Publishers getting back to work this morning after reading the requisite weekend media on media–specifically, Jonah Lehrer‘s column “The Buzz on Buzz” in Saturday’s Wall Street Journal—are probably trying to console and convince themselves that all the effort they’re putting into marketing isn’t a waste of time and money.

Lehrer’s column, as the title no doubt suggests, was about buzz; how it’s created, who’s responsible, how do content producers tweak it and take advantage, what’s effective, what isn’t, etc. The column uses the 1999 film “The Sixth Sense” as a textbook example of pre-release buzz coming to the aid of a film with low expectations and going on to create a blockbuster smash that nobody could avoid unless they locked themselves in a dark, soundproof closet with no contact with the outside world for three months. The star of the column was Brian Uzzi, a Northwestern sociologist who has been studying buzz related to blockbuster movies and has been trying to get the bottom of what creates buzz and makes it work. Over the period between March 1999 and August 2000 Uzzi analyzed data gathered from a survey of 180,000 movie goers who answered all kinds of marketing-related questions. A veritable motherlode of data for someone researching this kind of thing.

Anyway, Uzzi was interested in pre-release buzz because it’s not based on “actual experience” (i.e. exposure to good or bad reviews, conversations with anyone who’s actually seen it, etc.) but is something that is contagious, something that sways and focuses the attention of tons of people simultaneously and spontaneously. Here’s the piece from the column likely to make publishers either really excited or really bummed out, depending on the size of their ad budgets:

[Uzzi] found virtually no relationship between levels of pre-release buzz and the ad budget of the movie or the presence of highly paid actors, even if millions of dollars were spent. The data suggest that pre-release buzz is mostly unpredictable, driven by intangible factors like the originality of the premise, the title of the film, or even a throwaway line in the trailer.

The new buzz research has important implications for marketing. While the old model of advertising is all about reaching individual consumers — that’s why companies spend millions for a 15-second Super Bowl ad — Mr. Uzzi argues that future strategies should focus on getting consumers to spread the message themselves. “Thanks to social-networking sites, kids today are more connected than ever,” he adds. “They’re also much better at ignoring conventional ads, which means that the only way to reach them is with buzz.”

Ad budgets in publishing pale in comparison with the movie business. The audience for our advertising is a small sliver of the mainstream popular culture that constitutes large film audiences (James Patterson is big, but his latest book ain’t no “Avatar“). While consolidation has created huge corporate behemoths that seek to mimic the corporate ethos of other industries marketing their widgets, many publishers have no doubt discovered Uzzi’s conclusion without the effort of going through 180,000 surveys of book buyers. Through galley mailings to reviewers and booksellers, bigmouth mailings of titles we believe (or want to believe) will be hits, seeding the market at library and regional booksellers conferences, Good Reads, book clubs, etc., there’s a painful (if obvious) conclusion many of us have probably come to that’s reflected in Uzzi’s study: buzz is “unpredictable” and relies on “intangible factors.” Social networking is key and manufactured hype is a sure way to lose a lot of money.

The best way to sell a book then, it would seem, is one we’ve been relying on for a while: find a few good champions early and they’ll help with the rest.