Meebo Survey Proves Word-of-mouth Marketing Is Still Most Efficient for Internet Services

It is definitely good to see internet companies trying to understand their users better - if only to know how to attract even more users and hopefully learn how to monetize all of them eventually. Recently Meebo has taken a shot at understanding the users of its web-based multi-protocol instant messaging solution.

While there are quite a lot of various competitors in the market, Meebo is definitely a leader and the response rate from users was definitely a pretty good one - Meebo received answers to its questions from over 15 thousand of people which is more than impressive when compared to surveys by professional measurements firms covering a couple of thousand of people.

Meebo users answered questions about how and why they use Meebo as their IM client. It is remarkable that the major advantage in Meebo from the point of view of its users is its web-based nature as these people don’t want to have any additional IM applications installed on their desktops.

I myself used to think that Meebo and various similar services are mostly useful when you travel without your own computer with your IM clients installed and want to be able to login to all your IM accounts at once from a web-based interface. But Meebo users definitely think otherwise with 68% of respondents telling that Meebo is their primary IM method, not a backup service they use when they have nothing desktop-based. To me this looks like yet another evidence of the fact that there are already enough people who are absolutely comfortable with web-based applications without viewing them as an alternative to desktop applications for when you are away from your own computer.

But I think that the most interesting one of all was the question about how people learned about Meebo and started using it. The thing is that as many as 73% of people told that they had learned about Meebo from someone they knew. So this proves that word-of-mouth marketing is probably still the best approach when it comes to promoting internet products - after all, there is no doubt that Meebo is really a hit in its niche.

But while word-of-mouth is the major tool, there are certain limitations to it. The irony is that while 98% of those who answered the questions think Meebo is a good service worth recommending to friends, the majority of people also mentioned that only a few of their friends used Meebo as well.

I see two possible explanations to this situation. The first one is that while users tell that they are happy with Meebo and are willing to recommend it to their friends, they tend not to actually share the information, keeping the precious service to themselves for whatever selfish reasons they may have - or maybe they are just too lazy to actually go and recommend the service unless their friends ask them for such a recommendation. The second explanation could be in those friends not starting to use the solution themselves after they get a recommendation - simply because they may not even need such a service. After all, if my only computer is a laptop that I carry around everywhere and I have all the IM protocols configured to use with one desktop-based client (Miranda in my case), why would I need to use a web-based multi-protocol client like Meebo even if a trusted friend highly recommends it?

But still I think that this conclusion is worth noting as it proves that even without investing a lot in advertising you can grow a business that will be successful enough if you build something valuable enough for people to eagerly recommend to other potential users. Good news for startups but unfortunately bad news for publishers depending on advertising for our revenue. But maybe that’s exactly where the influence of bloggers appear on the scene as a recommendation from a blogger could also be considered to be similar to word-of-mouth marketing if a blogger is viewed as a trusted friend by readers.