The Problem:
Everyone knows that the fastest way to grow a new business is to generate positive word-of-mouth references. But, what’s the most efficient way for a start-up online company to do that?
The Company:
YouTube allows people to share their videos online and became the fastest growing website in the history of the Internet. Its growth was so impressive that it was acquired in 2006 by Google for $1.65 billion in stock.
The Technology Solution:
How does a startup come out of nowhere and in 18 months get purchased for more than any other online company? It does it by generating more traffic than anyone else. On an average day, YouTube serves more than 100 million video streams.
Although many success factors assisted the rise of YouTube’s traffic, researchers Deepak Thomas and Vineet Buch concluded in 2007 that the company owed much of its phenomenal growth to the use of widget marketing. On the Internet, a widget is a small software program that is designed to be easily inserted into a webpage to provide some added function. There are widgets that are self-contained games, widgets that display late-breaking news items, and widgets that are simply designed to attract attention. You can even create a widget to display the latest entry from your weblog on another website.
By making it easy (through the use of widgets) for visitors to embed YouTube hosted videos on their personal blogs and websites, the site also made it easy for its users to introduce new people to the joys of online video viewing.
The Outcome:
The buzz generated by the clever videos people hosted on YouTube created an escalating flow of traffic to the site. Even better, the resulting incoming links from widely dispersed YouTube widgets on a multitude of websites further boosted YouTube’s Google page ranking. In the end, that flow of traffic became worth more than a billion dollars in less than two years.
But what can you do if the customers who most need what you sell are stubbornly resisting your marketing efforts? Tomorrow, DataDocsDailyDose.com will show you how the world’s largest car manufacturer has learned to help customers who don’t want to admit they have a problem.
–J.D. Mosley-Matchett, Ph.D.
“The Data Doc“
You have questions? She has answers!
Data Doc's Daily Dose... 