Company Leaders at FiRe Embrace Marketing Via Social Media

The marketers present here at FiRe not only seem to embracing social media as a great way to drive sales, but in at least two cases, it’s been the only/main way they have promoted their wares.

From the podium this morning, Dave Winer was asked if there was a business model for podcasters. His response was that one might not get paid directly for podcasting, but there might be indirect revenues. As an example, he said that Scripting News was successful in generating sales revenues (I assume for Userland Software) and yet the business never took out ads. Winer indicated that his blog was the key traffic driver.

During lunch I was fortunate enough to sit next to Simon Hackett who is the founder and managing director of Internode Systems, and Agile Communications. Coincidentally, Internode also has not spent any money to speak of on traditional outreach and yet has been extremely successful. Simon told me that much of their success has been due to the positive word of mouth exposure gained from hundreds of hours he’s spent monitoring and contributing to the broadband community forum whirlpool.