BzzAgent is doing some belated Spring cleaning of its hive. (In response to internal headaches? Client complaints? Competitive issues? Something else?) This post on BzzAgent’s own blog is interesting, as are the comments posted in response.

You might also be interested in the following email recently sent to BzzAgents:

Dear BzzAgents,

I want to share with you some important news about BzzAgent.

We are preparing to make two significant modifications to our system. We intend for these changes to benefit each and every one of you.

Over the next several weeks, we will remove all known pests from our BzzAgent network. You’ve heard me discuss this before on the BeeLog, but the time is right to now take a more aggressive approach.

These individuals register multiple accounts and create fake profiles to occupy valuable slots in campaigns — slots that could (and should!) be occupied by you. Not to mention they also flood us with emails and phone calls, which reduces the quality of service we can provide to you. To ensure your BzzAgent experience is as active and fulfilling as possible, these folks will no longer be BzzAgents.

The second modification is being planned now. We are going to revamp our rewards system. The current rewards program, quite simply, is attracting pests. The bottom line is that it’s pointless to kick-out pests only to entice them to re-join.

Of course, regardless of how we change our rewards system we plan to honor all points that good-standing BzzAgents have been awarded to date. It is important to note that we are not planning to change in any way the practice of supplying you with a product experience at the beginning of each campaign.

In closing, the goal is a system that is filled with honest and happy BzzAgents.

I’m not a big fan of diary-style blogging (“so today my cat Tibbles did the cutest thing…”), but this anecdote from my vacation is a pretty good example of Cluetrain in action, so bear with me.

One afternoon, I wake up from my midday power nap and decide to head out to the local coffee shop before embarking on an afternoon of zoning by the pool. Or maybe the bay.

It’s a small coffee shop in a small beach town. There were five customers other than myself in there: two women with a young girl about six years old, the guy in front of me and the guy relaxing in the chair.

One of women notices the words on my T-shirt — “I’m not dead yet” — and chuckles. I ask if she knows the Spamalot reference. She didn’t, but loved watching Python back in the day. We get to chatting. Turns out they live just minutes from me in Pennsylvania.

The coffee’s taking a while, so we chat some more. No, I didn’t grow up in Pennsylvania, I grew up on Long Island. I name the town, and the ears of the guy in front of me perk up. He grew up in that town, too. Mentions his last name, Helou. Paul Helou? I ask, which undoubtedly spooked him. But I’d heard my brother-in-law mention the name often: They go way back, and played guitars together in the basement many moons ago.

Paul was in town to perform a youth concert down the road from the hotel where I was staying. He has a CD of music appropriate in age for the girl who was with the two women. He went to his car to grab a bunch of them. Each of the women bought one. I did, too.

Three CDs sold after about five minutes of friendly conversation. Not too bad. Oh, and the guy relaxing in the chair? A musician, too. He and Paul were trading phone numbers when I left the coffee shop.

Cluetrain gets it so right: Markets are conversations, and each of us has experienced stories just like this one. Had Paul walked into the coffee shop, interrupted everyone and started advertising himself and his CD (“Hey, I’m playing a show down the road tonight, anyone wanna buy a CD?”), he’d probably have left the coffee shop with mutterings of “what a fool” in his wake. Instead, he engaged in conversation — and made three sales.

As humans, we know Cluetrain is right … so as marketers, why do we insist on constantly interrupting people?

Takeaway for marketers: Are you interrupting your potential customers or engaging in conversations with them? Will they think you’re a fool, or will they want to buy your product?

There’s nothing like seeing 978 unread emails in your inbox when you return from vacation to make you wish you were back on the beach soaking up the UV rays.

There’s one small consolation: about 40 percent of them are spam (woo hoo — so I only have 587 emails to answer!). And whoever is sending them out, particularly for pharmacy products, must be a Groucho Marx or W.C. Fields fan, because the names in some of the “from:” lines could be right out of Horsefeathers or My Little Chickadee: Fetlocks H. Governs (pharmacy spam), Andromache Berg (cell phones spam) and Westerners S. Thundercloud (pharmacy spam) are just a few of the better ones.

To paraphrase Fields: I like spammers … fried.

“Every man who possibly can should force himself to a holiday of a full month in a year, whether he feels like taking it or not.”
—William James

A little too close to home for some of us: 48-Hour Internet Outage Plunges Nation Into Productivity.