No iPhone News is Good iNews?

My feed reader overfloweth. The hoopla has been building for quite a while, but yesterday, the iPhone unleashed all of its internet mind controlling power. If I had to guess, I would have to say that at least one third of the news articles I pulled in yesterday were iPhone related. Its been pure insanity, and a lesson to all of us marketing types. Some say enough already, can we kill the iPhone stories?? Gizmodo has even offered a way to view their site sans-iPhone news. Whether you wanted to hear about it or not, the iPhone dominated the news yesterday. I mentioned to a friend yesterday that I couldn't recall a product/service that had as much hype as the iPhone had around it. She mentioned the X-Box and so I stopped and thought about it for a minute. The X-Box did have a great deal of hype around it, but I see one main difference. In their initial launch, X-Box leaned fairly heavy on traditional sources of advertising and marketing. When you examine what Apple has done with the iPhone, its a fairly small advertising plan, coupled with an unpaid word of mouth campaign to rival all word of mouth campaigns. For weeks now, people have bombarded the internet with likes, dislikes, predictions and insanity all centered around the iPhone. The noise has been generated from nearly every angle possible and it all adds up to one thing: A huge marketing win for Apple. A devoted group of fans sure makes word of mouth a lot easier, but this effort has extended outside the Mac community proper. Apple doesn't have enough money to buy this kind of coverage. You can't buy the kind of gushing the iPhone has received from so many sources. For Apple's sake, you have to hope that the iPhone can live up to the hype. Apple may have just changed the mobile phone game, but I think they may have just changed the marketing game as well. Through all of this word of mouth, they have bought an incredible amount of equity with people that normally would not even consider looking at a phone like this. By simply giving people something to talk about, they have expanded their potential audience to new levels. Time will reveal if the iPhone is a true success or not. At some point, we'll get to see the number of units sold, we'll be able to read user reviews online and we'll see how much profit these little black beauties generate. We'll also get to see complaints and rants about how this or that doesn't do this or that. Only then, will anyone be able to give an authoritative answer on the success or failure of the iPhone. Until then, everyone else gets to sit back and watch as Steve Jobs and Apple turn marketing up to 11 once again.