The more time I spend looking at BzzAgent, the more I see that its superficial flaws conceal it's deep flaws. I've read the excellent and lengthy NYT article, the comments threads here, at Larry's and Suw's three posts and Dave's two, and I start to see a pattern.
An initial concern was that BzzAgent using incentives to it's agents would distort their judgement, but as the NYT article makes clear, this is not in fact what happens. It's more subtle than that.
There is a well-known phenomenon of cognitive dissonance in employment, where if you pay people less to do work, they are more committed to it, as they justify it to themselves in other terms. Many media companies run on young and hungry interns who do lots of work for free, while their managers are well-rewarded. The graduate student/professor relationship is often characterised in these terms too. Balter's success in BzzAgent is in refining this model to the point where he gets paid well by corporations, and his agents are doing it for their own reasons:
Balter [...] 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.
[The agents] 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.
[...]
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.'
This is the systemic flaw - BzzAgents attracts people who are wannabee manipulators. Who think that steering a conversation about politics to one about shoes is an amusing game. Who live and breathe the dying Producer/Consumer model of media. Who are ashamed to admit their BzzAgent association.
At it's core, Creative Commons is about changing the discourse about media to help open up creativity through sharing. It is a legal-driven structure to help create a change in social mores so people see the benefits of opening their works up to others' creativity. It is decentralised and distributed, encouraging people to build on one another's work. It is memetic infrastructure.
Conversely, Bzzagents is effectively, if not always explicitly, encouraging people to play mind games with their social contacts, to serve a central agenda. It has some distributed aspects, but it is designed to coordinate a product launch for big companies, and send field reports back to them. It is a successor to the Early Adopter Wars that Ruth Shalit skewered 4 years ago, an attempt to productize the bellwethers.
At the Social Computing Symposium last week, Molly did something very interesting - she asked everyone what they knew about but didn't get the chance to talk about. I mentioned the Phono-Graphix reading program that works by building on phonemic processing and induction, and which has been shown in controlled experiments to be significantly better at teaching reading than the alternatives.
Why don't I normally rave about this? Because, like BzzAgents, the ReadAmerica organisation has an odd feeling to it - it comes across as cult-like to outsiders, and emphasises using their published workbooks as a way to conform to the program that jars me. And this is despite seeing how successful their methods can be in the hands of a skilled teacher like Rosie.
I don't doubt Dave Balter's sincerity or belief in what he does, but Amway salespeople and Jehovah's Witnesses I have met are equally sincere, and equally unsuited to promoting Creative Commons.
Technorati Tags: creative commons
1. Peter Caputa on May 3, 2005 8:13 AM writes...
Oh God! That is elitist. I love how you are capable of characterizing bzzagents so succinctly by a few examples on their website...
"BzzAgents attracts people who are wannabee manipulators."
That's great.
Permalink to Comment2. libel vox on May 3, 2005 12:43 PM writes...
Not all buzz agents are as evil as you might like to cast them. Why wife signed up awhile ago and I've been watching with curiosity ever since. She signed up with the intention of never collecting reward points. She just likes getting free stuff in the mail. A cleaning product here, a financial guidebook there... it's all pretty harmless.
Agents aren't automatically given campaigns. They pick and choose which ones they find interesting. Yes, word-of-mouth marketing done this way takes advantage of people's trust in unbiased opinion. But if a person selects the CC campaign because they are interested in it is there really such a breech of social contract?
Some information campaigns don't even award points (not sure if the CC falls into that category). If I remember right there was also recently a buzz campaign for the march-of-dimes like that...
Permalink to Comment3. Rob on May 4, 2005 7:23 AM writes...
Everyone's a "manipulator." Who doesn't like to talk about their own likes and interests?
Do you really think these people are going to risk their friendships and reputations to talk favorably about products that suck?
Permalink to Comment4. George on May 5, 2005 4:29 AM writes...
Hi,
I have a few questions and comments about your post, Kevin. Please pardon the sarcasm ... I just couldn't resist.
Let me get this straight ... According to the "well-known phenomenon of cognitive dissonance in employment," you state that since people/bzzagents are not being paid (or only 'paid' with rewards), they are more committed to it and should not be trusted.
Kevin, do you get paid to blog here? If you are not getting paid to blog here, by the same logic and "well-known phenomenon of cognitive dissonance in employment," we should not trust what you write, right? After all, you must be finding other ways to justify it to yourself as well. Your 'reward' is a platform for the distribution of your thoughts ... and perhaps even a little name recognition. Maybe it gets you into conferences and other things ... like the Social Computing Symposium 2005.
How was the symposium, anyway? Sponsored and hosted by Microsoft, eh? Funny, but I think they "live and breathe the dying Producer/Consumer model" as well as any company I know. How do you feel about supporting, attending, blogging, and, dare I say it, buzzing their symposia?
You also mention that BzzAgent "has some distributed aspects, but it is designed to coordinate a product launch for big companies, and send field reports back to them." That's not quite what they do, but in any case, yes, they do marketing for companies. It is a business.
Sometimes, when a business wants to do good, they do pro-bono work ... Others organize symposia where people can talk about Phono-Graphix reading programs that work by building on phonemic processing and induction. Both are fine with me.
I like Creative Commons and Common Content, and I've used its copyright for my creative work.
I think that CC needs to get the word out and needs help doing so. There is nothing wrong with marketing and organizing the communications for something you care about. There is much CC has to gain from a partnership with BzzAgent.
Work it out. Don't throw it out.
Permalink to Comment5. JohnFen on May 5, 2005 4:45 AM writes...
The issue I have with the BzzAgent scheme is not that my friends will mislead me about products. Nor is it whether or not they are being compensated.
It's about the violation of a very personal space: my personal relationships with people. A third party is nosing in and affecting the way those relationships work. Even worse, the third party is taking part in a dialogue about my relationships -- one that I am not even a party to.
These kinds of marketing schemes have already added an additional layer of mistrust into our relationships with strangers (by using outright shills in bars, etc), and this scheme threatens to extend that suspicion to friendships. I find this completely unacceptable.
If it were just a matter of BzzAgents getting free samples and a handful of coupons, and loving the product so much they tell me about it, there wouldn't be a problem.
This is more than that. Reports are filed. Data is compiled. I am being treated as a consumer, not as a friend.
Whether compensated through gifts or emotional gratification, BzzAgents are highly motivated salespeople -- whether they know it or not. There's nothing wrong with that in the right time and place. When I'm hanging with my friends and neighbors, though, I don't want to have to have my mental spam filter turned on.
Permalink to Comment6. Bzzy on May 5, 2005 7:48 PM writes...
This is very interesting but...
Permalink to CommentWhat do you think of my shoes? They have no metal in them so you can walk around airports with them on. In fact most presidents wear these shoes.