Behind the Scenes at Global-Roam

No, I’m not talking about corona discharge on HV AC power lines – I’m referring to the more esoteric notion of “Buzz Marketing”.

Hang on a sec … just what is Buzz Marketing?

I asked the very same question, the first time I heard the term – a few years ago now.

The best definition I have come across is that it’s just like “Word of Mouth” Marketing/Advertising (i.e. people talking about you) – with the addition that you make a conscious, structured effort to get and sustain people talking about your product.

”Viral Marketing” is another coin termed for the same process .

Buzz Marketing in the energy industry?

Yeah right!

There are probably not many industries that could conjure up (and carry off with good effect) the  marvellous advertisement revolving around the line:

“We’re excited by electricity, even if you’re not”

I did try to find some video-record of this advert, but was somewhat surprised to find that there was nothing recorded on YouTube or elsewhere (or at least none I could find).

Perhaps the advert itself is symbolic – TRUenergy gets all the industry insiders laughing at the joke, but Mr Joe Public – well, is sleeping on.  Certainly it does seem that no one was sufficiently inspired to put a bootleg copy of the advert onto YouTube.

PS – did find this one, later, but it’s not exactly the one I was thinking of… (at 3,379 views currently, it does seem to have woken slumbering Joe Public  – albeit very slightly)

My main point, here, is that there does not seem to be a lot of space in the energy market for a bit of buzz.  Too geeky, too complicated, not sexy enough, or just damn boring?

Well, all’s not lost yet…

Why this article now?

That’s a good question!

In recent times, I have seen a couple of interesting things written about Buzz that have given us further food for thought, including the following:

What can we learn about Viral Marketing from Swine Flu?

I stumbled upon this post by Dan Zarella, who proposed 7 Lessons we could learn, about Viral Marketing, from Swine Flu (which seems to have achieved celebrity status in the illness-stakes).

In the following table, I follow-up Dan’s 7 headings with some comments about the industry we operate in:

1)  Seed Selection	In the case of the electricity industry, the mind does boggle when thinking about who would be a “carrier” of “the Idea Virus” (sorry, Seth).  Especially with Dilbert-type characters being the first images conjured up by many when thinking about the industry. In our experience, however, there are indeed a number of people in the industry who have a higher predisposition to spread the virus (they are the ones who tend to be A.C.T.I.V.E. – more about this acronym in this [restricted] post)
2)  Knowledge Gaps	The energy industry is NOT one that’s immune from the tendency for half-truths to emerge in the space of a knowledge gap. That’s one reason our company came about in the first place – to work to make the energy market understandable to everyone, not just to industry insiders. Thankfully there seems to be fewer apoplectic cries that “the market’s fundamentally broken – let’s throw it out!” these days.  Perhaps what we’ve done has contributed to this greater understanding, in some small way?
3)  Addition vs Replacement	It was more luck than good management, but we chose the name “NEM-Watch” for our first product back in 2000, and the name has grown to become somewhat synonymous with a clear view of the National Electricity Market. Remember that you had initially thought to call it “NEM-poll”, Jon.  Don’t think that would have stuck, as much! Unfortunately for us, the name choice was also linked inextricably with the NEM, which has (to some degree) thwarted attempts to achieve the same measure of familiarity overseas.
4)  Novelty	Oh no – from a product development point of view, this point is seeming to suggest ongoing reinvention of our product line. That is what we have been managing to do, now (NEM-Watch v8 was a massive upgrade, and NEM-Review v6 is a complete re-write of all functionality, including a move to .NET2 which has made our guys happy). It remains a further challenge for the future…
5)  Communal Recreation	How do we, in terms of aiming our products to go viral, “allow and encourage remixing” by our target audiences? Will have to think more about that one…
6)  Infectious Period Length	We’ve experienced this, several times. For instance, in the blackouts that occurred following the massive heat wave and demand surge experienced in summer 2008-09 in Victoria and South Australia (which we discussed here) we saw a major spike in the number of hits on our websites, and people trialling NEM-Watch and our other products.  Many of these were Mr Joe Public, who just wanted to know what was going on, in the face of different information coming from all different directions. Ultimately, though, that’s not what we’re primarily interested in – to make the market more efficient, it would be better if end-users had higher understanding and awareness of the NEM throughout the year (not just at times of stress).  That would lead to both: 1)  More rational responses in times of stress in the market; and 2)  More reasoned pressure on policy makers to ensure the right incentives are in place for participants in the market, at all times. Hence, we’re continuing to explore ways in which we can help to achieve this, in our own small way.
7)  Endemic vs Epidemic	It does not surprise me that (according to Dan) “we tend to see a reproduction rate of far under 1” – that’s because the W.I.I.F.M. (What’s In It For Me) factor is often not there. Seth Godin notes in this post that no-one “sends” an idea unless: a.  They understand it b.  They want it to spread c.  They get some benefit from it spreading (or at least they think they do) d.  Effort < Benefit Pretty common sense, but worth remembering. That’s the essence of the challenge…

As alluded to above, we’ve been aware of the concept of “buzz marketing” for a number of years, but we’re only really newbies in exploring how such a concept is relevant to us, and to the energy market.

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Best job in the world?

No, we can’t offer you that – not unless you are
(a)   allergic to sunlight, and
(b)   need to be constantly plugged into the internet to survive, and
(c)   in some form of macabre way, are excited by electricity (see above).

Rather - what sparked our interest was the massive success Tourism Queensland has seemed to achieve with its “Best Job in the World” promotion.

This has been written up ad-nauseam in the press over the past 6 months or so (itself illustrative of the success of the promotion).  The best coverage I’ve seen in the press was this article in the Courier Mail.

Since that article was written (back April), the ad campaign itself has won a number of advertising industry awards - all continuing to feed the media-frenzy.

All this, and the lucky winner’s only just started the job!   Let’s hope his blog posts are worth the hype.

I’m sure there’s plenty that we can learn from the success of this promotion (not just the fact that we’re about 2000km south of the best job in the world) …

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Book Reviews -

Have read a number of books about buzz, WOM, viral marketing – one particularly good and some not so good.

Will get to them – but have rambled on too long today already.

So you’ll have to check back later…

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What’s it mean for us?

Ultimately, that the key question for us to answer.

We have been fortunate enough to have a number of customers talk about our products, stimulating “word of mouth” marketing:

1)  As noted above, NEM-Watch is the most obvious candidate for this - more broadly of interest than our other products, visually appealing, easily understandable

That’s why we were so concerned when some customers started letting us know they were unhappy with our upgrade process to version 8 – which Shane has already discussed.  It wasn’t that we had a large number of complaints, relative to the number of users (though it sure seemed enough at the time) – we were more concerned that bad buzz spreads even more quickly than the good news.

2)  We have had other clients become advocates for the other products they use, as well (a couple energy users and deSide® come to mind immediately).

Hence, we have been the beneficiaries of word-of-mouth marketing on the part of a number of our happy clients – for which we continue to be very grateful.  In simple terms, this has resulted from just having a good product, that customers are happy to show around.

It would be a stretch, though, to label what’s happened for us (up till now) as “buzz marketing”…

If you are interested in exploring these concepts with us for the future, then we would be interested to hear from you.  There’s even a few islands near at hand that you can explore on weekends!

Tags: Buzz Marketing, Marketing & Sales, word of mouth

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 23rd, 2009 at 3:16 pm and is filed under Book Review, Buzz Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.