I just got notice of a new service called RippleFunction. No, it isn’t a party where they serve very low cost alcohol. It refers to the “ripple effect” of promoting events through social media contact networks.
The concept works as follows:
1) You plan a webinar or webcast for which you charge a registration fee (the system works just as well for local physical events, but that’s not my focus area). Let’s say you charge $100 to register.
2) You create a special discount code for people who share the promotion through the Ripple network. We’ll assume 10% off for a $90 registration.
3) RippleFunction gives you some HTML/Javascript code for a banner bar you can put on your web page. It lets people know that if they click to spread the word and share the promotion on their social account, they will get a secret discount code for their own registration. If you aren’t a web programmer, you can have RippleFunction host the promotional event page with your page embedded inside theirs as the content. Effectively it results in the same look… a promotional banner at the top and your event copy below.
3) When a person clicks the link to share your event promotion, they get the discount code sent to them which they can use for their own registration. Hopefully they don’t just turn around and retweet that code out to the universe. Instead, others should see the same offer… “Share this promotion and benefit by getting a discount code you can use.”
4) RippleFunction takes 10% of your original ticket price for all sales made with the code. So in our example, you end up with $80 revenue ($100 full price – $10 for the discount – $10 to RippleFunction). They also provide analytics showing the number of the number of shares through different channels, the top influencers who caused click throughs, and so on.
I’m not sure about this… As with any marketing approach, test and measure is the only way to see if it works for you and your audience. It does have the potential to let greed carry the message. But it limits the network somewhat because the only people with an incentive to help share the information are people who want to sign up and attend themselves. You don’t get a benefit from “altruists” who don’t want to attend but are willing to help spread the word to others out of the kindness of their hearts.
If you try it, let me know how it works for you!
