Buzz Monitoring: Aligning Goals and Measurement
Many online marketers are spending money on buzz marketing but are unsure how to measure
campaign success.

While all European marketers cite increasing brand awareness as their top online advertising
goal, engagement marketers say they are slightly more focused than average on
brand-building efforts. Two-thirds of European engagement marketers report using online
advertising to increase brand awareness, while more than one-quarter use the Internet
to increase brand buzz. Engagement marketers also report dedicating 29 percent of their
2006 online display advertising budgets to brand advertising, compared with an average
of 26 percent. Alongside this slightly stronger focus on branding, European engagement
marketers are also somewhat less likely than average to focus on sales and other direct
response goals: Less than one-half report using the Internet to drive direct online sales.

The gap between marketer expectations and user behaviors results less from misguided
advertisers than from relatively unengaged users. Most Europeans simply do not deeply
engage with online media, making them relatively difficult to reach through online
engagement marketing tactics. Across Europe, only 13 percent of Internet users were
‘heavy’ contributors to weblogs, forums, polls, and other engaging media in 2006; while
another 16 percent were ‘light’ contributors. Seven-in-10 online Europeans neither
contributed nor participated online in any public way. Fortunately for engagement
marketers, the 30 percent of Europeans who did participate online last year have the ability to
create echo chambers that generate the buzz many online marketers crave. These deeply
engaged users represent the key target audience for engagement marketers, and their
marketing tactics will increasingly focus on finding and engaging these key consumers.
(See European Online User Segmentation, 2006: Using Online Contributors to Reach
Silent Surfers, European Marketing & Advertising, December 21, 2006.)