A story about Lasoo recently ran on “A Current Affair” and resulted in a massive amount of interest in Lasoo.com.au. You can view the video under “Shopping revolution” at the ACA home page. Traffic to the site increased by a factor of 4 and hasn’t shown much sign of decreasing outside of standard weekly trends.
I believe this is indicative of “one shot marketing”. You get one shot to show your value proposition, and usually, from a usability stand point, about 10 seconds in that one shot. So, you must be compelling to maintain a stickiness with users. Following this, WOM marketing kicks in. This is what allows large web companies to grow organically purely through WOMM.
When considering the chicken and the egg principles of web marketing, consider letting the product market for you primarily, and then making lots of noise as a secondary tactic. This is incredibly important on the web, but probably just as applicable to products in the real world - except maybe commercial music (but is that the real world?)
The first rule of Facebook, is don’t talk about the Facebook (negatively at least). 
Facebook recently launched their new advertising platform and have raised a lot of privacy concerns. This is compounded with other Facebook woes, as they have also been accused of censorship around the issue, and are fighting a constant battle convincing marketers of good returns on Click Through Rates, which have been estimated as low as 0.04%. This post from Carnegie4Life points out some of the creepiness of their new features, and the paradigm shift in how privacy is managed on the Internet. Your anonymity on the Internet when surfing corporate websites that opt in to Facebook Beacon (particularly those you purchase from) is taking a bit of a back seat compared to how things were prior to the release of Beacon.
It is legitimate for users to be concerned about this, mostly because it has totally avoided any sort of permission marketing principles, and because it is co-opting users as affiliate marketers without their consent, and without reward. Similarly, marketers should be aware of their brand reputation in this light.
This disregard for user rights seems to be the most astounding trend with Facebook, and posits a dramatic difference in cultural identity to that of Google. Now, Google isn’t infallible, but their actions seem to point to some sort of economic justice in sharing the wealth (AdSense for example).
At the end of the day, a Facebook profile is content driving traffic, a recommendation is affiliate marketing, and none of this revenue generated flows to the end user. This seems to be greedy from Facebook, and presents an opportunity for competitors to give users a better value proposition. Not that these value propositions always take off - eg Metacafe pays for views of videos, yet YouTube doesn’t, but it is still the market leader. Similarly, advertising in the newsfeed doesn’t seem too far removed for from soliciting exception in an email spam filter.
It seems open platforms, transparency, respect for users and shared spoils seem to be indicative of a company’s longevity in the new Web.
“According to Hitwise data, Lasoo.com.au in its short existence has managed to capture 5.34% of the Shopping & Classifieds – Department stores classification and is ranked as the 7th Australian website (today) in this classification.”
It has been a busy couple of weeks, but the trends and feedback have been overwhelmingly positive. Growth continues to steam ahead
towards a much more efficient market benefiting retailers and consumers. Christmas spirit seems to be in full swing with the top search terms being; camera, ipod, wii, dvd, television and Christmas 
One can only imagine the impact this will have when people begin to browse Lasoo on their phones - quite possibly with the release of Opera Mini 4 Beta.
It seems, when market information is unlocked it enables a far more efficient market by providing information without the cost of transport and time, and by providing real-time feedback for supply and demand management. A fantastic case study of this is outlined in this economist article on how mobile information effected a fishing market.
