The Hidden (in Plain Sight) Persuaders

December 5, 2004
 By ROB WALKER 

Over the July 4 weekend last summer, at cookouts up and
down the East Coast and into the Midwest, guests arrived
with packages of Al Fresco chicken sausage for their hosts
to throw on the grill. At a family gathering in Kingsley,
Mich. At a small barbecue in Sag Harbor, N.Y. At a 60-guest
picnic in Philadelphia. 

We know that this happened, and we even know how various
party guests reacted to their first exposure to Al Fresco,
because the Great Sausage Fanout of 2004 did not happen by
chance. The sausage-bearers were not official
representatives of Al Fresco, showing up in uniforms to
hand out samples. They were invited guests, friends or
relatives of whoever organized the get-togethers, but they
were also -- unknown to most all the other attendees --
''agents,'' and they filed reports. ''People could not
believe they weren't pork!'' one agent related. ''I told
everyone that they were low in fat and so much better than
pork sausages.'' Another wrote, ''I handed out discount
coupons to several people and made sure they knew which
grocery stores carried them.'' Another noted that ''my dad
will most likely buy the garlic'' flavor, before closing,
''I'll keep you posted.'' 

These reports went back to the company that Al Fresco's
owner, Kayem Foods, had hired to execute a ''word of
mouth'' marketing campaign. And while the Fourth of July
weekend was busy, it was only a couple of days in an effort
that went on for three months and involved not just a
handful of agents but 2,000 of them. The agents were sent
coupons for free sausage and a set of instructions for the
best ways to talk the stuff up, but they did not confine
themselves to those ideas, or to obvious events like
barbecues. Consider a few scenes from the life of just one
agent, named Gabriella. 

At one grocery store, Gabriella asked a manager why there
was no Al Fresco sausage available. At a second store, she
dropped a card touting the product into the suggestion box.
At a third, she talked a stranger into buying a package.
She suggested that the organizers of a neighborhood picnic
serve Al Fresco. She took some to a friend's house for
dinner and (she reported back) ''explained to her how the
sausage comes in six delicious flavors.'' Talking to
another friend whom she had already converted into an Al
Fresco customer, she noted that the product is ''not just
for barbecues'' and would be good at breakfast too. She
even wrote to a local priest known for his interest in
Italian food, suggesting a recipe for Tuscan white-bean
soup that included Al Fresco sausage. The priest wrote back
to say he'd give it a try. Gabriella asked me not to use
her last name. The Al Fresco campaign is over -- having
notably boosted sales, by 100 percent in some stores -- but
she is still spreading word of mouth about a variety of
other products, and revealing her identity, she said, would
undermine her effectiveness as an agent. 

The sausage campaign was organized by a small,
three-year-old company in Boston called BzzAgent, but that
firm is hardly the only entity to have concluded that the
most powerful forum for consumer seduction is not TV ads or
billboards but rather the conversations we have in our
everyday lives. The thinking is that in a media universe
that keeps fracturing into ever-finer segments, consumers
are harder and harder to reach; some can use TiVo to block
out ads or the TV's remote control to click away from them,
and the rest are simply too saturated with brand messages
to absorb another pitch. So corporations frustrated at the
apparent limits of ''traditional'' marketing are
increasingly open to word-of-mouth marketing. One result is
a growing number of marketers organizing veritable armies
of hired ''trendsetters'' or ''influencers'' or ''street
teams'' to execute ''seeding programs,'' ''viral
marketing,'' ''guerrilla marketing.'' What were once fringe
tactics are now increasingly mainstream; there is even a
Word of Mouth Marketing Association. 

Marketers bicker among themselves about how these
approaches differ, but to those of us on the receiving end,
the distinctions might seem a little academic. They are all
attempts, in one way or another, to break the fourth wall
that used to separate the theater of commerce, persuasion
and salesmanship from our actual day-to-day life. To take
what may be the most infamous example, Sony Ericsson in
2002 hired 60 actors in 10 cities to accost strangers and
ask them: Would you mind taking my picture? Those who
obliged were handed, of course, a Sony Ericsson
camera-phone to take the shot, at which point the actor
would remark on what a cool gadget it was. And thus an act
of civility was converted into a branding event. 

This idea -- the commercialization of chitchat -- resembles
a scenario from a paranoid science-fiction novel about a
future in which corporations have become so powerful that
they can bribe whole armies of flunkies to infiltrate the
family barbecue. That level of corporate influence sounds
sure to spark outrage -- another episode in the long
history of mainstream distrust of commercial coercion and
marketing trickery. Fear of unchecked corporate reach is
what made people believe in the power of subliminal
advertising and turn Vance Packard's book ''The Hidden
Persuaders'' into a best seller in the 1950's; it is what
gave birth to the consumer-rights movement of the 1970's;
and it is what alarms people about neuroscientists
supposedly locating the ''buy button'' in our brains today.
Quite naturally, many of us are wary of being manipulated
by a big, scary, Orwellian ''them.'' 

In this case, however, it is not just ''them.'' It turns
out that Gabriella and the rest of the sausage agents are
not paid flunkies trying to manipulate Main Street
Americans; they are Main Street Americans. Unlike the Sony
Ericsson shills, Gabriella is not an actress. She is an
accountant, with full-time work and a 12-year-old daughter,
living in Bayonne, N.J. Aside from free samples, she gets
no remuneration. She and her many fellow agents have
essentially volunteered to create ''buzz'' about Al Fresco
sausage and dozens of other products, from books to shoes
to beer to perfume. BzzAgent currently has more than 60,000
volunteer agents in its network. Tremor, a word-of-mouth
operation that is a division of Procter & Gamble (maker of
Crest, Tide and Pampers) has an astonishing 240,000
volunteer teenagers spreading the word about everything
from toothbrushes to TV shows. A spinoff, Tremor Moms, is
in the works. Other marketers, particularly youth-oriented
firms, have put up Web sites recruiting teenagers to serve
as ''secret agents.'' 

Given that we are a nation of busy, overworked people who
in poll after poll claim to be sick of advertisers jumping
out at us from all directions, the number of people willing
to help market products they had previously never heard of,
for no money at all, is puzzling to say the least.
BzzAgent, which has a particularly intense relationship
with its fast-growing legions of volunteers, offers a rare
and revealing case study of what happens when word-of-mouth
theory meets consumer psychology in the real world. In
finding thousands of takers, perfectly willing to use their
own creativity and contacts to spread the good news about,
for instance, Al Fresco sausage, it has turned commercial
influence into an open-source project. It could be thought
of as not just a marketing experiment but also a social
experiment. The existence of tens of thousands of volunteer
marketing ''agents'' raises a surprising possibility --
that we have already met the new hidden persuaders, and
they are us. 


Dave Balter, the 33-year-old founder of BzzAgent, is a
smart guy, but he would be poorly cast as a slick, Madison
Avenue mastermind. He's fresh-faced, good-humored, almost
goofy. And he will cheerfully tell you that he has no
definitive explanation for the number of average citizens
who want to be, in company parlance, BzzAgents. In the
beginning, he had a theory about what would motivate
average citizens to generate word of mouth for his clients,
but that theory was full of holes. It assumed, for
instance, that agents would require some kind of
quasi-financial motivation to do legwork for consumer
companies. 

Dave Balter's background was in loyalty marketing -- those
frequent-flier-style programs that give rewards to
dedicated users of a particular product, service or credit
card. He read up on word-of-mouth-marketing theory, raised
some money, hired a right-hand man and put the word out
among family and friends that he was looking for
''agents.'' The idea was to build a network of people who
would get points for spreading ''honest word of mouth'' and
could cash in the points for cool products. ''The whole
concept,'' he said, ''was rewards, rewards, rewards.'' 

The first full-fledged Bzz campaign was for a book called
''The Frog King.'' It lasted one month and focused on New
York City. Balter persuaded Penguin Publishing to let him
do it by charging the publisher nothing. 

''The Frog King'' was a quirky, comic first novel by a
young writer named Adam Davies. Davies had some connections
in New York publishing (including Liz Smith, the gossip
columnist), but he wasn't exactly going to get a giant
publicity blitz. ''We didn't expect much'' from the buzz
campaign, recalled Rick Pascocello, a Penguin vice
president. 

The guide for the agents, a no-frills seven-page document
in those early days, welcomed them as members of ''an elite
group'' of word-of-mouth spreaders and listed the contact
information for ''your BzzLeader,'' BzzAgent JonO. (That
was Jon O'Toole, Balter's right-hand man.) It summarized
some of the novel's highlights, noting a few passages in
particular that might be useful ''conversation points,''
and suggested tactics like reading the book on mass transit
with the cover clearly visible, posting a review on
Amazon.com and calling up bookstores and chatting with the
clerk about this great new book about New York publishing
with lots of sex and drinking whose title you can't quite
recall. JonO signed the cover letter assuring agents that
the folks back at the hive found the book laugh-out-loud
funny. 

Local events for ''The Frog King'' drew
larger-than-expected crowds of 100 or 150 people, according
to Pascocello, who said that thanks to the word-of-mouth
campaign, the book sold in three months what he had hoped
it would sell in a year. There are now more than 50,000
copies of ''The Frog King'' in print, and it's still
selling. BzzAgent has had a steady flow of paying clients
ever since (including Penguin, which has used BzzAgent to
promote other books, like the novel ''The Quality of Life
Report''). The fee it charges varies according to the size
and nature of the campaign, but Balter said a 12-week
campaign involving 1,000 agents would now cost $95,000. 

BzzAgent has fewer than two dozen paid employees, though it
is growing and recently moved to a larger office. These
people are mostly young, without backgrounds in traditional
marketing. When the company takes on a new client, they
huddle to figure out whatever is most buzzable about the
product at hand. This summer, for instance, they handed
around and discussed a new line of Johnston & Murphy dress
shoes, which feature a fiberglass shank, rather than a
traditional metal one, so they won't set off metal
detectors at airports. A whiteboard was filled with
suggested conversation starters and likely sites for
word-of-mouth opportunities, which later was transferred to
a slick ''Bzz Guide'' for the agents. 

As the number of agents has grown, the company can meet
increasingly specific requests for, say, agents of a
certain age or income level, or who live in certain parts
of the country. It has done campaigns for a wide array of
goods, and for major companies and brands like
Anheuser-Busch, Lee Jeans, Ralph Lauren, even DuPont.
Recently the company has also begun working with clients to
begin converting existing loyal customers into private,
well-organized, word-of-mouth missionaries. 

Although Balter says he was pleased with his agents'
efforts from the start, he did worry early on that the
system could not be sustained. The problem was that while
agents were spreading buzz and thus earning and piling up
points, most were not cashing them in. That is, they
weren't bothering to collect their rewards. ''We've built a
broken model,'' Balter remembers thinking. He asked his
colleagues from his loyalty-marketing days: Is it that the
rewards aren't good enough? Are they too hard to get? After
many hours of listening to the conflicting analyses of
experts, he and O'Toole decided to ask the agents
themselves about the points. ''We didn't realize the agents
would want to talk to us,'' Balter said. This was another
miscalculation; many of the agents very much did want to
talk. In essence, they told Balter that there was nothing
wrong with the rewards; it was just that the rewards
weren't really the point. Even now, only about a quarter of
the agents collect rewards, and hardly any take all they
have earned. 

Karen Bollaert, who is 32 and lives in the Bay Ridge
section of Brooklyn, was among the firm's earliest agents,
and became one of its most effective. When she signed up
for her first BzzAgent campaign -- ''The Frog King,'' in
fact -- she was working with a pharmaceutical researcher,
mostly doing paperwork, and thinking about finding a more
fulfilling way to spend her days. Like everyone who signs
up at the BzzAgent site, she was accepted. 

During active stretches, Bollaert puts in between 5 and 10
hours a week talking up products and writing reports about
her activities. (She has signed up for many campaigns,
including a perfume called Ralph Lauren Blue, a line of
jeans for Lee and something called No Puffery, a gel to
soothe skin below the eyes.) What, I asked her, if not the
potential to get some free prizes for effort, made her
bother to volunteer with BzzAgent? First, she told me, she
gets the chance to sample new products shortly before they
hit the stores, so she gets to feel a bit like an insider.
Second, she has always liked to give people her opinion
about what she's reading or what products she's using, and
BzzAgent gives her more to talk about. Third, if she does
like something, then telling other people is helpful to
them. So participating is both a chance to weigh in and be
heard, and also something close to an act of altruism. 

What Balter said he learned from his agents is that lots of
people like to tell others what they are reading and what
restaurant they've discovered and what gizmo they just
bought. In his view, BzzAgent is simply harnessing,
channeling and organizing that consumer enthusiasm. This is
presumably why it's so easy, so natural, for someone like
Karen Bollaert to work word-of-mouth efforts into daily
life. When, for example, a friend mentioned to Bollaert
that she would have to get up early after a late night out
on the town, she brought up No Puffery. When a
pharmaceutical representative visiting her office worried
about looking lousy at a meeting she had to fly to,
Bollaert mentioned No Puffery. At her grandfather's wake,
''a relative told me how well I was looking,'' she wrote in
one report back to the BzzAgent hive, ''and I mentioned
that No Puffery helped to keep me looking calm instead of
puffy-eyed and as horrible as I felt.'' 


The endless chatter of American consumer life that BzzAgent
has infiltrated is not simply a formless cacophony; it has
its structures and hierarchies, which have been studied
exhaustively for decades. Tremor, the Procter & Gamble
word-of-mouth unit, which also does work for a variety of
non-P.&G. clients, was founded four years ago with those
structures in mind. A key Tremor premise is that the most
effective way for a message to travel is through networks
of real people communicating directly with one another.
''We set out to see if we could do that in some systematic
way,'' Steve Knox, Tremor's C.E.O., said recently. He added
a second, closely related premise: ''There is a group of
people who are responsible for all word of mouth in the
marketplace.'' In other words, some friends are more
influential than others, and those are the ones who are
chosen to join Tremor. 

Who are they? Check out the word-of-mouth industry's
favorite graph. The graph is meant to show the pattern by
which ideas or products or behaviors are adopted, and it
looks like a hill: on the left are the early adopters; then
the trend-spreaders; the mainstream population is the big
bulge in the middle; then come the laggards, represented by
the right-hand slope. This is not new stuff -- Knox himself
cites research from the 1930's, as well as the 1962
academic book ''Diffusion of Innovation,'' by Everett
Rogers -- but it has become extremely popular over the past
five years or so. Seth Godin, who wrote ''Permission
Marketing,'' ''Unleashing the Ideavirus'' and other popular
marketing books (and whose ideas partly inspired BzzAgent),
uses it, as do dozens of other marketing experts. Malcolm
Gladwell's ''Tipping Point'' made an argument about these
ideas that was simultaneously more textured and easier to
digest than most of what had come before (or since), and it
became a best seller. But whatever the intentions and
caveats of the various approaches to the subject, the most
typical response to the graph is to zero in on the segment
that forms the bridge over which certain ideas or products
travel into the mainstream -- influentials,
trend-translators, connectors, alphas, hubs, sneezers,
bees, etc. Let's just call them Magic People. 

Knox said that Tremor's approach to finding the Magic
People is intensively researched. The company tries to
isolate the psychological characteristics of the subset of
influential teenagers, and has developed a screening
process to identify them. The details of this are a secret,
but as an example, Knox noted that most teenagers have 25
or 30 names on their instant-messaging ''buddy list,''
whereas a Tremor member might have 150. Tremor recruits
volunteers mostly through online advertisements and accepts
only 10 or 15 percent of those who apply. The important
thing, Knox said, is they are the right kind of kids -- the
connected, influential trend-spreading kind. Knox mentioned
a focus group of Tremor kids in Los Angeles, where several
teenagers showed up with business cards. Magic. 

Janet Onyenucheya was chosen by Tremor, and she is pretty
much what you picture when you picture a trend-influencer.
She is 18, African-American, beautiful, smart and, on the
day I met her, was wearing a really cool pair of sneakers.
An intern at an independent music publishing company in
Manhattan, she is preparing to enter the Berklee College of
Music in Boston in the spring. She got involved with Tremor
a couple of years ago, while attending LaGuardia High
School. 

Onyenucheya gets free stuff from Tremor, and sometimes even
a small check for taking surveys and participating in focus
groups. She got to vote on the design for a T-shirt for the
10th anniversary of the Vans Warped Tour and for the design
of a Crest toothbrush. This past July, she was invited to
an advance viewing of two television shows, ''Lost'' and
''Complete Savages,'' at the Millennium screening room in
downtown Manhattan. There were about 70 teenagers there,
and pizza and sodas for everybody. Onyenucheya particularly
loved ''Lost.'' ''When I came home,'' she said, ''I
immediately told my five closest friends, like: 'Oh, my
God, you just missed the greatest shows. I got to go down
to the Millennium and saw a show called 'Lost' and it was
so good, and we have to watch it when it comes out.' And I
felt like I had the upper hand. Like, 'You don't know what
I know.' '' 

By and large, the word-of-mouth literature tends to
describe our influence and degree of connectedness as
something hard-wired. Magic People like Onyenucheya are
born, not made, is the idea, which is why companies spend
so much effort developing psychological profiles to find
them. But the BzzAgent experiment largely discards that
premise. Its agents are not screened. They are not chosen.
They simply sign up. They are all kinds of people, all over
the country: a 50-something bookstore owner in suburban
Chicago, a young housewife near Mobile, Ala., a college
student in Kansas. Many are teenagers, or even younger. At
least one is 86 years old. And yet, it seems, they are able
to persuade. 

Jason Desjardins is a regular guy, a good guy,
accommodating and polite. Twenty-eight, slim, clean-shaven,
with close-cropped hair, he is the dairy manager at a
supermarket in rural New Hampshire, part of the same
supermarket chain he has worked for since high school.
While he was wearing a Brooklyn T-shirt when we met, the
truth is he bought it at the Old Navy in the Concord mall,
and has never been on an airplane or even traveled outside
of New England. Jason Desjardins is sweet and guileless,
but he is not, by any expert definition, a Magic Person. 

Desjardins stumbled across a reference to BzzAgent online,
and he was interested. How could this thing work? He signed
up, and soon after, they sent him ''Purple Cow: Transform
Your Business by Being Remarkable'' -- Seth Godin's most
recent book at the time, which was written with a BzzAgent
marketing plan in mind -- and his life changed. It's hard
to overstate how enthusiastic Desjardins is about BzzAgent.
He joined campaigns for several other books, as well as for
a beer called Bare Knuckle Stout, a spam-blocking service
called Mail-Block and, yes, Al Fresco sausage. He figures
he spends about 10 hours a week either buzzing or writing
reports about buzzing. I visited him at his apartment in
Bradford, N.H. We were joined by his wife, Melissa, a
pretty woman with a stylish haircut and a big smile, and
their 2-year-old daughter. I wondered how Melissa felt
about her husband spending so much time on a no-money
hobby. In fact, she was thrilled. She said she thought it
had made him more open to other people. He used to be the
kind of guy who just hated to call a mechanic about a noise
the car was making; he would wait until the car actually
broke down and he had no choice but to bother someone about
it. He was in a shell. But that has changed -- partly
because of Melissa, Jason wisely interjected -- but also
partly because of his involvement in BzzAgent. 

For starters, Desjardins said, BzzAgent ''turned me on to
reading.'' And having enjoyed ''Purple Cow,'' he wanted to
do his best to spread the word. The Bzz guide suggested he
call a bookstore. For a while, he put it off. He would look
at the phone and tell himself, I can do this, and he would
try to rehearse what he would say, and this would go on for
15 or 20 minutes. ''I thought: What have I got to lose?''
he said. ''I'm never going to see this person.'' And
finally he called and pretended he did not know the name of
Seth Godin's new book. ''He'll call anybody now,'' Melissa
said, smiling. 

He printed slogans from ''Purple Cow'' (''Be Remarkable or
Be Invisible'') onto card stock and hung them where his
fellow employees could see them. He posted reviews on
Amazon. He started conversations with co-workers,
customers, strangers. He submitted a rave review for a
fantasy novel he was buzzing called ''Across the
Nightingale Floor'' to The Concord Monitor, and it was
published; there's a laminated copy of the review on the
fridge. He wrote to the governor touting Mail-Block. At the
grocery store, when a co-worker moaned about not liking her
job, Desjardins practically turned into a motivational
speaker, waving his hands and quoting from another book
called ''Five Patterns of Extraordinary Careers,'' telling
her that if she wasn't happy she needed to take control of
the situation. ''She did end up finding another job after
that,'' he observed. Desjardins is ranked the 45th most
effective BzzAgent, out of 60,000 nationwide, and proud of
it. He has learned to influence. 


This was all good for Desjardins, but it complicates what
we thought we knew about word-of-mouth influence. The whole
premise of the Magic People is that the rest of us take our
cues from them because they have some special credibility,
in the form of reputation or expertise or connections. In
April 2003, that premise was put to the test when BzzAgent
began a 13-week campaign for a restaurant chain called Rock
Bottom Restaurant and Brewery, which has about 30 locations
around the country. This particular campaign was studied by
two academics: David Godes, an assistant professor at
Harvard Business School, and Dina Mayzlin, an assistant
professor at Yale's School of Management. The experiment
involved more than 1,000 subjects; some were devoted Rock
Bottom customers, and the rest were BzzAgents -- none of
them Rock Bottom loyalists, and only a few had even heard
of the chain. Rock Bottom wasn't running any other
significant marketing program at the time. 

Sales increased markedly. Godes and Mayzlin found that,
consistent with past research, word of mouth traveled more
effectively when it was spread not through close friends
but through acquaintances (meaning that networkers -- the
people with the big Buddy Lists -- are more valuable). But
curiously, it turned out that the agents -- the
''nonloyals'' -- were more effective spreaders of word of
mouth than the chain's own fans. Godes and Mayzlin
hypothesize that the Rock Bottom's most devoted customers
had probably already talked up the restaurant to all the
friends and acquaintances that they were likely to tell. 

The researchers also looked at the tendency of marketing
efforts to focus on ''opinion leaders,'' who often gain
that social status by way of expertise. The results here
were somewhat mixed, in an interesting way. A loyal opinion
leader -- someone who was seen by her social network as an
expert on restaurants and who was also a Rock Bottom fan --
was pretty effective; if that restaurant expert was
ambivalent about Rock Bottom, she was of little use. In
contrast, it didn't really matter if the nonloyal agents
knew much about restaurants. What mattered was that they
told a lot of people (and presumably that they were
enthusiastic). The implication is that it doesn't matter if
you know what you're talking about, as long as you are
willing to talk a lot. 

Godes offered some caveats to that particular conclusion.
He pointed out that expertise may be much more important to
real-world word of mouth -- the kind that occurs absent an
orchestrated effort to create buzz from scratch. He also
emphasized that willingness to talk doesn't mean much if
you have no one to talk to. Maybe so. But when Dave Balter
saw the results, it provided strong evidence for a position
he had been coming to for a while: he doesn't quite believe
in Magic People anymore. BzzAgent's system does, of course,
try to identify who has a large network of friends, who is
an expert, who is outspoken, just as Tremor does in its
screening. (Actually, several BzzAgents are Tremor members,
as well.) ''But we also know that sometimes those people
aren't the best at spreading word of mouth,'' Balter said.
''We all get information from people around us who don't
fit any type of profile that would make them more
intelligent or more focused on products than someone
else.'' And the information we share changes, too. ''We
might go from influential to noninfluential, from
trendsetter to nontrendsetter all year long,'' he
suggested, ''because we have continued interactions that
change our opinions.'' 

On some level, then, participating in a voluntary marketing
army serves as a kind of consumer-status enabler. You
weren't the first on your block with Moon Boots; at least
you can be the one to tell your friends about Al Fresco
sausage. The more people you can persuade that Al Fresco
sausage is good, the better you'll feel about your
discovery. BzzAgent, in turn, will help you be a better
persuader. Pretty much everyone likes the feeling of having
''the upper hand,'' as Janet Onyenucheya put it. Even in
the small orbit of your own social circle, knowing about
something first -- telling a friend about a new CD, or
discovering a restaurant before anyone else in the office
-- is satisfying. Maybe it's altruism, maybe it's a power
trip, but influencing other people feels good. As an
example of how powerful the desire to have the upper hand
can be, consider that some participants in a campaign for a
new scent called Ralph Cool simply could not wait for their
free sample to arrive and rushed out to buy the $40 product
so they could start buzzing. Word-of-mouth marketing
leverages not simply the power of the trendsetter but also,
as Balter puts it, ''the power of wanting to be a
trendsetter.'' 

BzzAgents are under no obligation to push a product they
don't like. In fact, if they think it's awful, they're
encouraged to say so. Yet, of all the agents I spoke to,
and the hundreds of reports I read, there were hardly any
examples of outright dissatisfaction with a product. Most
of the agents seemed genuinely excited about most of what
they were buzzing. 

Part of the reason is that people tend to join campaigns
for things that interest them. Perhaps just as important is
that the volunteers, hearing that BzzAgent turns down 80
percent of potential clients, seem to believe that the
folks at BzzAgent spend their days sorting through the
morass of consumer culture, choosing only the best of the
best. BzzAgent does want to keep lousy products out of the
system, of course, but it also wants to make money. It's a
business. And its ability to keep the system relatively
free of awful products probably has much less to do with
acting as a consumer-culture curator than with the simple
fact that there are probably more perfectly good products
being sold in America now than at any time in history. 

Barry Schwartz, a psychology professor at Swarthmore, is
the author of ''The Paradox of Choice,'' a book that
addresses the incredible (and at times paralyzing)
abundance of options available to the contemporary
consumer. In the past, Schwartz notes, the challenge for
the consumer was navigating a world of faulty, shoddy or
unsafe products. That's not much of an issue anymore. Now,
Schwartz told me, Consumer Reports might test 40 stoves,
find that 38 of them are pretty good and then resort to
sifting among increasingly minor differences to decide
which one is the very best value of all, by however narrow
a margin. The ''Pretty Good'' Problem complicates our lives
as consumers and makes it increasingly difficult for one of
those 38 stoves to stand out. But it gives BzzAgent plenty
of work. 

Still, people's tastes differ, and it seems remarkable that
agents are so rarely disappointed. One oddity that Schwartz
notes in his book is the ''endowment effect.'' This is one
of the many discoveries of the behavioral economists Daniel
Kahneman and Amos Tversky. They found that when two items
of equal value are handed out randomly to a group of people
and those people are given the opportunity to trade, hardly
anyone does. It's very unlikely that all the participants
were randomly handed the objects they would have preferred
had they been asked in advance, so the economists concluded
that once something has been given to us, we value it more.
In another experiment, conducted in the early 1990's by a
psychology professor at the University of Louisville, two
groups of subjects were given nine similarly valued objects
and asked to rate the desirability of each. The group that
was informed in advance it would get to keep one of the
items (one of those insulating tubes that keeps canned
drinks cold, as it happens) gave that item a more desirable
rating than the other objects. The group that didn't get to
keep anything rated them all the same. A follow-up
experiment found that this ''mere ownership effect'' was
essentially instantaneous. Other studies have shown that we
like things more simply by virtue of repeated or prolonged
exposure to them. (Which could explain why, during the
course of that Johnston & Murphy meeting, I gradually went
from being indifferent to the shoes to wishing I could get
a pair.) 

This research on how we value -- or irrationally overvalue
-- things that are given to us might help explain why
BzzAgents and other word-of-mouth volunteers get excited
about whatever they are asked to push. (And if you're
curious why, in light of this, you're not crazy about every
product you've ever bought, the answer may be adaptation --
our tendency to get used to our possessions and, in effect,
fall out of love with them. For the word-of-mouth volunteer
this hardly matters, since by the time it happens the
campaign is over.) But it doesn't address another mystery:
Why would the volunteers work so hard to get other people
excited about these products? Another line of research
suggests a possible answer. This school of thought would
characterize word-of-mouth volunteers as operating not in a
traditional money-in-exchange-for-effort ''monetary
market,'' but rather in a ''social market.'' A social
market is what we engage in when we ask our friends to help
us load up the moving van in exchange for pizza. The
research suggests that we are likely to get a better effort
out of our friends under the social-market scenario than by
offering the cash equivalent of the pizza. (A recent
article in the journal Psychological Science finds that
''monetizing'' a gift, like the pizza, by announcing how
much it is worth, effectively shifts the whole situation
from social market to monetary market.) Under some
circumstances, we will expend more effort for social
rewards than we will for monetary rewards. This suggests
that the agents may do more to spread word of mouth
precisely because they are not being paid. 

Add to all of this the idea that they have been granted
status as ''agents'' in an ''elite group'' that most of the
world doesn't even know about, and have received a free
sample of a brand-new product from a source that they
trust, and they are almost certain to expend some kind of
effort, unless the product is truly awful. 


There is another advantage to the social market. Since the
agents are not being paid, and have the option to ignore
any Bzz object they don't like, they tend to see themselves
as not being involved in marketing at all. Almost all of
the BzzAgents I interviewed made this point. ''In
marketing, obviously, those people are paid to pump a
product, whereas I'm not really getting paid to do this,''
Bollaert, the agent from Brooklyn, explained. ''I don't
talk about a product if I don't feel strongly about it.
I'll give my honest opinion.'' 

The notion of the ''honest opinion'' came up again and
again in conversations with the agents and with Balter.
Seth Godin, the writer and speaker on marketing whose ideas
partly inspired BzzAgent, agrees that the agents' honesty
is crucial. Paying people to promote products, hiring
supermodels to show up in a bar and request a particular
vodka, is ''disingenuous, dishonest and almost unethical,''
and it represents a subversion of honest peer-to-peer
communication. And honest peer-to-peer communication, he
maintains, is the future of marketing. 

Godin is not just a BzzAgent fan -- he's also a client.
''Purple Cow'' was marketed through BzzAgent, and Godin
quietly plugs the company at the end of the book. He
describes BzzAgent as a company at the center of a
conversation between its corporate clients and thousands of
agents who serve as a kind of guild of consumers. ''I think
this is a new kind of media,'' he said. Specifically, this
new kind of media is people like Gabriella, or Desjardins,
or Bollaert, chatting with friends and strangers. 

This argument requires you to accept that a conversation
can be honest even if one participant has a hidden agenda.
Whether that's possible is something I asked several
agents, and Balter himself several times. Of course the
agents believe in their own integrity, but that's the easy
part. Do we really want a world where every conversation
about a product might be secretly tied to a word-of-mouth
''campaign''? Doesn't that kind of undermine, you know, the
fabric of social discourse? 

''The key is,'' Balter said, ''people already talk about
this stuff. They already talk about things they love.''
Manufactured word of mouth is indeed a bad and scary thing,
he maintains, but that's not what his company is doing.
''For whatever reason, we have this natural instinct to
tell a friend about a product -- and to get them to believe
what you believe. We're not trying to change that. All
we're trying to do is put some form around it, so it can be
measured and understood. That's not changing the social
fabric.'' 

It is certainly easier to defend the voluntary
buzz-spreaders as less devious than the paid model
pretending to like a product in public -- but the honesty
and openness come with an asterisk or two. Those
suggestions in the Bzz guides to call bookstores and
pretend you don't know the exact title or author you're
looking for are pretty hard to define as ''honest.''
Similarly, it's most unlikely that Amazon.com (let alone
The Concord Monitor) would consider the reviews of a
BzzAgent quite as unbiased and helpful to readers as a
review from someone who hadn't consulted talking points
compiled with input from the publisher. The whole tone of
the Bzz guides -- which read like a cross between a
brochure and a training manual -- is a bit difficult to
square with the idea of genuineness. 

Finally, while BzzAgent tells its volunteers that they are
under no obligation to hide their association with the
company and its campaigns, the reality is that most of them
do hide it most of the time. They don't tell the people
they are ''bzzing,'' that they really found out about the
sausage, or the perfume, or the shoes, or the book, from
some company in Boston that charges six-figure fees to
corporations. ''It just seems more natural, when I talk
about something, if people don't think I'm trying to push a
product,'' Karen Bollaert explained to me. Other agents
said the same. Gabriella, for instance, insisted that she
really does think Al Fresco makes the best sausage around.
Basically, they trust BzzAgent, and they trust themselves,
so they don't see a problem. 

Nevertheless, Jason Desjardins has told a few people about
his efforts for BzzAgent, with mixed results. Some people
thought it sounded exciting. Others, however, said they
felt ''used.'' One friend he tried to recruit now responds
with suspicion when Desjardins talks up something he has
done: ''Are you buzzing me?'' the friend will ask.
Desjardins shrugs. ''I've been honest about everything.'' 

One reward Bollaert did collect from BzzAgent was, of all
things, the William Gibson novel ''Pattern Recognition'' --
an actual paranoid science-fiction novel about a future in
which corporations have become so powerful they can bribe
flunkies to infiltrate your life and talk up products. ''It
made me think, when somebody says something about a product
- I wonder. That gave me a little pause,'' she said.
Earlier in our conversation, I touted my iPod. Wouldn't she
feel differently about my comments, I asked, if it turned
out that I'd gotten it from Apple or a BzzAgent equivalent?
''That's true,'' she said. ''But you know what? If you
start questioning everyone's motives, then you'll be in a
home with tinfoil on your head.'' 

The motives of chattering consumers can, of course, be
biased in all kinds of ways. If your friend is bragging
about his great new cellphone, he may not be a buzz agent,
but he may not be the purely rational information source
you assume. He says it's the best phone around, and maybe
he even believes it -- but the truth may be that he bought
it because it looks cool and he read that Jake Gyllenhaal
has one just like it. It may be true that we trust our
friends more than TV ads, but that doesn't actually mean
they've become more reliable. 

''I think we all do this naturally anyway,'' Bollaert
concluded. ''If you find something you like and somebody
asks your advice and you have a product, good or bad,
you'll say don't get it or do get it. We're a consumer
society.'' 


Crucial to the BzzAgent system is the small team of young
people in Boston who read and answer every single Bzz
report. They offer encouragement, tips on how to improve
word-of-mouth strategies. Every report is rated and every
agent ranked according to a complicated formula, one that
is constantly being tweaked, taking into account everything
from how often the agent reports to how many people they
tend to buzz to the quality of their summaries -- plus
intangibles like originality. (This system is part of
BzzAgent's defense against people signing up for free stuff
and simply making up fake reports about their buzz
activities; the home office is trained to spot such
things.) Along with the feedback, they almost always throw
in a joke or a comment so it's clear that they have
actually read the report. 

No doubt because of this, many agent reports are full of
personality. Some are almost confessional; others are
revealing perhaps without intending to be. Casual mentions
of boyfriend or girlfriend problems come up, as do
complaints about bosses, friends, strangers. One of the
most memorable was from a young BzzAgent who reported that
a man she met in a bar complimented her on her Ralph Cool
perfume, one thing led to another and they spent the night
together. The next morning he asked about the perfume again
and said he liked it so much he might have to buy some for
his wife. (These reports are ultimately handed over to the
client -- a trove of anecdotal research from the front
lines of consumption.) 

Along the way, Agent JonO has become a kind of celebrity,
or at least a figure of mystery. There are more calls and
e-mail messages and instant messages to ''JonO'' than Jon
O'Toole himself can possibly deal with, so lately JonO has
become more of a construct than a person. Jason Desjardins
sounds honored to have had a chance to meet the real JonO
not long ago: O'Toole lined up a dinner in Cambridge with
several BzzAgent volunteers, to meet them and hear their
thoughts and ideas. Desjardins was so excited about this
that at first he overlooked the fact that it was on the
same night as his wedding anniversary. (Melissa encouraged
him to go anyway. ''But we'll see if JonO is still there
for you 10 years from now,'' she said.) 

Balter did not count on the agents taking BzzAgent so
seriously. He still doesn't seem to know quite what to make
of it. He has met only a handful of agents, and while he
said he intends to meet more, he sounded almost nervous
about it. A number of those he has met have been almost
apologetic about not doing more -- about not buzzing enough
on this or that campaign. The biggest complaints come from
people who say they have not been invited to join enough
campaigns. One agent resigned because he said he was unsure
whether he could live up to BzzAgent's ethical standards. 

This might be the most peculiar thing about BzzAgent: not
only are its volunteer agents willing to become shock
troops in the marketing revolution, but many of them are
flat-out excited about it. At his apartment, Desjardins
told me about another book he had read because of BzzAgent.
Called ''Join Me,'' it's about a guy who decides he wants
to start some sort of voluntary group -- a commune, a cult,
whatever you want to call it. He puts an ad in the paper
that just says, ''Join me,'' and to his surprise, people
are interested. They didn't know what they were joining, or
why, but they joined anyway. The guy, whose name is Danny
Wallace, decided to turn his followers into a good-deeds
army, basically on the ''Pay It Forward'' method. The book
is nonfiction. 

Why, I asked Desjardins, did people join a group without
even knowing what it was? Well, he explained, Wallace's
theory was that they just wanted to be part of something.
That made sense to me. After all, some people are lucky
enough to find meaning and fulfillment through their work,
family or spirituality. But many people don't. Many people
have boring jobs and indifferent bosses. They feel ignored
by politicians. They send e-mail to customer service and no
one responds. They get no feedback. It's easy to feel
helpless, uncounted, disconnected. Do you think, I asked
Desjardins, that there's some element of that going on with
BzzAgent? 

''I think for some people it probably is,'' he answered.
''For me, it's being part of something big. I think it's
such a big thing that's going to shape marketing. To
actually be one of the people involved in shaping that is,
to me, big.'' That made sense to me too. After all, there
is one thing that is even more powerful than the upper
hand, more seductive than persuading: believing. 


Rob Walker writes the Consumed column for the magazine.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/05/magazine/05BUZZ.html?ex=1103265150&ei=1&en=b3b4c78fbf35c256

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