90 Days of BzzAgent

Two years ago, when I first met Balter, I asked him, “So what the #@!$*! is it that you Bzz people do?” He gave me a nice, rational answer about harnessing word of mouth and promoting clients’ products. It sounded intriguing. The business was obviously growing fast. But I knew something more was going on.

I collaborated with Balter on Grapevine, which tells the story of word of mouth and the rise of BzzAgent. During the research period, I read hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Bzz reports. (!!!!!!!!!) Picked Balter’s brain clean. Observed the place in action. Read a half-ton of background material.

In the year it took to publish Grapevine, the number of Agents grew like wildfire, new clients came bursting through the doors, and the press was all over this thing called WOM — portrayed as the next bright wave of marketing or as the devil in Agent’s disguise.

And I became more convinced that something much more was going on at BzzAgent.

Now I’ve spent (almost) ninety days as an embedded blogger at the Hive, and I know very well what the #@!$*! Bzz people do all day and how things here work.

Yes, BzzAgent helps clients create and harness word of mouth for their products and services. And the company does so effectively and with great success. But, as marketing guru Ted Levitt wrote in 1960, the railroad business is not about running trains, it’s about transportation.

BzzAgent is not only about managing a process for people to chat up business books and chocolate cereal. It’s also about creating a self-defined social group. A community that offers people a chance to engage in activities that are sometimes proxies or approximations of, or substitutes for, other activities they might otherwise be involved with. A society that communicates in a special language all its own. And a group that has a complex and finely-balanced system of rewards that has little to do with points and free stuff.

For many Agents, BzzAgent is a form of community that they may not have elsewhere, or at least not enough of. Particularly for young mothers, which many Agents are, BzzAgent is a proxy for the outside world and a connection to the other selves they know they are or believe they can be.

For many Hive denizens, BzzAgent is an engaging and rewarding place to work, especially for those who didn’t really plan to go into business, don’t resonate with big companies, or for whom it’s most important to work with a lively group of compatible people. And it’s possible to be employed at BzzAgent without using up every scrap of mental and emotional energy, so there’s still some bandwidth to explore the personal writing, painting, musical, or Web project.

Many clients, I suspect, do not yet understand what the #@!$*! it is that BzzAgent does and, more important, what it could do and be. Some still think of it as a sampling program or a 3-D version of direct mail. They don’t know the code yet.

The language of the BzzAgent community, of course, is the language of goods. When speaking of products and services, people are speaking indirectly about themselves and their relationships with others.

Like most organizations, BzzAgent is as much about itself as about what it does.