Today Boston-based word-of-mouth mar­ket­ing firm BzzA­gent takes the wrap­ping off a very inter­est­ing new ven­ture: BzzS­capes.

Here’s my ini­tial impres­sion, after a 20-minute phone call Fri­day with BzzA­gent founder and CEO Dave Bal­ter (pic­tured at right):

A “brands com­mu­nity” was a long time in com­ing, and I’m glad to see that BzzA­gent has incor­po­rated some of the best fea­ture sets of social media in stir­ring inter­est among its 550,000-strong army of vol­un­teer buz­zsters. (Fast­Com­pany had a good writeup about BzzA­gent here.) We’re a brand-addicted nation of Starbucks-sipping, Oakley-wearing, Apple-worshipping, Wii-playing con­sumers — when we’re not wear­ing our blogging/citizen journalist/video pro­ducer hats — and Buz­zA­gent is bet­ting that enough of us in Crowd­source Land will want to built vir­tual altars to express our feel-good mojo about the stuff we love.

Love a brand? Head over to BzzS­capes and cre­ate a land­ing page around the prod­uct or ser­vice you get juiced about. (BzzS­capes are free to build.) Then watch as dozens or hun­dreds of other buzz-folk layer on their own con­tent: pho­tos, videos, tes­ti­mo­ni­als, graph­ics — it all cre­ates a dig­i­tal foot­print or medi­as­cape of the public’s impres­sion of a brand.

Say, that could prove to be valu­able infor­ma­tion to a mar­keter, you say? Exactly. By let­ting its biggest fans gather dig­i­tal con­tent and cre­ate a sort of fan boy Web pres­ence — and watch­ing other peo­ple rank and rate the con­tent — com­pa­nies can gain valu­able infor­ma­tion about how they’re per­ceived by the pub­lic. I sus­pect Bal­ter is right in pre­dict­ing that com­pa­nies will reach out to its most ardent advo­cates to share prod­ucts, solicit feed­back and cul­ti­vate a new gen­er­a­tion of evan­ge­lists. Mar­keters, how­ever, will not be allowed to pay peo­ple to flack their products.

The brands’ role

It would be easy for such a ven­ture to be derailed by con­flicts of inter­est and the impres­sion that com­pa­nies can tai­lor their image on BzzS­capes, so Bal­ter wants the word to go out: Your com­pany can­not alter the con­tent cre­ated by BzzS­capes users. Your brand can, how­ever, add addi­tional con­tent (that will be judged by the com­mu­nity), poll the com­mu­nity, and cul­ti­vate rela­tion­ships with the most active participants.

“We want con­sumers to decide what’s impor­tant about the brand,” Bal­ter said.

A few years ago such a site would have been unthink­able — trade­mark law is noto­ri­ously slanted against repur­pos­ing of com­pany logos, for instance. (Here are two arti­cles about recent con­tretemps.) But Bal­ter said, “A lot of prece­dent has emerged around fair use. We’re not cre­at­ing the con­tent” around these brands but merely point­ing to the images and videos that reside on other sites. In other words, the lawyers have looked at this closely and believe there’s a busi­ness to be had.

BzzS­capes is start­ing off with part­ner­ships from such major brands as Proc­ter & Gam­ble, Ford, Col­gate, Philips, Clorox, Pen­guin Pub­lish­ing and Wal­greens. “They’re jazzed about the pos­si­bil­i­ties here,” Bal­ter said. “It gets them real advo­cates through another level of engage­ment. It’ll be inter­est­ing to see what the pub­lic finds valu­able. This is the stuff that mat­ters to the peo­ple who matter.”

The site has been in pri­vate beta for a few weeks but it went live a few hours ago. Check it out.

JD Lasica works with major com­pa­nies and non­prof­its on social media strate­gies. See his busi­ness pro­file, con­tact JD or leave a comment.

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