its com­put­ers, it still only retains between 5 and 10 per­cent of the mar­ket. Sim­i­larly, while Google has gen­er­ated much buzz for all its new prod­ucts, its bread and but­ter is still rev­enue from adver­tis­ing on the search engine. So the ques­tion that still needs to be con­sid­ered is whether buzz has value beyond the intro­duc­tion of a new prod­uct and what that value trans­lates to in terms of real dollars.