Over the past 9 months Blazetrak has taken on shapes and directions that we could not have predicted in a million years. Some things we thought would happen have yet to happen, and some things we thought were total long shots have fallen completely into place. One thing is for sure, Twitter’s power is our greatest asset and by far the most unpredictable. First a little background:
Our business is based on two solid interdependent value propositions:
- Celebrities and Industry Professionals (Professionals) – help them find talent, promote themselves online, and monetize their expertise in the process.
- Customers – help them find highly sought after opportunities and connect directly with the top celebrities and industry professionals in the world. The customers receive a video response within a guaranteed amount of time or they receive 100% of their money back. We also help to promote the customer once they connect though our platform.
During our incubation (pre-launch) consultants, investors, lawyers, friends, and family all told us that we would have to pull together a huge marketing budget before we could really let the world know about our business. Having turned down investors with the decision to make Blazetrak a reality on our own, it became apparent quickly that our greatest marketing tool would be to leverage one or both of our “value recipients” through Twitter. That is, market for free.
Because each Blazetrak Professional profile is like a small business, each proprietor of that small business is incentivized to uniquely market to their followers. On a daily basis, Blazetrak Professionals tweet about their most compelling opportunities. The captive followers then proceed to retweet, which depending on how compelling the opportunity is, will usually manifest new registrations and subsequent conversions on our site. In some instances the Professionals will become very creative with their profiles, and leverage not only their own twitter account but also the twitter accounts of additional high profile individuals.
Here is an example:
On Aug 1 2010, world famous music producer and songwriter Rodney “Darkchild” Jerkins started a competition on Blazetrak guaranteeing that he would sign at least one person to a publishing deal. This is a huge opportunity and one that is seen very rarely these days. Darkchild was willing to take a bet on this type of guarantee because of the consistency of quality he experience over a 6 month period on our platform. Approximately one hour after the competition went live and people were allowed to submit, Darkchild (@only1Darkchild) tweeted the following tweet to his 30K followers:
Enter The Producers/Songwriters Competition Now! http://blazetrak.com/ U Got What It Takes To Get A Publishing Deal? Then Lets Go! RT!
As I am writing this, about 33 hours have passed since the original tweet above. Over the 33 hours, the tweet was retweeted or re-retweeted 143 times to over 3.5 million people. I was careful in my exhaustive analysis to quantify these numbers minus as many redundancies as I could possibly realize. Now that being said, some big factors played into this level of aggregation, including retweets from Sean Combs (@iamdiddy) and Brandy Norwood (@4everBrandy). In addition to those heavy hitters, the tweet also was Retweeted by LaShawn Daniels (@bigshiz) and Shontelle Layne (@Shontelle_Layne).
What is most compelling about the above sequence of events is best displayed on our analytics and on our admin panel – that being a spike in traffic, registrations, and revenue – all up more than 500%.
In our case, Twitter has supreme power. It allows us to let the world know about Blazetrak’s value by channeling to markets captivated by highly sought-after and respected people. Although this kind of marketing potential is extremely exciting, nothing excites us more than the prospect that through the aggregation of our value message to the right markets, we will tap some of the world’s most untapped resources: that being potential for greatness; tremendous amounts of talent, looking for discovery by the people that can really make something incredible happen through the right connections.
My prediction is that Darkchild (with a single tweet) has planted his golden shovel deep into talents fertile soil. When the time comes (Oct 1) to go on Ustream and announce the winner, Darkchild will surely introduce us all to the next generation of musical genius.
We have only begun to see the power of this type of marketing for Blazetrak. In the coming months we will be experimenting with similar scenarios to test the overall impact of messages from the “right people” through twitter. At some point soon we might have that marketing budget that everyone said we needed, but maybe, just maybe, we won’t need it.
Nathaniel Casey – Blazetrak Co-Founder
