When I was at the Innovative Marketing Conference in New York last month, I heard presentations from several inventive firms doing "buzz marketing," and talked with a marketing professional who participates in the two P&G "word-of-mouth" intiatives, Vocalpoint and Tremor. However, no one was talking about the model being used by Streetwise in Los Angeles. "Use it or lose it" is a powerful approach where marketers present their product or service for a vote. If 80% of the influencers want to promote the product, a campaign is launched.
If they decline a product they are asked to explain why and this feedback is given to the marketer. This approach sounds very authentic to me. Now Tremor and Vocalpoint don’t encourage members to promote a product they don’t like, but it seems to me that advertisers will not get as much from buzz networks that don’t start to pick up on these Streetwise tactics.

ClickZ: A Buzz Network With a Twist, 2006-Jul-12, by Zachary Rodgers

"Use it or lose it" is also part of an overarching strategy of transparency, De Pastino said. "You don’t get emails from us saying, ‘Here’s something to blast out as many people as you can and whoever sends it to five million people wins the prize.’" … More often than not, the offline channel promotion involves distributing schwag to the most active team members, for instance those who have added a client’s HTML banner to their MySpace page and reached out to all their friends there.