BzzAgent, Inc. in Boston, MA | Advertising

BzzAgent
The seeds of BzzAgent were planted in late 2001 when Dave Balter, founder and CEO of BzzAgent, found himself at a transition period in his life. He'd recently sold a promotions agency and was looking for the next challenge. Leading up to this point, he had read books like The Tipping Point, Unleashing the Idea-Virus, and Anatomy of Buzz. Dave was interested in the concept of "buzz", but he wasn't sure how to apply it.

Services for Marketers
BzzAgent provides turnkey word-of-mouth marketing services to marketers across virtually all industries. Our multidisciplinary team helps you select the ideal participants for your program, craft effective dialogue points, design visually compelling educational materials, manage all Agent communication and track and measure campaign performance. We collaborate with your internal marketing team and outside agencies to ensure all of the branding and messaging we share with our Agents is consistent with your complementary marketing and advertising initiatives.

Services for Agencies
Our groundbreaking Agency Partnership Program enables advertising, marketing and public relations firms to implement word-of-mouth programs on behalf of their clients. BzzAgent allows partners to access our growing community of 130,000+ word-of-mouth volunteers, effectively creating the world's first word-of-mouth media channel. To ensure all campaigns achieve optimal performance and adhere to the highest ethical standards, BzzAgent provides partners with easy-to-follow guidelines for program development. We, of course, manage all Agent communications and analytical tracking/reporting.
For information about working with BzzAgent, please contact: BzzAgent Sales.

The Basics
Through our patented technology and word-of-mouth process, BzzAgent harnesses word-of-mouth to turn loyal customers into a unique marketing and research channel powered by real world discussions and feedback. BzzAgent develops word-of-mouth programs that help clients market with their customers as opposed to at them. We also offer advertising agencies, marketers and public relations firms the opportunity to create their own word-of-mouth programs and run them on our vast network of trained consumer volunteers. Our media channel and word-of-mouth programs help clients drive credibility, create evangelism, understand real-world communications and add value to their other marketing initiatives.

The Agents
BzzAgent provides our community of more than 130,000 volunteer brand evangelists – or BzzAgents – the opportunity to experience a client's product or service first hand and become involved by sharing opinions with those around them. BzzAgent campaigns are designed to spark widespread word-of-mouth among consumers and capture brand-shaping feedback. Agents form their own honest opinion, share it with others in natural conversations and are awarded points for the interactions they report. These points may be redeemed for client-supplied rewards, but have no cash value.

The Data
BzzAgent collects qualitative and quantitative data about real-world consumer behavior, including product usage, preferred features and message traction. We specifically focus on the features that consumers love to talk about, the places where they are most likely to spread word-of-mouth, how many conversations each Agent engages in, and how many sales are driven by our community. All of this insight and data is analyzed as part of the periodic reports we provide, including a comprehensive final report.

The System
The heart of BzzAgent is the communications platform that allows volunteers to report their word-of-mouth activities for individualized feedback and support. Our Communications Development (we call them Com-Dev for short) team – each an expert in word-of-mouth and the behavior of customer dialogue – reviews, measures and responds to each report personally. Some weeks, we can receive over 9,000 individual reports!

This process is managed through our proprietary BzzEngine technology platform. It's this seamless interaction that allows us to cultivate and maintain strong relationships with each volunteer, providing every member with the opportunity to truly become involved with our clients' brands.
Why am I a BzzAgent? Everyone is a BzzAgent in theory, I am just lucky enough benefit from the practice.