BzzAgent has been promoting products by WOM for over two years. The idea is simple: WOM recommendation is one of the most powerful forms of marketing. So why wait and hope for recommendations? BzzAgent tells their “BzzAgents” about the product, they recommend your product, the company tracks these recommendations, and finally they send you a bill for their efforts. Even better for the company, they don’t pay their BzzAgents, although they do “occasionally offer gift certificates, and always offer cool, hard-to-get prizes.”
Whatever you think about this approach, it’s pretty obvious why it might be attractive for consumer goods (companies such as Kellogg’s and Penguin books are clients). What interested us was that Broadcom is on their client list: are there really engineers telling everyone they know about how good the latest Broadcom Gigabit Ethernet transceivers are, just to get a prize? Silicon Valley dinner parties must be getting pretty dull!
Finally if you live outside of the USA and Canada, you can relax: the company only operates in North America.