Word of Mouse

Companies like Facebook and Google have been built mainly if not only through word-of-mouth and word-of-mouse. Take the case of Gmail.

When Google released its free Gmail email service to the world, it didn't advertise and didn't even open it up to the world. The Yahoo! email and Hotmail services it wanted to compete against were mostly free and open.

Instead Google made it an invitation-only service. In other words, Google, recruited its own user base as champions of its new Gmail service.

At one point, Gmail invitations went for $150 on eBay!

The company released its service to a few hundred employees who were given the power to invite a few friends. The latter, in turn, would be given invitation to hand out to their friends after using the Gmail service for a while.

Is exclusivity so inherently powerful that anything becomes attractive if it's exclusive? Not always. In technology markets the products or service has to offer real value. It was instantly apparent that users of competing services were experiencing pain, like running out of storage. Among other things, Gmail offered for free ten to a hundred times the storage that competing services offered.

Via Google Book Search