How to measure ninety days of buzz marketing?

Erik Heels over at Clock Tower Law Group turned me on to this via his newsletter. It's rather an interesting experiment in buzz/non-traditional marketing.

John Butman is going to chronicle 90 Days of BzzAgent as an experiment in corporate transparency. To cite his own words:

In December 2005, BzzAgent received $13.8 million in venture capital, and has now a reached a critical point in its development — the company will double its staff from 47 to 80 over the next year, double its sales, and make a fundamental transition from an agency to a media model.

To chronicle this extraordinary phase in its evolution, BzzAgent has invited John Butman — a writer, expert in organizational communications, and co-author with Balter of the recently published book Grapevine: The New Art of Word-of-Mouth Marketing — to spend time inside the company and blog about what he sees and learns, in real-time.

90 Days at BzzAgent will chronicle the changes that take place at BzzAgent as the company strives to grow fast and big, but keep true to its mission of "open and honest sharing of opinions" among everyday people.

This is billed as a grand experiment in corporate transparency. Fine. But usually experiments have criteria for success and failure. I wonder what those might be?

Here are some metrics I thought about using to judge this effort:

1. How many people will this effort reach? My guess: a lot. They'll probably hit half a million readers over the ninety days if not more.


2. What will it cost? Just about nothing other than John Butman's salary, which I have to guess will be quite a bit more than the media costs would be for a traditional compaign. Say $25,000 for three months. Maybe in stock.


3. What would it have cost to reach this many people in other ways?This is hard to say, but even on Google Adwords at $5 eCPM, I figure it's about $2,500 minimum. Doing it on radio or the like would cost much more.


4. What message will it communicate?Maybe that BzzAgent is a cool place to work, or that they do some interesting stuff. But I doubt there will be any clear corporate message.

I think the best way to characterize this effort is that it is an awareness campaign. More people will know about BzzAgent, and they'll learn a lot about how a company goes about spending nearly $14 million in funding to grow quickly. But what strikes me is that while it will raise awareness, people will probably have a tough time explaining what BzzAgent is or why it is different from PR companies, non-traditional ad agencies, or other new media firms.

The good news: Butman is a good writer. He'll tell good stories. If nothing else, it will be a fun daily corporate soap opera.

My view: this is going to be a bit like putting a bunch of material in a petrie dish. You may get penicillin, but you'll get a lot of other outcomes too. The experiment will be fun to watch, but no one should confuse this sort of effort with a serious marketing or branding effort. And without being able to refine out the good stuff from the bad or measure the results, it will probably end up being kind of messy.

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