Brian Sweeting

Shaun Inman is going to unveil Mint this week. Mint is a web stats tool, which is the sucessor to his earlier (and free) ShortStat. It is interesting to see this trend of people building products and then using their markets (a.k.a. blog readers) to market the product to. This is exactly what Jim Coudal was talking about in his recent ALA article. Instead of building a product and then looking for a market, Shaun built up a market of blog readers, many of whom are ShortStat users, and now he has a love-group to hock Mint to. Pricing hasn’t been announced for Mint, but I highly doubt it will be free.

Shaun is also using something else that I’ve found very interesting lately. The idea of Blog2Blog marketing. What do I mean by this? Well, it seems that the bloggerati allstars feed off of each other. Shaun has tapped into the “markets” of other high profile bloggers to build buzz for Mint. As of this writing, Mike Davidson, Jeff Croft, Keegan Jones, Matt Thomas, Jon Hicks, Jason Santa Maria, and Rob Weychart have all posted on the “My favorite feature of Mint is…” meme. All of these people have been beta testers of Mint and now they are preaching its greatness to their readers. This has been going on a lot lately. Let’s look at a couple of other recent examples of Blog2Blog marketing.

37Signals

The Signals built a huge amount of buzz for Ta-Da List, Backpack, and sometime in the future Writeboard. They started out doing a series of four previews of the features of this mystery application on their SvN Blog. One that really got people going, was when they posted a screenshot that was large enough to give people some clues as to what this application was, but too small to give away any detail. For the final preview they pulled a Willy Wonka and gave out golden tickets to random people who had signed up to be notified upon Backpack’s launch. By the time Backpack had launched, they had built so much buzz that they had 10,000 accounts created in the first 24 hours of launch. Cost of this word-of-mouth advertising? Free.

BlinkSale

BlinkSale is web application targeted at small creative firms that allows them to send out invoices. I started noticing things popping up in my news aggregator about BlinkSale several weeks before they launched. The people behind BlinkSale used P2P Marketing by inviting some well-read bloggers to preview their application. Those people in-turn blogged about how great BlinkSale was. Then the buzz trickled down the blog food chain. By the time BlinkSale launched it had a huge amount of hype built up, and had a long list of testimonials to boot. The cost of this word of mouth advertising? Free.

Conclusion

I hope you see a trend here. Never before have companies been able to use word-of-mouth advertising so efficiently since the rise of blogging. Now just because this type of advertising is free, it isn’t necessarily easy. You have to put in the time. It takes time to build a community by giving them something they find useful, whether it’s a great product or sage advice. Word-of-mouth advertising is the hardest to come by, because it requires passionate customers. By blogging about your product/service which you are passionate about, you will win passionate customers.

If you know of other examples of Blog2Blog marketing, please post a comment about it.