Developing a consumer database by capturing email addresses during a pre-launch phase for a beta site, product or service release is easy to do and can serve as a spring board for amplifying viral pass along once your service, product or brand is made publicly available.

If you’re looking for a great  example of a beta release site, check out Likaholix “a fun and easy way to share and discuss your likes and discover new ones with people you know.”  It appears as if the company is diving into the “interest + relationship = trusted recommendation” arena.  Very interesting!

So how did Likaholix.com create a great beta release site?  It starts with a pretty simple landing page with a number of well executed elements to capture email addresses.  Note: This  framework can drive a 20% to 40% conversion rate for email capture off traffic to the site.

Here are few key takeaways to consider as you build your beta release site:

1. Prominently position data capture elements. The goal is acquire as many emails as early as possible to support future release goals as well as to gain insight from users. The underlying goal is to make it as easy as possible for visitors to sign up and become registered active users.  Start by making it as easy as possible for people to see how to sign up.  Site visits for early releases are in many cases are friends and family as well as individuals that have a category affinity or interest in a technology or service. Think technology application geeks that want to be the first to try something and, blog about it.

2. Keep data requests to a minimum. In this case, Likaholix is only asking for an email address.  Very smart.

3. Create exclusivity. Likaholix uses “private beta” and presents a relatively small pool of participants with an added “counter” of the number remaining beta accounts remain to drive email submissions.  The call to action - Request Account - is used to reinforce the perceived notion of exclusivity.  Again, very smart.

4. Deliver an activation link in an email communication that is triggered off the submission of an email address. There is always room for upgrades and, in this case I believe Likaholix would benefit by expanding their email communication model to include:

I. A reference to their privacy policy with a link to a privacy policy page. It is on the site but always nice to reinforce this information in the confirmation email.

II. Reinforce the incentive - five Amazon Kindles to drive activation — in the communication and turn it into a data capture vehicle.  Before Seth Godin sold Yoyodyne to Yahoo, he was running one the best email marketing data capture models online.  His Get Rich Click (GRC) framework prompted users for information before they could gain access to other links/contest information. In any event, Likoholix does request additional information - name, screenname and password - when you activate your link.  Again, nicely done.  Small innocuous data elements.  One small step for user, one giant step for Likoholix.

III. Leverage celebrity endorsements.  The activation email doesn’t mention Paul Buchheit or Jason Shellen.  Paul and Jason are Google rock stars and are likely to drive Tweets and blog posts because of the work they did at Google.  This is a missed opportunity to fully leverage the implied technology endorsement!

IV. Humanize the closing by including the name of the founder(s) or community director.  I would encourage Bindu Reddy and Arvind Sundararajan to be people signing email communicating to members of Likaholix community.

V. Add the “if this wasn’t you who requested to use to this cool tool” disclaimer paragraph to inform non-requesters that their email address is not going to be sent to fundraisers but rather that they — the receiver — simply need to act like a couch potato and do nothing because this is the last time they will hear from your great company unless they of course decide to click the activation link.  Problem solved.

5. Include a simple incentive framework to boost conversion off the data capture page. The incentive - the possibility of winning one of five Amazon Kindles - was enhanced by an implied technology endorsement from two super geeks (see above) who are judging the contest.  And, more importantly, a viral marketing campaign (get 10 friends — kind of a mini Moby campaign was integrated into the beta release to stimulate tool usage and viral pass along.  Well done Likaholix!

6.  The link to the Privacy policy is a nice touch.

TAGS: Likoholix, Bindu Reddy, Arvind Sundararajan, Google, beta release, viral marketing, Amazon Kindles, Paul Buchheit, Jason Shellen, Seth Godin,

When you think of Twitter the first thought that pops into your mind is most likely not community destination but Chad Engle is challenging that concept.  Chad’s created Design Community Twitter Hours a Thursday night - 6:00 pm to 8:00 pm EST - online group that connects via Twitter at @DCTH to discuss graphic design.

I interviewed Chad recently to get his take on Twitter and community.

Audience Machine:  Let’s start from the beginning.  What was your inspiration for creating DCTH - Design Community Twitter Hours?

DCTH:  Sounds good. The inspiration came from a conversation one night with Adelle and Graham about the design community. We had a conversation in a forum type chat room and it was impossible to keep up and it seemed tons of people had questions about everything design related. So I decided that we as a design community needed a forum to talk to each other.

Audience Machine: When did you activate your the DCTH — http://twitter.com/DCTH  — account on Twitter?  And, and many Followers do you have?  What do you know about your Followers?  Who are they?

DCTH:  Believe it or not I did not even think about making a twitter account for DCTH. I ran it from my personal twitter account ( @chadengle ) the first few weeks and then Niki Brown was a co-host of #DCTH for a few weeks (and will be again provided she will help ) mentioned that I should have an account for it so I made one. At first I just let people follow it who were designers/creatives. Then I realized thats not really how I wanted to build my network, I wanted to make go after as many designers and creatives as possible. So I have started to follow them all because I want to build the DCTH community as big as we can make it. Its been great to hear all of the success stories and have the community support that has come from this. (more…)

In May of 2006, I published a research paper with Osterman Research highlighting the challenges brands would face as they embarked on implementing word of mouth marketing campaigns.  The study took 6 months to implement and eventually grew to 54 pages of content.

My goal was to provide organizations interested in, or even intimidated by, word-of-mouth (WOM) campaigns with data and guidance designed to help them integrate this exciting strategy into their marketing and media plans.

The study is titled Perceptions, Practices & Ethics in Word of Mouth Marketing.  And, I’m making it available again.  Is it still relevant?  Well, from a planning standpoint I think the topics are still as relevant today as they were two years ago.

I also turned the release of the study into an example of how to support viral marketing pass along.  The study was downloaded over 150,000 from May 2006 to February 2009.

Here’s how we did it:

1. We started with no marketing budget and decided to use a free e-book framework to drive distribution.
2. We became members of communities to hear what was going on and to gain qualified participants for the survey. This platform also allowed us to announce to relevant communities when the study was available.
3. Created a database. We captured the email addresses, names, and company names of all survey participants. We also included email requests for the survey that were appended to the database. There are 217 records in the database for email requests.
4. We communicated. We thanked individuals for participating.  And, sent them a link to pick up the results.
5. We said something important. The study took 6 months from formulation to publishing and we focused on giving readers valuable and actionable information. The content publishing focus was on tips and techniques.
6. We focused on co-creation. This is an important step. We reached out to 45 industry experts and competitor firms in our industry ten days before we published and, asked them for their feedback and insight. 38 individuals responded, and 17 of those people provided lengthy comments and insight that enhanced the quality of the work and required us to rethink some of the conclusions and rationale. Personally, I’m still thrilled and humbled that competitor firms say that the work is incredibly valuable and comprehensive.
7. We recognized the contributions of those that contributed feedback.  And, even asked some individuals for reviews of the study that we published as Accolades.
8. We did a blogged press release. Having a blog press release really helped to drive distribution.
9. We created a counter so that we could track downloads.
10. We provided links to relevant publishers that cover the WOM industry.
11. We talked about the study at industry events.
12. We commented on comments to be part of the conversation.  Thanking people for reviews gave us more content to reference in the form of lists of people who were talking about the study.  This became blog post content.
13. We shared our success by publishing download counts.
14. We published snippets of content from the study with additional insight on our blog.
15. Once it was added on Wikipedia — we linked to it.  NOTE:  If you feel the study is worth adding back into the Wikipedia article for Word of Mouth or Word of Mouth Marketing, I hope you’ll add it as a resource.

In addition to the 150,000 downloads, I was interviewed for a New York Time article on social media and generated $1.685 million in new business.

TAGS:  Word of mouth, word of mouth marketing, wikipedia, Osterman Research, Audience Machine, content distribution, viral marketing,