90 Days of BzzAgent

I have come to the conclusion that an unknown but disturbingly large number of BzzAgents have some kind of Internet-related psychological or emotional disorder.

How else to explain the following behaviors:

Creating multiple BzzAgent accounts with different Agent names, all of which list the same shipping address.

Logging on to the BzzAgent site an average of 4.8 times per day over a 300-day period, with nothing to report.

Posting an aggrieved comment under one name on a freebie site and then quoting your alias on the BeeLog, as proof of BzzAgent’s allegedly unfair practices.

Calling into the Hive and bursting into fake tears about how you’re not getting enough campaigns.

To make matters worse, these people are some of the most vocal and visible members of the community, creating hubbub way out of proportion to their numbers.

But, you know what? The PestBusters are on to all you pests, ghosts, voyeurs, lunatics, and Internet addicts.

BzzAgent’s old strategy for dealing with problem Agents was to identify and neutralize them, without informing them the jig was up. The reasoning was that an outed pest was a noisy pest. There would be indignant ranting and railing up and down the Net.

But it has become obvious that these people are far more than pests. They pollute the system. They offend the good agents, make all kinds of trouble for Hive denizens, cause client anxiety, give the WOM industry a bad name, and could eventually threaten the viability of the BzzAgent business model.

It’s harder to sell “open, honest, and genuine” when some percentage of your community is secretive, duplicitous, and subversive.

And it’s a problem, not just for BzzAgent, but for anybody who does business on the Web.

So the debate is now on at BzzAgent.

Should the network become more transparent?

Should rogue Agents be confronted and cast out of the community?

Should the rewards system be abandoned altogether? After all, the Agents who scream loudest about their points and rewards are often the biggest system gamers. (Most Agents never redeem their points at all.)

The righteous PestBusters at BzzAgent are hard at work defining the specific parameters of nasty behavior and developing ways to root it out with the terrible suddenness it warrants.

If BzzAgent can keep itself as squeaky clean as a bathroom scrubbed with Scrubbing Bubbles, the entire world of word-of-mouth marketing — perhaps even the whole universe of Internet commerce — could be the better for it.