Thursday, November 10th, 2005, 1:53 pm
Invites and Free Advertisements
Filed under:
A sign that is sure to get people’s attention
ATHER common these are aptly-orchestrated campaigns that attract media attention and stir talks among people. It is a form of free advertisement, which benefits from people’s willingness to propagate a message.
Take this code debugging project for example. They offer beer, they offer a trip to Roumania (timely due to Halloween) and finally they receive a free advert on Slashdot and free labour to test their program. Slashdot editors, among others, fell for it…
The winning formula:
- Set up a contest
- Make the reward interesting
- 1st prize: Get free ads
- Invite just the ‘talented’ few
- Users test program
- Hacks found and fixed
- 2nd prize: Profit
Jeff Veen explains why the idea of invites is similar. WordPress.com takes this approach when accumulating users for a new Web service, possibly following the tactics of Google Mail. This also may prevent misuse and bad activity as I previously explained. From a commercial point-of-view, it is a disguised form of playing hard to get, though there true intentions behind it, namely quality assurance (e.g. misuse of 2 GB mail account for MP3 sharing and storage) and reliable moderation, e.g. spam flagging in Akismet, which can be tricky.
