I did my PhD work on colloidal semiconductor quantum dots right at the peak of the nano fad. I would say that popular buzz doesn't help or hurt, it's mostly noise. Academically, we're expected to spend some time on outreach, so if your field is in the public eye at the moment it does make outreach easier.

Believe it or not, the hype among scientists was even worse than among the public, to the point of (in my opinion) hurting good science. Everyone was shoehorning "nano" into their proposals, regardless if their work was legitimately nano[1], and that really hurt the SNR for manuscripts and grant proposals.

[1] I define nanotechnology as dealing with something sufficiently small to access properties not seen in bulk materials. For many materials, restricting one or more dimensions below 100nm will lead to side-dependent properties. There was a lot of stuff during the Great Nano Hype that was claimed to be nano, but was say 500nm—that would be "submicron".