/Fon and viral marketing

Fon and viral marketing

There is a very interesting article written by the Wall Street Journal. It describes the blogger-gaining strategies used by Fon to generate viral marketing on the Internet. We did already talk about this the day before yesterday in this blog, but not as deeply as the Wall Street Journal. In some cases, Varsavsky and his team gave routers away to the bloggers; in other cases they were hired straight away; but the best of all is that they swapped seats in their many boards in exchange of a stake in the company.But the thing is that the North American journal is not very happy with the fact that some of these bloggers didn’t make public that they were receiving this kind of “compensations”. However, as Alvy recalls, some people say that what really disappointed the Wall Street Journal was to find out the investment made in Fon through the blog that had the exclusive, Varsavsky’s.Nonetheless, the viral marketing operation has been huge, in spite of how much Luis Bassat dislikes it. The Wall Street Journal defines the agents of this new commercial system as “influential commentators who write blogs”. Even Scobleizer, Microsoft’s ‘evangelist’, has admitted in public that he’d like his company to invest in Fon.(Note: Alianzo is one of Fon’s suppliers and Martín Varsavsky is one of the judges of the HazRuido.com awards, organized by Alianzo)