In
the first five days of its pre-launch campaign, a new website combining social
networking and affiliate marketing has gained over 10,000 members. Built around a ?one-click? affiliate
networking tool that enables individual users to quickly build a large personal
buying network (or ?grapevine?), OfferGrapevine.com is alleged to offer
unprecedented opportunities for leveraging social media?s viral marketing
potential.
Engineered
by online marketing
firm In Touch Marketing, the new offering stems from the conviction that word of mouth is, and always has been, the most
effective channel for advertising campaigns, and that web-based social
networking is its most potent incarnation to date. The press release announcing the site?s early
success backs up this diagnosis with figures from a Pew Internet
research research poll, whose findings include the fact that online shopping has grown
by over 500% since 2000, and that 81% of all internet users rely on the
internet to research their purchases.
Conceived
to answer these trends, OfferGrapevine.com functions as a searchable shopping resource
featuring hundreds of
major consumer and B2B companies, combined with a social networking platform and an
affiliate system that pays users to recommend the site to friends,
colleagues and family members, a viral process referred to as ?building a
grapevine?.
In virtue of this ?One-click? system, each purchase of recommended products or services through the network generates revenue for the friend, or even friend of a friend who endorsed them. A consumer review and voting
feature is also planned to be released within the coming week.
Avowedly timed in order to
capitalise on the next Christmas shopping spree, OfferGrapevine.com has
announced that it hopes to have reached an audience of over 200,000 members by
autumn this year.