90 Days of BzzAgent

Wow…that was quite a ride. We learned more than you could ever know from this. There were bumps, bruises, highs and insights – and an energy around this that will never be replaced. From our perspective, 90days was an enormous success – it was a clear indication of how transparency and openness can have positive and lasting benefits to a business. We’re thinking about how to extend John’s influence on the business. This chapter may be closed, but the book certainly isn’t.

Outside of the concept of a social experiment in corporate transparency, 90days was also an effort to drive home the importance of artistic culture in the workplace. Continuing in that vein, we have another short two-week project that’s launching immediately.

What happens when the same concept as 90days is applied to canvas? We aim to find out.

For the next 10 days, painter Seth Minkin will be sharing space in the Hive, producing sketches and paintings. Each day’s works will be posted live for people to see, review, comment on – and then will be placed on Ebay where anyone who is interested can bid on it for keeps [with 20% of proceeds being donated to Boston Center for the Arts].

Head on over to 10 Days to find out more.

As for 90days, I think John has said there’s all to say on the subject, and as usual, he’s said it very, very well.

Thanks for reading.

So 90 Days has run its course.

Since about Day 73, I’ve been thinking about what the subject of the final post should be. Helpful Hive denizens suggested many clever ideas. One of them was to make up a shocking Balter-related revelation — perhaps that he had blown the entire $13.8 million on mint condition Wacky Packages — and post it on an exact replica of the site that only showed up on Balter’s screen.

I decided, instead, to take this farewell opportunity to blog a bit about blogging itself.

I was a virgin blogger. Although I have written in many forms, I didn’t have a clue about how to write a blog, so I floundered a bit. In the first couple of days, a few outsider observers — bloggers themselves — logged on and decided that 90 Days was not up to their exalted standards and logged off, never to be heard from again. This annoyed me. Was I going to spend three months under constant attack from unknown blogospheric blowhards?

For the first few weeks, everybody had suggestions about the posts. I wasn’t ranting enough. I hadn’t gotten enough dirt. I should follow a single character. I should talk more about management tensions. I myself wasn’t sure that I was getting it right or that I was painting the whole picture. But, the more I wrote and the more people read, we came to accept that 90 Days was its own thing. It was telling a story, but it was a story of many tiny parts, told out of sequence, with no fixed cast of characters, and no conventional story arc.

In a file called TOPIC CANDIDATES I collected ideas for posts — fragments and tidbits, moments and comments — but I ended up using very few of them. I came to realize that a blog must be about whatever is blogworthy at the actual moment of blogging. What seemed compelling yesterday is uninteresting today. What I had expected to sit down and write about just didn’t get my wheels spinning when I stared into the screen. It has to happen in the moment and on the page.

Gradually, my process became routinized. I would leave home and head for the Hive with a blank mind. On the drive in to Boston, or while hiking up the stairs, or as I set up my computer in whatever empty workspace I could find, something would pop into my brain. If it didn’t, I would wander around the office — like a pelican looking for juicy fish to dive at — chatting with people, observing interactions, snatching bits of conversation, conducting interviews or mini-polls, or sitting in on a meeting. Something, usually many things, would present itself as blogworthy. Then I’d sit down, log onto the 90 Days admin site, click on WRITE POST, and tap away. It could take an hour or two to come up with a few hundred words.

From the beginning, I wondered what effect I was having. Was anybody reading? Did anybody care? The most immediate and exciting response, of course, comes in the form of reader comments. I came to understand how the press can get addicted to topics and hot button issues that create a gush of reaction. My major gusher was Free Stuff which provoked 56 comments from agents, Hivesters, Dave, and a variety of outsiders, including my 16-year old son.

Often, the dialogue about a post was more interesting than the post itself, bringing in a variety of viewpoints and additional information. Sometimes, a comment would be totally unrelated to the main topic of the post. For example, Profile of a Com Dev was about the the stresses and strains of reading Agents’ reports for a living. But, to one commenter, it was a minor detail in the story — the fact that Nutella could be heated up and poured over ice cream — that moved her to write: “Wow, I never thought to heat up Nutella! Great tip!”

That’s one of the beauties of a blog. It’s a collaborative effort, even though you don’t know who your collaborators are, have no idea where the collaboration might take you, or what impact it could have. So thanks to everyone who appeared in, read, or commented during the past three months. Like word-of-mouth, the quantitative effect of 90 Days is virtually impossible to measure (at least until Mr. Clemens and his team crack that particular nut) but, for me, it has been an invaluable experience.

I saw Balter on Sunday for dinner at Upstairs on the Square, right next door to Peet’s, the coffee place where we had first talked in January about the 90 Days idea. He seemed a little rough around the edges. He confessed that he had quaffed an excess of gin and tonic the night before and maybe that was the cause of his condition. But maybe not.

I told him about a speech I had recently heard by Steve Case, founder of AOL. Steve said that, in some ways, he enjoyed the early days of the business, when no one was sure what the outcome might be, more than the later times when the business had become a huge success. Balter said, “Yeah. But we’re a long way from that.”

Yesterday I enjoyed a rare and welcome interview with David Wagner, BzzAgent COO. The very first day I came to the office, Wags and I spoke and he made it abundantly clear that he felt no need for blog immortalization and did not care to appear in 90 Days. He also worried that an inopportune post, on a transparent blog open to the world, could be distracting and even disruptive to the workings of the Hive. Why tempt fate? But nothing like that happened. In fact, Wagner volunteered yesterday that 90 Days has had some positive effect — both as a method of internal communication and as evidence that BzzAgent truly believes in transparency.

Once, I deliberately tested Wagner’s resolve to keep out of the blog, by mentioning his name in a post about a company meeting. I received a very polite email from him reminding me that he did not wish to appear in 90 Days and suggesting that my little test (which I’m sure he recognized as such) had no doubt been an oversight. I liked that.

In our conversation yesterday, Wagner seemed as much on edge as Balter had. Though Wagner has been involved in start-ups before, he made the point that every situation presents a different dynamic, and this one includes: a newly recomposed board of directors, a senior management team with short experience working together, new pressure to achieve quarterly numbers, rapid growth, intense technology needs, a Hive swarming with new hires, and the office move coming up. He speculated that the noise generated by so much activity — in addition to the business of running the business — had the potential to “wear away the collective motivation” and would have to be carefully guarded against. Which is not to say Wagner isn’t confident BzzAgent remains on a path to success. He is.

Elsewhere in the Hive, I’m glad to report that the collective motivation seems to be withstanding the challenges. Michele Pearl reported that BzzAgent “is in a good place overall. Sales are flowing in and we’re figuring out some really important things on the network side.” The Cave dwellers were hard at work on a variety of projects. Smita, the new QA engineer, had settled in, and Vishnu, the long sought-after java developer, arrives today. Jake Alper now sits near accounting and admitted that he was slightly lonely there without his fellow troglodytes, but would soon be joined by yet another new engineer. He lent me his cable again. Thanks.

Erik Heels, a lawyer who handles intellectual property issues, was pleased to report that several “bzz” words (including BzzAgent, BzzBlast, and BzzNetwork) are now well on the way to legal trademark protection. Joe Chernov sent out a missive about the company getting more good press, this time in the Atlanta Business Chronicle. A new HR person has been hired and starts in a few weeks. John Ramsey was handing out free trial memberships to BJ’s.

And speaking of motivation, Brian Dame has already lost five pounds in the Biggest Loser contest, which he thought was pretty good until Toof revealed he had lost eight. “I want a Coke,” Brian said. Neither Sara nor Mary-Stuart were saying how much they had lost.

When I left, I saw Elizabeth and Evan on Summer Street. “They’ve been yelling at me all day,” Elizabeth reported with a schoolgirl smile, referring to people who were upset by the raging debate about pests on the BeeLog. Evan snickered. (His post ignited the controversy.)

I walked toward the parking lot thinking to myself, “I wonder what’s going to happen to all these people and this unusual little company?”

• Yes, a new AP/AR person was finally hired. She sits within seed-spitting distance of Aaron Cohen. Not only that, she holds an MBA from Northeastern. So that makes four MBA’s Hive-wide.
• Remember the crazy pitch that Toof made in Montreal? The agency that BzzAgent partnered with didn’t get the job in the end, either. The client brought in a group that hadn’t been in the original bidding and that had no expertise in WOM marketing. Clients do things like that.
• I never followed up on my phony identities as Jennifer at Vocalpoint or Vib at Tremor, but I get exciting!!!! emails from both of them regularly. So I guess I’ve become a ghost.
• I have seen the lay-out for the new offices at 500 Harrison. Although the Troglodytes are still tucked into a distant recess, and the telephone talkers (the sales dept. and client services) are clumped together, the idea of the Hive is not quite so tangible anymore.
• Balter met with Andy Sernovitz (the guy who referred to Dave as a word I’m not going to use because certain agents found it distasteful) and they were civil to each other, but Balter says “this story is far from over.”
• The worst finally happened. There are so many new people at the Hive that every desk space is taken. Last Friday, I had to sit at a rickety table in sales with no lamp, no phone, and no Ethernet connection until I begged a cable from Jake. “Make sure you return it,” he said rather curtly. “We’re very short of cables.” I got the sense that he knew there were only 5 days left of 90 Days.
• Romance: still nothing. (?!?)

The weigh-in took place, appropriately, just before lunch on Monday.

About fifteen Hive denizens, including almost the entire population of the sales department, kicked off their shoes, emptied their pockets, and stepped, one by one, onto a digital scale.

Matt McGlinn, Analytics Chieftain (who weighs about 77 pounds sopping wet), was called in to monitor the proceedings and record the weights — in total confidentiality, of course.

Since then, the “BzzAgent Biggest Loser” competition has blossomed from a simple weight-loss contest into a complex corporate endeavor involving sophisticated analytical techniques, high-stakes handicapping, and motivational and relationship-management tactics worthy of Dr. Phil.

The deciding metric of who is the biggest Big Loser will not be the simple reduction in gross tonnage. No, in order to compensate for each person’s individual deviation from his or her ideal Body Mass Index, the winner will be the one who achieves the highest percentage reduction.

Actually, according to Director of Weight Loss Metrics McGlinn, it’s a little more complicated than that. “We also had to correct for that fact that people who are already fairly close to their BMI norm would have a harder time losing weight than those who were significantly off the ideal,” McGlinn explained to 90 Days. In other words, it’s easier to lose the first fifty pounds of flab than the last five. “So we looked at the average deviance for the entire group of losers and then set a handicap for each contestant.”

To avoid any public embarrassment, McGlinn also converted all body weights from kilograms into an equivalency measured in Take5 candy bars. (Sample size.) Balter, for example, weighs in at 4,071 units of BzzAgent’s favorite sweet ‘n’ salty snack.

And so the race is on. Sara, Toof, Devin, Chernov, Rich, Jake, Scott, Brian, John R., Brady, Greg, Mary-Stuart, and Balter himself have eight weeks — until June 23 — to sweat and starve themselves into a lighter state of being.

Each of them has thrown $20 into the prize pot and the entire stash of cash is being held by McGlinn in a completely insecure location that I cannot divulge.

Many Hive denizens have placed bets on their favorite contestants, and some appear to be trying to influence the outcome. So far, the favorite technique is to place tempting treats, such as Snickers bars and chocolate chunk cookies, in close proximity to certain dieters.

The contestants themselves are engaging in a variety of weight loss methods. Scott, for example, indulged heavily in beer and high-density junk foods prior to the weigh-in on the theory that much of the ballast could easily be jettisoned shortly thereafter. Sara is cutting back on mayonnaise and sour cream-based dips. Toof does not deny himself sweets, which he considers essential to normal functioning, but swims daily and eats only a head of lettuce for dinner. (The use of diet aids or appetite-suppressing pharmaceuticals is strictly prohibited.)

Considering the amount of resource going into the management of the Big Loser event, I became concerned that it might have an adverse effect on Hive productivity. To my relief, I was assured that, although there might be a small short-term dip in personal effectiveness, it would be more than offset by the long-term increase in the winners’ (a.k.a. losers) energy, concentration, and confidence — which, as everybody knows, can result in beefy top-line sales, a buff bottom line, and a rock-hard EBITDA.

The beautiful and weird thing about blogging is that you never know who your audience is. With 90 Days, I’ve learned that certain topics catch the attention of specific audiences. Only a few posts have cross-over appeal. One way to tell which audience is reading the blog is by who posts comments — agents, employees, friends, surfers, strangers.

But comments can be misleading. Plenty of people have told me they read the blog or love a particular post, but never make a comment. (One guy admitted to me that he was “afraid” to do so.) And there also are people who comment a lot, but who may not be representative of any audience at all.

Which brings me to Laraelo.

Laraelo, as even the most occasional reader of 90 Days should know, is a constant commenter. She has been known to add as many as six comments to a single post. Sometimes she carries on a dialogue with herself, posting one thought after another. She has even made a public vow to try to curb her commenting appetites, without much success.

As a result, I’ve learned more about Laraelo than I have about any other member of the audience. I know that she is an agent, that she has an eighteen-year-old son who will be moving out of the house the first week of June (Thank God), that she’s gonna miss 90 Days when we’re history, and that she seems to live in ND, which I think is North Dakota, but could be Non-Disclosure or some other state of being.

I, too, have shared quite a bit about myself and what I think in the 102 pieces (this one makes 103) I’ve posted since February 7th. Now I’d like to know more about everybody else out there. What brought you to the site? What else do you do with your time? What has interested or annoyed you about 90 Days?

Go ahead, be open and honest and transparent. Everything you say will be kept strictly off the record.

It’s a nasty question, but Dave himself posed it.

First, let’s talk etymology. The Oxford English Dictionary lists six definitions for the word “dick” including a riding whip, a leather apron, a ditch and, of course, a policeman.

However, I think we all know the meaning that Andy Sernovitz, CEO of the Word of Mouth Marketing Association (WOMMA), had in mind when he rashly applied it to Balter in a conversation with BzzAgent PR maestro, Joe Chernov. The discussion had to do with BzzAgent’s allegedly suffocating overexposure in the WOM industry. (See Dave’s post in the BeeLog for full details.)

Seeking an answer to this fundamental question, I conducted an informal, unscientific, random sampling of Hive denizens. They responded thusly:

Only one person answered with an unqualified, “Yes.” But s/he said it with a kind of knowing smirk, as if to suggest that Balter’s particular version of dickdom (if that’s indeed what it is) is essentially an admirable state of being.

I received at least ten “No” answers, some of them quite emphatic, as in “absolutely not.”

There were at least two, “No, although he is a pain in the ass.” But this description, I was assured, was meant in a positive way, as in, “he sweats the details and gets things done.”

Or as another denizen put it, “Sometimes you have to be a dick to be on top.”

Others variously characterized Dave as challenging, intense, a goof, open and blunt, a Tourette’s sufferer, and “looking like a beaver.”

One said that asking the question was similar to asking, “What is the sound of one hand clapping?”

Many echoed the sentiment of another of their colleagues who described Dave as “enthusiastic, empathetic, visionary.”

My opinion is that Dave is just dicky enough to make people suspect he could have stirred up this controversy just to get people talking even more about the company he loves and the industry he has helped to shape — but not so dicky that he actually would.

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.

Almost as soon as I began writing 90 Days, people started stopping by my temporary pod, wherever it might be, hesitating, then shooting a look around to see if anyone was watching. They’d give me a meaningful look, lower their voice to a breathy undertone, and ask, “So, what’s the big secret? When are you gonna drop the big bombshell?”

“What is the big bombshell?” I’d ask, hoping for a scoop so spectacular that it would land BzzAgent on the front page of Slate and earn me whatever the blog equivalent of the Pulitzer might be.

“You’re the one who’s supposed to know, Butman,” they’d say and scurry off.

When I told Jono I was writing a meaty post about agents he looked nervous all day, as if expecting the bombshell would finally explode right near him. But when it was posted, he read it and said, “That’s all ya got?” and flashed his woodchuck smile.

Last Friday, I got an anonymous tip about what sounded like it really might be a shocker. “Ask XX about YY,” said my source, ZZ, cryptically.

I immediately swung into investigative journalist mode and asked XX about YY. “How did you hear about this?” he yelped, as if I had stuck him with a finepoint rollerball. “I have my sources,” I said.

“Ask Balter,” he said, backing away from me, looking as if he wanted to dash down the stairs and flee into the sunset, even though it was early afternoon.

I sent Our Founder an email. “What’s all this about YY?” I wrote. Silence. A little later, XX stopped by. “This is much too serious to blog about,” he said. “So don’t. Just don’t.”

I don’t know if YY really amounts to a bombshell but, if it does, you’ll have to hear about it somewhere else. There are limits to transparency, after all. There’s no point in allowing me to drop a bombshell that will completely shatter the window. Not even Balter is that mischievous.

But the incident set me to wondering:

Why is it that some people are so eager to have a bombshell dropped? (After all, it may very likely land on or near them.)

Why do people automatically assume there even is a bombshell?

And, if there is, why should I be the guy to drop it?

While I was away luxuriating, something unusual happened at the Hive: there was an internal battle. Well, maybe not a battle so much as a squabble, a business-related tug of war, a time of friction among colleagues.

Hivesters are used to getting everybody involved in a contentious issue in one room together and talking things out. But this bit of strife had client services and sales locking horns with production and they couldn’t resolve the issue themselves. Management had to be called in to mediate. No one likes that.

There were no harangues. No body slams. And, as far as I can tell, no serious after-effects. There was, however, a sense of unrest and discomfort and slight apprehension. It was difficult not to connect this minor rift with the stresses and strains of rapid growth, cramped space, quarterly sales pressure, and many new faces in the Hive.

In big companies, internal business units and professional disciplines are constantly in conflict with one another. People come to identify with their own little band of brothers and sisters and sometimes demonize the “others” over there in engineering or the southwest region or marketing. (Especially marketing, which usually deserves it.) Managers spend a lot of time trying to get people to venture out of their silos and communicate and collaborate with each other.

78 days ago, when I first came into the Hive and started writing 90 Days, there didn’t seem to be internal factions. There were like-minded subgroups, perhaps, and some departmental loyalties. The Boys in the Cave, for example, and the Gang in Sales, and the Nuts in Analysis, and the Production Team, and Client Services, and Finance. But they didn’t run in packs.

They still don’t. But when the head count hits 80 and the 500 Harrison Hive has discrete cells for different departments, can we expect to see swarms forming a little more often?