Consulting firm Accenture has a paper called Invitation Marketing: Using Customer Preferences to Overcome Ad Avoidance. While the paper paints in broad strokes, it is clear that Google has implemented a variation with great (Orkut) and even greater (Gmail) success.
How many otherwise respectable folk have you seen dedicating email broadcasts and blog entries to announcing that they have a few Gmail invites to give away, especially in the last couple weeks? I lost count long ago. Ad avoidance overcome, indeed.
Kudos to Google’s marketing department.
Updates: Wendy Seltzer cited this post: Gmail’s Viral Marketing. My trackback broke. Oops.
I like Joey Hess‘s take on the Gmail invite virus: stop wasting my time with gmail. Joey notes that the going price on eBay for both Gmail invites and ancient 1 gigabyte hard drives is less than one dollar.
pleas gime me a Invitation
mojtaba, you don’t need an invitation anymore.
[…] Invitation Marketing: Six Gmail Shills Available congratulates marketers and ridicules “otherwise respectable folk”, where the problem begins and need not be explained. Invitation marketing has become ubiquitous (“invite your friends”) and rarely takes the crude form of breathless “I have invites!” posts. Invitations help ration new services and discourage spam and other exploitation on same, encourage communication, put new services on relatively equal marketing footing, and steer new services away from sleazy, expensive, inaccurate, privacy compromising advertising and other marketing. […]