I really enjoyed the talk by Rebecca Thorman at Alice.com at Web2.0 Expo.
Six months prior to the Alice.com launch they started using social media, company blogs, Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube to connect with a list of key influencers.
Lead by Rebecca Thorman, the company developed a community of loyalists by targetting mom and frugal bloggers who provided input during the pre-launch phase and then on launch brought attention and grassroots credibility to the service.
The Alice team also offered incentives like discounts and coupons to select bloggers, so they could extend incentives to their readers to try the service.
In the first week after launch, Alice received 110 pieces of unique coverage and nearly 70,000 tweets. In early June, the pre-launch Alice.com site had 170,000 site visits — before anyone could even use the service. At launch time in July, Alice.com’s traffic jumped to nearly 400,000 site visits.
All pretty amazing when you consider that Alice does not invest in advertising — this was all grassroots Social Media Marketing.
- Establish a list of the key influencers for your service or products. Ideally they should be the leading bloggers in your industry with lots of followers and influence.
- Start commenting on their blogs making sure your comments are not just a ‘plug’ for your services. Make a positive contribution and don’t spam.
- After a couple of months of following, contributing and adding value, approach the blogger. It is much more likely that they will know you and have time for you.
- Make sure you have something interesting to show them.
- Alice found Twitter much more effective in reaching the blogging community and this was used more prior to launch.
- Following launch, their Facebook page attracted much more activity because because of the broad consumer appeal of Facebook.