Part 1 : The "Buzz" on Buzzword's beginning

Hi Jim, thanks for talking with us. Where do you play guitar professionally by the way?
I have a band in town, the Johnson Brothers Band. We have a great web site by the way.

Tell us about your background. You left an ad agency to start Buzzword? How did it all come about?
I've been doing advertising, PR, marketing stuff for more than twenty years and I started Buzzword in 96. I had been working at an ad agency and I thought the Web was going to grow into something pretty big and this was pretty early on. My colleagues didn't think it was going to get big so I left and started Buzzword.

What are you colleagues thinking now?
Well, they're probably thinking, "less of a lunatic, more of a visionary" now and they're all doing interactive stuff too. Everyone is.

What made you think the Internet was going to get so big?
My background has always been in PR and advertising and it just struck me that it was never really about technology, it was always about the content and that was what I did, so it was simply a new vehicle. It was like television in 1948, this was simply a new way of getting to people, or customers or anything else. The process fundamentally was not altogether different; you have the audience, the message and the content. I thought it was going to be a good place to be.

In one of your press releases you are referred to as a "Techno-Evangelist", what does that term mean to you?
One of our writers thought that up but really, I think of myself as a web-based anti-techno-evangelist, in the sense that I totally buy into using the Web as a tool and yet at the same time what makes it work is not the "techno" part of it. The very thing that makes the Web so successful is the part of it that has the very least to do with technology. The technology ought to be almost invisible.

There's an expression, that old adage about "the most important thing is to get somebody to your web site" and it's really not. The most important thing is really to get somebody to come back to your web site. That's a whole different problem and the only reason that people will come back to a web site is if there is some kind of payoff.

People go to a site for a reason; it's to either get information, to buy something, to get entertained, or to be informed. Whatever that reason is, they want to do it in a way that's at least easier and more enjoyable than the old alternative is or they won't bother. The whole idea is to figure out what is the payoff or the agenda for people coming to visit, and if you figure that out and fulfill it, then the web site will be successful. If you miss the point, or don't do it very well, then they'll go to a competitor and get it better there and you'll lose out.

Do you enjoy being a new media-marketing strategist?
Yeah, I really do. Buzzword is really different in that we are really a marketing company, more than we are simply a propeller head web production code banging kind of shop. What we do is marketing stuff and the product we produce by and large is interactive stuff, CD-ROMS, web sites etc.

Continued...