I had a conversation with Megan at BzzAgent this week.  My interest was peaked, when a former IDC colleague, who now works at Iron Mountain Digital, mentioned BzzAgent. 

BzzAgent claims to have 400,000 “buzz agents,” who have agreed to review products and services and to share with their friends and colleagues their honest opinion.  BzzAgents get the products for free.  They test them.  And they create buzz.  The buzz could be good, or it could be bad, but it’s buzz.  I don’t know if Iron Mountain Digital uses BzzAgent, but I can see the fit, since, Iron Mountain offers desktop and server backup services to homes and businesses. 

At the $80,000 entry price that Megan mentioned, you’ll want to get a lot of buzz for the investment, and you’ll want to have enough confidence in your product to expect that most of the buzz will be good.   In the consumer products and services area, I see a great opportunity to leverage BzzAgent.  It’s hard to see the fit for the kinds of enterprise IT infrastructure providers with whom we are working. But, Megan suggested I check out their Frogpond offering, which I will do when I get a chance. 

In the meantime, after listening to the pitch from Megan, I decided to sign up myself.  I am now officially a BzzAgent.  I’ll let you know how it goes.  For now, I’ve just filled out a bunch of surveys about my drinking habits (softdrink and otherwise).  Fortunately, the fortunes of Coke and Pepsi don’t depend much on my soft-drink habits. If they did, the companies would be broke.

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