Customer Reviews

Dirty Little Secrets of Buzz: How to Attract Massive Attention for Your Business, Your Product, or Yourself

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

This is a great book if you are looking for solid info on this topic, this is a wonderful that is informative and you will not regret purchasing it!!!

The book begins well enough, but it never fulfills its promises. It doesn't really teach you how to get "BUZZ"....which is what the book is supposed to be about! It mostly tells you what you can do once you DO get Buzz and how to capitalize on it once you have it. But it never really tells you HOW to get it. It talks about how you CAN get it through social networking. But it never gives you real tips or advice. It never give you any solid ideas. It's all-in-all humorous and a quick, entertaining read...but hardly an excellent guide to getting "BUZZ". It should be called "How to use buzz once you have it already".

By the way, the author stresses the importance of having a website. I read the book when it came out. Noticed recently that his website is down and has been for years. If it's so important to have a website, why does his never work?

Just finished reading this book from cover to cover. I learned the author LOVES Bill Maher and Michael Moore, HATES Anne Coulter and Bill O'Reilly, and loves to ridicule Conservative talk radio. Oh, and by the way, "Superbad" was hilarious, but he NEVER would have gone to see a movie like "The Passion of the Christ" if it weren't for the marketing.

So I ended up asking myself, "Is this a book or a blog?" It's disrespectful to sell folks a book and then give them page after page of ones own political views.

Or, to put it another way, "Why is he telling me this stuff?" I bought a book on buzz, not a book of political satire. "Stay in your league and give people what they bought, not what you want to shove down their throats," would be my advice to the author.

Someday I look forward to trying another one of Seaman's books, but not until he's grown up. With maturity will hopefully come the knowledge that you shouldn't purposely try to offend the people who just shelled out $14.95 for your skimpy paperback book.

In short, look for a more professionally written book. Trust me, it won't be hard to find one!

Dirty Little Secrets Of Buzz is written for the overworked, online, ADD crowd. It doesn't waste a lot of time trying to give you a history of PR and teach you how to seem more like you are a huge PR company. Instead it gives you down and dirty, step by step processes for creating a crowd of followers online and how to leverage that online visibility into online and offline Buzz.

This book has a lot of case studies that PR purists will find boring and will call "flash in the pan." But for people who want to get famous and build their company brands, they will see that this is the new reality and learn how to leverage it.

The book is a very fast read, the information is accessible and positioned in a way that makes it quick to implement. Will you be a star overnight from reading this book? Probably not, but you will have a much better idea of where to start in a media space that is rapidly changing.

If you are an author, speaker, small business owner or entrepreneur, this book is for you, if you are a cutting edge practitioner of PR who is current on all of the media modalities it may not work as well for you.

Overall, very good book.

Dave Lakhani
Author of Persuasion: The Art of Getting What You Want
Subliminal Persuasion: Influence & Marketing Secrets They Don't Want You To Know
The 12 Factors of Business Success: Discover, Develop and Leverage Your Strengths

Very nice little book. I liked it. It is comprised of 12 chapters and three appendices as follows:

0. Introduction
1. Choose your own adventure
2. The rules of effective publicity whoring
3. All fires start with a spark: Getting friendly with mean bloggers
4. MySpace, Facebook, and the social networking revolution
5. When it makes sense to pay for attention: Teaming up with the godfather of the Internet
6. How to get on television
7. Become famous in your underwear (or, getting radio coverage)
8. Celebrity Tabloids: Getting in them or staying out of them them
9. Building the empire, maintaining coverage, and avoiding burnout
10. Other sparkling pearls of wisdom
11. Peacing out, closing thought, and publicity zen
12. Epilogue
A. Services
B. Web sites
C. Books

As I recall the following points are provided throughout the book:

>>Create real outrage
>>Establish a positive connection with the public
>>Always remain accessible to the media
>>Have an enemy and publicize your rivalry
>>Exploit the viral aspects of YouTube and Vimeo
>>Create a viral group on Facebook
>>Network with others in your field
>>Appear in-demand at all times
>>Befriend the print media, especially trade magazines
>>Be seen as a controversial expert, not an average Joe

If you own a small business or are in charge of business development for one, then it might be a good idea to pick up a copy of this book. Here you will learn how to attract massive amounts of media coverage for your company if you want it. This book is about strategizing how to create a national sensation out of essentially nothing. You can use some of the techniques disclosed, many of the techniques, or all of the techniques. The important thing is to be aware of the techniques and use them as your marketing plan will allow.

Controversy, "scandal" managering, and social networking can create buzz and a viral sensation. If used correctly, you and your company can become famous, and likely very profitable. Read this book to learn more about being successful at creating buzz for little or no cash. 4 stars!

The author writes in a very no-nonsense "here it how it works" fashion which I liked. He gives a lot of excellent tips about how to drive traffic to your site without spending a lot of money doing it.

I bought this after a friend recommended it to me. Look... it seems to be a good book on the subject. The problem? This is not a subject that has anything to do with me. So.... yea.... buy the book if you want to get on TV, radio, and have people taking your picture. It seems to be a fun and good read.

This book does what it sets out to do. If you're looking for a magic formula, try a little wishful thinking. But if you want to see what others have done to build buzz, this book lays it out nicely. Does the author have opinions? Of course! Will you agree with all of them? Unlikely. But will you find great examples and compelling ideas? Absolutely. And unless you are a PR hack who's been there, done that, and lived to tell the tale, I think you'll find help for your endeavors here.

Of course, learning how persuasion itself works can multiply your success in this and in just about everything involving you and others.

Dr. Rick Kirschner
Speaker, educator, coach, blogger
[...]
Author of the Insider's Guide To The Art Of Persuasion

In Dirty Little Secrets of Buzz, provocateur and professional attention-getter David Seaman shares his take on how anyone, regardless of money, can become famous--or at least, almost famous. He breaks down the landscape of today's media with lessons from his own antics, such as the Free Paris Hilton campaign, and looks at real-life examples such as dating columnist and Internet sensation Julia Allison (whose blog I first heard about the book from) and Obama Girl, interviewing them about their achievements.

The book's basic message is that professional PR is not the only route to go to gain attention and that individuals can do for themselves what once required many steps and gatekeepers. He brings up real-life examples like Tila Tequila, though there can only be so many people like her (even with the glut of reality TV). More helpful is his take on social networking sites and link promotion sites like Digg, explaining exactly how they work, why you want to use them, cautions and his own experiences with them.

If you've never created your own website before, or just want to learn more, this is a great primer. Seemingly obvious advice like, "Your landing page should give the user exactly what they expected, or they will leave your site in a hurry without taking action," is actually quite necessary, because many websites don't do this.

"Buzz" is also a little different than simply getting the attention of traditional media. It's not always, in Seaman's view, about making an immediate sale, but generating long-lasting contacts, people who will want to join your mailing list and stay with you throughout a career, rather than a single campaign.

As a freelance writer, editor of books, and blogger, I've found much of his take useful and true. The more targeted you can make your pitches, the better, rather than sending them out willy-nilly. He breaks down some of the major blogs (though those should be familiar to most casual blog readers) but I'd say that going even further is useful; if you run a food blog, like I do, you should send your best work to other food bloggers.

At times, he's a little too eager to extol the powers of the Internet; while it indeed is a mighty force to be reckoned with when it comes to gaining attention for oneself, not everyone can be as mega famous as some of the people he profiles; there need to be followers if there are also going to be leaders.

And this may be nitpicky, but he makes a point that Martha Stewart's show is simply called "Martha" as a sign of her success, when the actual show is called The Martha Stewart Show. Overall, this is a spirited, engaging look at what it takes to spread the word about your business, product, and/or persona in the modern world, tackling TV, radio, print media and perhaps most extensively, the Internet, perhaps the easiest of these forms of media to crack. Whether everyone who follows these methods can truly succeed remains to be seen, but Seaman's enthusiasm is contagious and I certainly learned of a few sites I hadn't known about and got inspired to redouble my efforts in terms of self-promotion.

This was a fast, entertaining, and easy read - You should be able to go though it in a few hours and grasp the basic principles of this book. I thought David's suggestions and tips on how to prepare for an on camera and/or radio interview were insightful. This book will be very useful for someone in the very early stages of their career to help build and maintain (specifically an online) audience. The world of PR and how to attain fame has changed and will continue to change rapidly- so it is imperative that one keeps ahead of the curve. What "stunts" or "trends" (insert gardener stole my sex tape here) that made people famous two years ago- is not what does the trick today. John Q Public-they are a media savvy bunch now. They don't like it when people try to "piss on their leg and tell them it's raining"- if you get my drift. They can spot a hack a mile away. Know why you are there: Work the room, sell your product and most importantly, sell yourself.

One thought that I came to while reading DLSB was that this book is necessary now ore than ever because Joe Public wants to have a say on who gets to rise to the top. All of these competition based reality shows, YouTube, Facebook, MySpace, etc... has changed the way fame is achieved. It seems as if now it is an expectation that you earn your place in the spotlight- and when you get their you'd better be on point.
Read.
Resonate.
Master.
It is only those with a true Machiavellian spirit know how-as Tupac Shakur put it so eloquently- to make a dollar out of fifteen cents.

Another great book to check out is The Brand Within by Daymond John.