Insightful articles, opinion and commentary about mobile and web.

In this month’s HotHouse podcast, Yooster founder Justin Kirby talks about how the company helped Australian natural healthcare company Blackmores create word of mouth for one of its supplements aimed at arthritis sufferers.

Yooster recruited 1,000 people to try samples of the product, and by the end of the campaign 85% were converted to the product – and all of those converts had told their friends and family and had convinced at least one person to use the product. This niche product, which was not suitable for traditional advertising, had a noticeable lift in sales as a result of the campaign.

read more

After all the fear mongering that’s been going around about the hazards of social media, this heartening article in smh points out how iPhone applications, Facebook, Twitter and Google have literally been saving lives in Haiti.

Read the article here.

By Simon van Wyk

In the same way that digital technology helped convert the world’s oldest profession into the booming global industry of Internet pornography, word of mouth, probably the oldest of all marketing techniques, has emerged as arguably the most powerful selling tool of the 21st century, thanks to the Internet.

Traditional advertising and marketing is in chaos as people turn their back on advertising messages and turn to recommendations from their friends, via social networking tools such as Facebook and Twitter, when deciding what products and brands to buy.

Businesses who can use online tools to cleverly and ethically leverage the power of word of mouth will be able to successfully make the transition from traditional marketing .

Word of mouth marketing online can even be a successful business model in itself. Yelp, a US-based service where people write reviews of restaurants and other local service providers, recently knocked back a US$500 million offer from Google to buy its business.

Justin Kirby, interviewed for this month’s HotHouse podcast, is the founder and CEO of both one of the UK’s first digital agencies and Australia’s word of mouth marketing firm Yooster, and is a globally recognised expert on word of mouth marketing.

read more

HotHouse founder Simon van Wyk talks to Justin Kirby, founder of Yooster, Australia’s pioneering word of mouth marketing agency. Justin is also founder and CEO of Digital Media Communications, one of UK’s pioneer digital agencies. He discusses the ins and outs of word of mouth marketing, why social media is a misnomer, and the seductive but ultimately counterproductive nature of viral campaigns.

Listen to the podcast below.

 

 Justin Kirby Podcast.mp3: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

HotHouse enjoyed a day in the sun - and in the river - before closing office for the holidays. We headed up to Peats Bite on the Hawkesbury river for a fantastic end of year long lunch. Afterwards we refreshed ourselves with drinks and a few even had a spontaneous splash in the water. Check out a few of the pics below.

Drinks at Peats Bite

read more

By Simon van Wyk

How do you measure the impact of blogger engagement and other social media activities? Because you’re able to collect more hard data for online activities than for traditional marketing activities, there is an inherent assumption by management that online magically provides an answer to the old dilemma of “Half of the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the problem is, I don’t know which half.”

The thing is, it’s not nearly as simple as that. Although a lot of data is collected, it still needs to be harvested, organised and interpreted. And if you want to express the data in terms of return on investment (ROI), you need to be able to match the ROI framework used in other parts of the business.

read more