Institute For The Future

Your Friends as Salespeople

 

Via Springwise comes word of an interesting marketing ploy from Domino's Pizza: They've developed a widget that you can place on your social networking profile, blog or other online presence, which your friends can then click on in order to order a pizza. For every order, you get 0.5 percent of the sale. Think of it as affiliate marketing meets social networking.

 

 

The logic behind the widget, as Springwise puts it, is fairly straightforward:

 

 

 

All the marketing experts in the world can't hold a candle to the persuasive power socially connected consumers have over each other; the key is harnessing that power and putting it to work for your brand—with rewards, of course, for the consumers in question. Who will be the first brand in *your* industry to leverage the virtually limitless marketing muscle of sellsumers?

 

 

 

 

Count me as intrigued, but skeptical. For one thing, the incentives--0.5 percent of every sale--work out to a tiny amount of money. Even a pizza order for a fairly sizable group--say, a $100 purchase--only earns the end user 50 cents. I'd be astonished if anyone could earn more than a couple dollars per year through their Domino's widget, yet, in exchange, they'd have to plaster their Facebook page and other forms of online identity with a Domino's ad all the time. Would you want your friends and family to think of you as a pizza shill for the chance to earn, literally, a couple bucks?

 

 

Probably not.

 

 

The bigger problem, however, is that nobody needs the help of their social network to think to order Domino's Pizza. This isn't the sort of local place you might stumble upon after a couple years living somewhere and then tell all your friends about. This is a decades old, widely-known chain. Nor is Facebook the place to go to order a pizza--the context, in other words, doesn't make much sense.

 

 

But these latter issue points, I think, to a different potential in social affiliate marketing in food as well as other industries. There might be some potential to use affiliate marketing programs in the context of expert, local recommendations--say, a widely known San Francisco food blogger pointing her readers to her restaurant picks--though even then, some pretty significant hurdles remain. I trust my friends, or bloggers I respect, in part because I believe that they will give me their honest opinion. I think my friends will recommend their favorite pizza, for example, not the pizza that nets them a nickel, whether or not they really like it. And, in fact, Yelp has run into some trouble for giving the illusion of honest recommendations that turn out to stem from crude advertising.

 

 

Would it be possible to resolve that trust issue on an individual's social networking page? I think it might be in more local contexts, where one's reputation and expertise is already connected to a product, and where endorsing something bad would have a major social cost. But in the meantime, I do expect we'll see a lot of big brands following Domino's lead in trying to figure out how to turn our friends into salespeople.