Geek advertising. Without gaming the system or passing over wads of cash in brown envelopes, Winweb (with whom I have a commercial relationship) is at the top of the pile of Skype Enterprise Extras with its free Winweb AccountsOffice. That is products or services that are integrated with Skype. They’ve had 800 hits in a week. No effort required. No PR. No advertising. Free, nada, zippo looto.
Here’s the deal – Winweb integrates Skype into its products. Skype gets a guaranteed user every time Winweb adds a user of its own. No cash required. Skype has 100 million users and at any one time, Winweb has a potential audience of around 5 million Skype viewers/information consumers/users. No cash required. No commercial advertising of any kind.
Here’s another thing. Because Winweb is buried 3 layers deep inside Skype Share, I reckon the vast majority of readers are geeks. So now, Winweb’s advisors need to get geeky because geeks like geeks.
So open source free does mean win-win-win. The first winnner being the customer. Of course. Because they get ‘free’ as well.
As an accountant thinking about how to grow your practice, wouldn’t you like to be holding the reins on a potential audience of 5 million people, 24×7 and growing?
If so then welcome to my world.
Pssst: Does this trounce 100 Stormhoek Geek Dinners? (We’ll get to that later)
Endnote: I’ve said in the past that Winweb could blow Sage away. I was wrong. Skype will do it for Winweb. And even if Sage was to integrate something from Skype tomorrow into its Line 50 product offering – it wouldn’t make a blind bit of difference. See if you can work out why?
Hint: there are two answers to this.
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