Kingdom Keys Bookmarking Blog

Hi Wilma,

If you're taking on new clients, I'd like to include you in my private referral network to send you business leads through Referral Key

Please accept my invitation below. Thanks!

Like many who received such invitations I gave it a go. It smacks of multi-level marketing where you have to get another 5 people to sign up under you to get your full profile. There is a tool to siphon out your contacts from LinkedIn and invite them to join you at ReferralKey. It even appears that their IP address 50.57.77.129 has hit the junkemailfilter blacklist for some destinations.

Then I googled around to get to the bottom of the matter. Alexa shows a big spike in traffic in May 2011 and Hubspot brags about how they helped them fine tune their SEO. Also in the past there was a paid membership. It looks like they gave that away to grab market share from LinkedIn and slap advertising later on when nobody is watching.

There is a Christopher Ott posing as your personal guide but it is just an automated response which fools no-one. On the positive side there is definitively a viral effect going on and a few of my friends have taken to it with abandon. Indeed we are taking on new clients - you bet!

By now the phenomenon has reached critical mass and has become unstoppable. There is a plentiful supply of contacts downunder in Australia where I belong - so I assume it has well gone past the boundaries of the USA.

Originally the brief must have been to allow people to network within their geographical area but now you can befriend strangers from overseas as long as they are friends of a friend.

Another little detail which doesn't quite fit the model is this: I would normally refer business to someone who gave me good service. But if I need a dentist, a solicitor or a graphic designer who am I going to call? There is a search bar at the top of the page but you can't pull a list of names within a category - all you can do is randomly hit a keyword in their company name...

Now since LinkedIn IPO the stakes are high for a new social media dotcom boom (and bust). There is no shortage of clever marketing nous in the facebook genre. At the end of the day: "Are you taking on new clients?"

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