That's Hot: Spanning Sync's Viral Effort

What if you offered to pay your current customers for every new customer that they refer to you? How about offering the new referral $5 off of your prd/svc? That is what Spanning Sync is doing. Check this out...

Let's say you've bought a one year Spanning Sync subscription for $25. If you refer just one friend during that year, you'll get $5 back—in effect saving you 20%. But if you refer five friends, you'll get $25 back—and your subscription becomes effectively free. Not only that, but your friends get $5 off their purchases, saving them money right away. And since they pay only $20 for their subscriptions, they could each effectively get Spanning Sync for free by referring only four of their other friends.

Chris Marsden used twitter to find a current Spanning Sync customer from his network of relationships so that he could get a $5 off offer code and help one of his friends make $5. After he joined, he sent the following twet to all of his peeps...

cruciformity If you have been thinking about Spanning Sync save $5 today with discount code 8HXR7N.

What Spanning Sync has done is a great example of how customer evangelists can be motivated to do something that they probably would have done already - tell their friends. However, by offering a small incentive, the evangelists have an incentive to follow through on their good intentions. A Similar approach is being used by the digital music store: RockviewMusic.com.

Video: Google Webmaster Tips

Reid Yokoyama from the Google search quality team answers questions about duplicate content, themes for ecommerce sites, "noindex" attributes, and ranking well in local search.

It's Time to Cancel The Office

Not the tv show. I mean your office. Save gas, save time, save money, save your family and save the planet by shutting down your office. It is a no-brainer. Or is it?

I just got my October issue of Wired magazine. Brendan Koerner has written a cool article on telecommuting. Fear of loosing control has kept 60% of American companies from allowing their employees to work from home. However 81% of managers believe that telecommuting improves productivity. The article also points out that it costs more than 15k per year to provide one employee with 200 sqft of cube space. With gas prices at $4 a gallon, workers can save an average of $1,200 if they worked from home. Check out the Penn State study.

It is time to decentralize, downsize, optimize and telecommutize. We now have the technological resources to make virtual offices much more real. Now you can get rid of your business computers, servers, phone systems, and the software needed to run them. Oh, and how about those folks that keep insisting that you need all of this stuff. Well, that's your decision.

"The Good, the Bad, and the Unknown about Telecommuting: Meta-Analysis of Psychological Mediators and Individual Consequences" is available online at www.apa.org/journals/releases/apl9261524.pdf.

Wall Street Madness

Did last week's Wall Street roller coaster convince you to keep doing business the same way? Are you banking your future on past performance?

The world has changed is changing, will continue to change. We are so far away from where we've been that there is no way to measure future impact. Past performance is past performance, it can't predict the future any longer. You need a business model that is future oriented.

It is time to get lean, work smart, and leverage these irreversible changes to your advantage. Are you ready for some creative thinking? How about cutting your overhead, increasing your visibility and expanding your business all at the same time?