The subject of this week is Social Influence and Diffusion. As we know from the course, the power of social influence and viral marketing is huge. When I was reading the case of this week I was actually quite surprised. I really thought that Cork’d had a really good idea. And I still think they had. Unfortunately, it didn’t work out well for them.
From my point of view, this is because of their business model. The biggest competitor of Cork’d was Snooth.com. The biggest difference between Cork’d and Snooth.com was that Snooth.com allowed ads on their website and that they let their users shop on their side. On the contrary, Cork’d didn’t allow ads on their site and asked advertisers an annual fee of $999,-. Why would an advertiser pay $999,- if they can’t see how much they benefit from it? Why would they pay an annual fee of $999,- for a whole new website? I would have preferred to advertise on Snooth.com as well.
The most interesting article for me was Leveraging public sentiment to beat the market. I think it is quite interesting and scary to see how you can influence the stock market with one single tweet.
All in all it became clear that the power of social influence and viral marketing is huge and that is exactly why platforms such as Cork’d and Snooth.com can be very successful as they let their users share their profile on Facebook and Twitter. In this way more brand awareness will be created and more potential customers are reached. It’s not about if you use viral marketing, it is about how you use viral marketing.
