Return on investment for traditional advertising can be as low as 18 percent, says Chris Stiehl and Henry DeVries, co-authors of Pain Killer Marketing. However, social networking, blogs and promotions that tie in with something newsworthy are seeing “ROI off the charts,” the team says.

“This is a huge community. They love to play games, and they are on [Internet message] boards talking about games if they are not playing them,” says Terry Brown, account director at Moroch Partners, a Dallas advertising agency.

When those gamers went to their blogs and waxed poetic about McDonald's, others listened. A lot of others: Some of these online sites have as many as 70,000 members.

“McDonald's did not have the brand that is coolest for young adults,” Brown concedes. Yet Moroch was able to help the Oak Brook, Ill.-based concept expand its cool factor beyond Happy Meal-aged kids. For the past three years, McDonald's has sponsored the annual Midnight Gamers Championship, a cross-country tournament for gamers. And that sponsorship created goodwill with both those who went to the tournaments and those who only read about them online.

McDonald's ability to capture the excitement of consumers who are already talking, writing and texting about their favorite (and least favorite) products is an example of what many feel is the biggest component in 21st-century branding: buzz marketing. Many marketers say that traditional advertising, particularly the national TV ad buy, may no longer be the gold standard in reaching customers.

New technologies are changing the way marketing messages get to consumers. With DVRs it is easier than ever for customers to skip TV commercials. Instead of getting their marketing messages from the small screen, many consumers get them on their phone, via text messages from friends and businesses or through mobile couponing offers. That's what makes it so important to take advantage of these new marketing outlets in the right way.

Just any tie-in with McDonald's would not have worked. “You cannot just put Ronald [McDonald] in a game and be accepted,” Brown says. But, because online gaming typically goes on well after dark—Xbox LIVE activity peaks at 2 a.m.—sponsorship of the contest dovetailed well with McDonald's efforts to promote its late-night hours.

McDonald’s upped its cool factor beyond the preschool set and their moms when it became the lead sponsor of the annual Midnight Gamers Championship. According to the NPD Group, online gamers are both genders (42 percent of them are women), have incomes between $35,000 to $75,000 and spend more than four hours online each week.

Fishing for Feedback

To develop such sensible partnerships, Chris Stiehl and Henry DeVries, co-authors of Pain Killer Marketing, published this month by WBusiness Books, urge marketers to understand some basic definitions:

“In a modern marketing strategy, you need all three,” Stiehl says.

Others use a more all-encompassing definition: “Buzz marketing is something that takes on a life of its own,” Brown says. “I do not know that you can create it, but you can put your brand in a position to take advantage of grassroots opportunities.”

Patrick Moorhead, director of advanced marketing solutions for the Central Region with the Chicago office of Avenue A | Razorfish, a marketing firm that specializes in emerging technologies, agrees. He believes it is more important to use the existing buzz to learn what consumers really think about your business than it is to try to engineer a short-lived, buzzworthy campaign.

Sports Illustrated swimsuit model Daniella Sarahyba was the subject of Taco Bell's 2008 online promotion, marketed on sauce packets, designed to create buzz among its core male customers. Visitors to a dedicated Web site can create an online “photo shoot” of Daniella hanging out on the beach and playing volleyball. They can then share their shots with their friends either by downloading or forwarding them.

For example, Moorhead remembers a pharmaceutical client who was locked in a neck-and-neck sales race with a competitor. Each company was promoting its drug based on its effectiveness. Avenue A | Razorfish contracted with Umbria, a Boulder, Colo.-based company that provides data-mining services to help companies learn what is already being said about their brand on the Internet. The pharmaceutical firm found that customers discussed ease of use of these drugs more often than effectiveness, as both products were considered effective. The client changed its messaging based on what it heard, and sales increased.

The advantage of a data-mining firm is that it finds things you'd miss, Moorhead says. If you only surf restaurant review sites, you won't uncover a mention of your brand being kid-friendly on a message board for new moms.

Some marketers worry about negative impressions in these consumer-generated forums, but Moorhead says understanding what customers are saying is paramount. “The opportunity is not in engineering the social environment, but in understanding the social environment,” he adds.

Cellfire Inc. provides retailers with the ability to send consumers coupons via their cell phones. Dwight Moore, vice president of corporate marketing for Cellfire, says just watching consumers hold up their cell phones to cashiers in order to redeem the coupons generates buzz. Cellfire recently launched a mobile coupon effort for Extreme Pita.

Customers trust their online peers because they have no vested interest in the brands they are promoting. Experts agree that covert campaigns, such as posing coached customers on busses to spontaneously praise a brand, are not well received.

“People get angry when they sense something is phony,” Stiehl says. “And when they are angry, they spread negative word of mouth.”

Instead, DeVries cites a successful promotion by Jägermeister, which sent models into a bar to buy customers drinks and talk about the brand. The models were upfront about who their employer was, so the campaign came off as fun, not phony.

Buzz marketing tactics are not just for brands going after young adults. Denver-based Vicorp, parent of Village Inn and Bakers Square, has an older-than-average demographic base. Vicorp Vice President of Marketing Josh Kern was surprised how many of Vicorp's customers wanted to order pies on online, subscribed to the company's e-newsletter and are participating in its online Easter memories video contest.

“What people recommend to one another has always been important,” Stiehl says. “Now there is a science behind it, and we are just learning how to manage that science.”

Village Inn and Bakers Square customers who posted online accounts of their best Easter stories were entered to win prizes including a year’s worth of free visits. The contest has “spanned generations,” says Josh Kern, vice president of marketing, engaging the chains’ older demographic in its buzz-marketing efforts.