isn't known for having a vibrant trade show floor, but that is where I found Spiceworks, the Austin-based developer of a free network administration tool.
There are lots of free admin tools online, but Spiceworks distinguishes itself by making a product that is very easy to use, and creating a community of more than 350,000 engaged business users that advertisers are desperate to reach. I asked Spiceworks co-founder and VP of marketing, Jay Hallberg, for the secrets of the company's social marketing success.
Why are you guys at SXSW? It isn't a very business focused show, after all.
Hallberg: There are a few reasons for us to be at SXSW. A lot of our advertisers—Dell, HP, Microsoft, Rackspace, etc—and agencies we work with have people at the show and it's good for us to connect with them. We are also one of the fastest growing Austin-based companies so it's great to be at a big local event like SXSW to show our support... and connect with other folks around town. We've figured out a lot on the social media front but we're always looking for new ideas. And our developers are here to sharpen their skills.
You guys give Spiceworks away for free so how do you make money?
It's essentially a media business model where we build a large, valuable audience and charge advertisers to reach them. We have a lot of options for these advertisers ranging from impression-based branding ads, to cost-per-lead offers for direct marketers, to surveys and polls for the market researchers, and events to meet the SMB IT pros in person. Over the past several months we have rolled out a number of community engagement packages that lets marketers interact with the community using social media—placing clearly marked avatars in the community, asking questions, providing content, etc. LinkedIn is an example of a successful company that has built multiple revenue streams like this.
How important the Spiceworks community of users to your business plan?
The community is incredibly important to our business, and business plan. We've been able to crowdsource much of what we do to the community from product management, to support, to IT best practices, to marketing. This helps us keep our costs low but more importantly, the community helps one another, so every person that we add increases the value of the network to each other—it's the network effect, brought to life across an IT community.
SMB vendors like Freshbooks and BatchBlue are sharing APIs, are you planning to do anything similar?
We haven't announced anything formal yet but if you go to our site you'll see you are spot on. This is public in the sense that it has been out there for a couple of months but it has been very quiet... we're emailing our users next week to tell them about the plugins and APIs. We already have 47 plugins and widgets written by Spiceworks employees and users who are using our initial set of published APIs. We have a lot more planned on this front.
No comments:
Post a Comment