So what does “Commence Freaking Out” actually mean?

It means that dozens of BzzAgent staffers are going to have to work double time, overtime, stress time and weekend time to pull together the last pieces of our new rewards and ranking/tiering platform.

It means that our website was down for more than 9 hours while we made all of the changes that took 12 months to plan, configure, and test (we always wish we had more time for more testing).

It means hundreds of thousands of BzzAgents will pour into the website within hours to try out the new platform. We’ll be on pins and needles, hoping you like it as much as we think you will. There will be thousands of customer service calls. Tens of thousands of new word of mouth reports. Points exchange questions. Points redemption questions. Questions about status. Questions about questions.

It means our engineering team can’t rest just yet. We’ll find some bugs. Things won’t work exactly 100% perfectly. The site may struggle to handle the load of all of the traffic. Everyone will be on call.

It means we’ll be working diligently with dozens of partners like MyPoints, Wolfgang’s Music Archive, Origins, Rue La La, TrueJeans (to name just a few) to ensure they’re happy. We’ve spent hundreds of hours working on the relationship with all of these companies, and they’ll need love and support. Are they getting enough interest from Agents, is data being tied appropriately between the companies, are our accounting departments getting along?

It means the processes we used to have: the FAQs, the way we handle fulfillment, the materials we develop for clients, will all be changed.

We stripped away everything we previously knew and built from the ground up. We did a do-over. For a 6 year old company, that is perhaps one of the most difficult things to accomplish. We asked ourselves: if we were starting the business today, with all of the knowledge and expertise we now have, with 420,000 Agents who care., how would we make it work?

It means that everything old is new once again.

That’s worth freaking out about.

So let’s look forward: what exactly is this “new economy” we speak of? Imagine the BzzAgent platform as a car. While this car is cruising at 100 MPH down the highway, we decided to remove the engine so we could replace it with a brand, shiny new one (this one is a hybrid, of course) that will allow us to drive faster and safer for the next million miles.

It took a year to prepare for this engine switch, which is happening as we speak. As you’ve now witnessed, we spent the last two weeks allowing Agents with BzzPoints to transfer them into something of value (the removal of the old engine). With the transfer complete, we are now putting the new engine in place. We’ve added new types of thank yous (Womlets) and the ability to have points redeemable for unlimited inventory at hundreds of retailers. We’ve made ranking and tiering significantly more intuitive and beneficial to active Agents.

So, we ask that you spend some time getting to know this new engine, this new economy. Compared to the old economy, things are different. But they’re different for a reason: You.  And we hope you enjoy what we’ve built.

So, come along with us. Let’s collectively turn the key to get this engine revving.

I was recently testing some code that I’d written for the BzzAgent website and during the process I discovered a new appreciation for how time-consuming our signup process is.

In order to test my code, I had to sign up as a new agent about a dozen times, using different values for country and language preference. That’s a dozen times of entering my name, username, password (twice), email (twice), phone number, address, birthday, gender, and that silly little spam check thing where you have to enter the text from the image in the box and half the time you get it wrong because you can’t even figure out what the stupid letters and numbers are. And then I have to answer at least 1.7 million questions about what kind of car I drive, where I work, and how many times my Aunt Millie has gone to the movies in the last six months. Sheesh! Seriously, I think you can take the SAT in less time than it takes to sign up to be a BzzAgent.

Today I came across an article online in which the author, Luke Wroblewski, argues that “sign up forms must die” and that we should strive for “gradual engagement.” Wroblewski states,

…I believe we can get people engaged with digital services in a way that tells them how such services work and why they should care enough to use them. I also believe we can do this without explicitly making them fill out a sign-up form as a first step.

This got me thinking about how we can implement this concept of gradual engagement at BzzAgent. Here’s an example that I think would be much cooler:

1. During the sign up process, we only ask for an email address and a password.
2. After signing up, a new Agent is automatically invited to join one of our active campaigns (how annoying is it to spend all that time signing up and offering up all that personal information only to find out you can’t even participate in a campaign right away??).
3. If the Agent decides to join a campaign we ask for an address (so we can mail the BzzKit).
4. When the camaign is over we ask the Agent to complete the profile information (those 1.7 million questions), which allows her to be invited to more campaigns.

Sweet. We’ve made it easier to sign up and given the Agent an opportunity to kick the tires before asking for a complete life history. But if it were that easy, we would have implemented this a long time ago. The biggest hurdle is allowing a new Agent into a campaign before we know anything about her. Our clients rely on the answers to those 1.7 million questions. Also, we have a limited number of slots in each campaign. Every slot taken by a new Agent is a slot that is no longer available to an existing Agent. If I had my way, every single Agent would be invited to every single campaign, but I don’t think our clients would agree with that approach (asking them to give out 400,000 product samples is an expensive proposition).

Ok, so it’s easy to sign up, but not so easy to actually implement. But that doesn’t mean we’re not going to work at it. In the meantime, if you guys have ideas of your own, I’d be glad to hear them.

——– Original Message ——–

Hi all,You may not all know but on 1/14/2008, we deployed a new feature (coded by developer extraordinaire Brian Dame) called Address Verification.

Through this feature, BzzAgent is now able to verify that an agent address is valid before sending anything to him/her. This allows us to cut on returned packages but most importantly helps tremendously in pest detection and shipping list cleanup. On launch date we invalidated all US agent addresses which prompted them to verify that their addresses were valid before we ourselves verified that it in fact was using a third party vendor called Service Objects.

On the first day, a little over 20,000 validations were made using this system, 105,000 after one month and 120,000 to this day. This resulted in 71,364 agents with a verified address thus far (a 60% ratio of verified addresses to verification attempts). The number of address verification queries per day is in direct correlation with campaign launches (except for the first 3-4 days after feature launch of course).

At what cost ? Well, beyond the time it took for Brian to implement this feature, it has cost us roughly $1514 to verify addresses for 71,364 agents, that’s 2 cents per agent.

We should recoup that cost very quickly in shipping cost and eliminated pests. Mary-stuart tells me that the volume of package returns has gone from above 30 a week to 4 this week. ComDev did receive quite a few emails (up to 50 a day) in the first 3-4 weeks of the program but this has dwindled considerably since then.

What’s next ? Well, as we’re verifying less addresses every day, we’re downsizing our service-object contract every month, until we find our cruising speed (=(new agents + change of addresses) / 0.6)

If you have any questions regarding this program, feel free to comment. Also, virtually “stop by Brian’s desk to give him a hug”.

Here’s the thing with the late-70′s punk movement: In their effort to rebel against the majority, members inadvertently created a new social norm. As distressed leather and pre-torn denim found their way into suburban shopping malls, emblems of the punk subculture quietly diffused into the mainstream.

Reading Kara Swisher’s fascinating January 31^st post (“Chatty Zuckerbeg Tells All About Facebook Finances”) on her D: All Things Digital blog, I thought: Is Dave Balter a punk?

Followers of BeeLog are aware that there exist few topics which Balter won’t discuss – or permit being discussed – publicly. Dopey policies, hiring blunders, client snafus, good ol’ fashion belly achin’ … it’s all fair game. (To the uninitiated, it might appear as if the only information considered off-limits is the amount of cash we have in the bank, yet he’s even hinted at that figure in the past.) Sure there are times when, moments before uploading something truly outrageous, Dave calls me into his office and, with a self-gratified smirk, asks: “Have I gone too far with this one?” But deep down we both know that he picks me because I say “go” far more than “stop.” It’s our unspoken pact.

I’ve likened our commitment to “transparency” to corporate exhibitionism. I told researchers from Harvard Business School (who are authoring a case on this peculiar corporate value): “BzzAgent is a flasher and the BeeLog is our trench coat.” But maybe that’s not the half of it. Perhaps Balter is onto something far grander than shameless exposure; maybe the BeeLog is much more revealing than even an open raincoat.

Given Swisher’s perspective on Zuckerberg’s candor, could it be possible that we are on the verge of a new norm in corporate culture, one that replaces firewalls with fireplaces? In other words, will leaders begin to view information as a way to unite rather than divide?

On the topic of language structure, linguistics professor Geoffrey Pullum wrote, “One is an exception, two are a couple of anomalies, but three is a trend.” Balter and Zuckerberg make two. Will another Doc Martin drop? Will the punks soon become the masses?