Get Buzz, Make Buzz

Here’s a new book that will help you develop the crucial entrepreneurial skill of generating publicity—frugally. Guerrilla Publicity, by Jay Conrad Levinson, Rick Frishman, and Jill Lublin, extends a popular line of "guerrilla" guides stretching back nearly 20 years to the extremely successful Guerrilla Marketing title. "In a nutshell, guerillas are business operators who substitute time, energy, and imagination for money," write the authors, "Unlike traditional marketing, which is geared to big businesses, guerrilla marketing is targeted to operators of small businesses who have big dreams rather than big bankrolls." In this book the authors provide hundreds of tips on how to bootstrap publicity. They show how to create a killer press kit, how to write a pithy sound bite, when and how to contact the media, and how to develop a compelling story about your product or service. And, the book contains a rich appendix with more than 60 pages of sample press releases and other documents that help you plug in—and plug—your own story.

If, on the other hand, you have more resources on hand than the ordinary startup, there are several other excellent guides to spawning buzz and launching blockbuster products. The recent book The Anatomy of Buzz by Emanuel Rosen gives a smart explanation of the dynamics by which individual products become the darlings of passionate early adopters before catching fire. Geoffrey Moore’s Crossing the Chasm provides a wealth of tactics for tracing this trajectory. And, the recent Piloting Palm by Andrea Butter and David Pogue provides an excellent narrative tale of how one startup helped create a hit product—the Palm Pilot—and an industry in the process.