"Ever since Hotmail appeared on the scene and showed that one consumer can influence many, many others, brands have been chasing the kind of viral explosion that catapulted the Numa Numa dance to web glory," wrote Dave Balter in his new book The Word of Mouth Manual Vol. II. Dave is the founder of BzzAgent.com, a company providing word-of-mouth services for hundreds of major brands. A recent guest of HubSpot TV, Dave offered insights into the pure word-of-mouth aspect of marketing. If you have questions about the new face of content promotion, advertising and blogging, read through Dave's thoughts on these subjects...

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Dave Balter knows a thing or two about brand advocacy, and his experience may turn some of your assumptions about brand relationships on their head. Balter is the founder of BzzAgent, a Boston-based agency that specializes in generating word-of-mouth awareness for products and brands. Over the past eight years, the company has recruited more than half a million brand ambassadors it calls “agents” and applied them to campaigns for more than 500 clients. BzzAgent’s success challenges two items of conventional wisdom about marketing...

What if all the people who were truly passionate about your brand had a single place to gather? Somewhere that they could share content and opinions, organize real life events, ask one another questions, and just about any other activity that happens in a real community. It's pretty obvious to see the value in something like that - which is probably why many companies have tried some version of it. Yahoo launched and then abandoned their Brand Universe concept. Sites like Squidoo, Ning and Alltop arguably had some version of this vision in mind when they launched as well...

BzzAgent is launching a new product today, seeking to create a better way for brands to engage consumers. Called BzzScapes, the new tool acts as a social media tool as well as an extension o the company’s client services. So what is a BzzScape? It’s a web-based, social destination where people can create a page for any given brand, and add information about that brand as they see fit. A mix between a product review site and Facebook public profiles, BzzScapes aim to provide an open forum for consumers and brands...