Pick any Apple launch, and you can guarantee it will be accompanied by downtime on the Apple Store website, slap bang in the middle of trading hours. What should be commercial suicide for Apple is, in fact, one of the most powerful marketing tools in the industry.

As a company Apple trades on buzz like no other. You won’t find it punting out cheesy marketing campaigns, or paying off celebrities to carry the latest iPod. Instead it uses the web to do its dirty work, and all it takes is a single Post-It note.

Take the downtime for the launch of the new Mac Mini, iMac and Mac Pro for example, Apple blocked access to its web stores worldwide for well over two hours.

According to analysts Piper Jaffray, Apple sold 2.2 million Macs in the 90 days to March 2009. That’s an average of over 24,000 Macs sold every day, or more than a thousand every hour. And that’s just Macs!

The minute the first Apple Store dropped off the web, social networks and news sites began to buzz. Twitter analytics tool Twist shows mentions of ‘Apple’ surging as soon as the stores began going offline.

Likewise, blog posts go into overdrive and Google News reports almost 14,000 news stories written about the Apple Store in the past day. Mentions of it in blog posts have also topped 35,000 at the time of writing, according to Technorati.

Thequestion is whether Apple actually profits from the buzz it creates and if it does who was the genius that came up with this marketing strategy?!