At First Glance, a Cool Marketing Campaign

A recent post on the At First Glance blog by Glance Networks CEO Rich Baker got me thinking.

In a savvy marketing move, Glance is offering bloggers a free year-long subscription (a $499 value) to their web conferencing services. Glance is positioning this as “a way to say thanks” to the many bloggers who have helped spread the word about the value of web conferencing.

With the growing number of bloggers and the ease at which just about anyone can create a blog, the audience for this offer is staggering. As of this post, blog search engine Technorati was tracking more than 112 million blogs.

I would imagine that many bloggers would be drawn to the simplicity of Glance’s web conferencing solution. It is marketed as “a simple one-button screen sharing tool that lets people instantly show their live PC or Mac™ screens to anyone online”. And, given the pricing table published on their website, I would assume Glance is a lower cost offering for the individual user or SMB customer than competing solutions from Cisco/WebEx, GoToMeeting and others.

I’m not up to speed on the web conferencing market growth projections and I don’t know how Glance is segmenting and reaching out to this pool of potential customers, but even if you started by assuming a quarter of the blogging population could be web conferencing users, the audience for this offer would be 28 million. Assume, one in 10 of those may have a need for a web conferencing solution after a first year of free service and you’re at 2.8 million potential customers – still a nice big number.

With the right viral marketing campaign across the blogsphere, word could spread fast. And, the call to action seems to follow Glance’s belief in simplicity: contact Rich with your blog’s URL.