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Word on the Street Psst...your friends may be shilling for a soap company. Why people love marketing by word of month. The next time someone you know raves about a dish detergent or motor oil, consider this: you might be on the receiving end of a marketing campaign. It s a new world for people whose job it is to sell you things, what with consumers digital video recorder-enabled ability to skip over ads they don t want to see, and their Internet-empowered freedom to find out all the stuff left out of a 30-sec.TV spot. That s driving marketers to all sorts of new places, including your circle of friends. Procter Gamble, a pioneer in the field, has been focusing on word of mouth fox six years through its Tremor division, which has enlisted 255,000 teenagers in the US. to tell their friends about brands like Herbal Essences and Old Spice. Last year, P G signed up 500,000 adult volunteers, all mothers, for Vocalpoint, a program in which the moms evangelize about pet food, paper towels and hair color. P G gives the women marketing materials and coupons, but they are free to say whatever they like about the products. BzzAgent, a firm that specializes in word-of-mouth marketing, has its 260,000 volunteers submit detailed profiles about their habits and interests, which BzzAgent uses to match them to word-of-mouth campaigns for products made by companies such as Nestle, Arby s, Philips, Kraft and BP. | 
