Like.com and the Power of the Blogosphere

Last week Riya made news with the announcement of Like.com. I’ve been silent until now because the rule on ReveNews prohibits posting anything that is self promotional – though I would argue by blogging you are promoting yourself.;-)

Anyway, Like.com is news and what Riya did made headlines in the Blogosphere and in the more mainstream media, so it seems like fair game to me especially since David Lewis and Carsten Cumbrowski have already posted on Like.com. So, I thought it might be interesting to write a couple entries about our campaign last week and what I learned as a marketer.

You would think by now, I would have learned the power of the Blogopshere, but every once in a while I get reminded. Friday morning when I went to Alexaholic was one of those moments. This is what I found.

Thanks to everyone who wrote and linked to us! This was traffic from blogs and some PR we did. There was no paid advertising up those days.

Yes, Yes, I know Alexa is not perfect, but it’s in the ball part, and of course, the traffic will die down (and it has started to). But this is a nice start.

Riya learned the Blogosphere blast trick from Flock who basically invented it. What we did in this case was keep the product in stealth mode and line up as many bloggers to write about it as possible. I think it’s the product that carried the day thought. It’s the nexus of technology (that appealed to men) with celebrities and shopping (that appealed to women) that made an impact this strong. In this product release is there is something for everyone about which to write.

Like.com basic user proposition is to provide users a better way to search very aesthetic products and we launched with handbags, shoes, jewelry and watches for that reason. We do plan to expand our categories and overtime morph to a full blown visual search engine, but we are starting as a shopping comparison engine for aesthetic products.

What I found really interesting is the different reaction by men and women about this product and I’ll write about that in the next few days.

Addendum: Munjal Shah, my CEO had a great blog this morning where he talked about our PR campaign and blog campaign. He pointed out that PR played a big role in our traffic, which is true, but most of it did not kick in until the day after launch, so besides for the Wall Street Journal who broke the story the day of launch, most traffic that day was from blogs.

Addenum: I deleted a comment that just pointed out what I stated, which is Alexa is not perfect. The spirt of the comment was just out of line, so I thought it best to remove it.