We all know that word of mouth is the best form of advertising and with the emergence of Web 2.0 companies have an ever increasing number of platforms from where they can facilitate conversations between their consumers. Recently companies have become super smart and sites are looking for ways to recruit consumers that are excited and passionate about their products to be sales people for them.
Hollrr.com, currently only in invitation Beta, is a website with a mission to help small companies launch new products. Consumers join hollrr.com, find a product that they love and add it to thier profile by joining it’s “Tribe of Followers”. From here they can write about their experiences with the product in a forum very similar to Twitter. For those wanting to learn about a new product, they can search from the homepage, products are grouped into categories (e.g, Web, Music, iPhone) and then rated on a scale according to how popular those products are with the community of Hollrr.com. Hollrr enables consumers to help spread the word about products they think deserve to succeed by writing an endorsement, downloading a widget to their blog or Facebook page and sending a link to their friends via Twitter or email. Hollrr also rewards members for recruiting new customers. Through Hollrr’s partnerships with the companies behind the products, rewards are distributed to Tribe members in two ways. In cases where the maker’s reward system allows Hollrr to track individual users, participants get directly rewarded for each person who clicks through from their endorsement to the product website; otherwise, rewards are split among the whole Tribe, with the greatest shares going to those who joined earliest. (When direct rewards are possible, Hollrr still contributes a separate Tribe reward among the group as well.) Each user is allowed a maximum of five products to promote, and payments are made through an Amazon Flexible Payment account.
This type of consumer generated promotion is also gaining popularity within the music industry. Peoplesmusicstore.com provides a platform where consumers can create their own storefront. From here they can recommend and sell music that they like. Creating a store is free and owners get rewarded with free MP3 downloads. This means that artists and labels are still able to be paid a full cash royalty for their songs.
This type of promotion could segway into any type of product or service and it is a great way to recruit active brand ambassadors for your product.
Image from TheMattBrown.com
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