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?)
“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.
When we build a website, it seems quite obvious that there is one thing that you want in order to be able to monetize, it is traffic. More visitors means more opportunity to monetize. So then, it should stand to reason that if you are measuring rapidly growing visitors then you are winning the war…right?
Well, not entirely. The real objective of most websites (if not all websites) is to deliver information. Granted, for some, the payload is in the ad information, some is in the information that will lead to a transaction - but at the core, that is all a website wants to do, and really all a website can do.
So, if delivering information efficiently is the absolute goal, why are we so focused on visitors? Isn’t this just a proxy measurement?
It is because, for many companies it is the most relevant metric for their web strategy, since their “web-footprint” is small, or limited to just their email and website. It is also because to those who don’t quite understand the game, a high monthly UV means a popular site, which equates to a high value.
That thinking isn’t flawed, however, in a perfect world YouTube’s content could reach me at exactly the moment I wanted it, in whatever virtual location I was in. So long as they could deliver their advertising payload with it, this becomes the most efficient form of information delivery, and I would never visit their site. So, in a perfect world their visitors would be zero, yet they would be able to reach an audience far larger than before (and track the server calls).
This is why widgets have the buzz that they do, it is the thinking paradigm shift that information wants to be free and is virtual, so shouldn’t be chained to a domain (albeit in a virtual environment) .
This change in thinking, is taken to a radical nth degree in this discussion on “information centric network architecture”. It sounds like a much more efficient way of organising the web.
