Social Media Marketing

I thought it fitting to start a new era for PDQProspects.com talking about a new piece of software I recently acquired called “Viral Inviter“.

This is the latest generation of Tell A Friends scripts to hit the market. You may already be familiar with Paul Galloway’s classic Tell A Friend program TAFPro or indeed Mike Filsaime’s Viral Friend Generator.

These types of scripts can now be considered “old school” – the Web 1.0 ancestors which although very useful are not as feature rich as this new breed of mass traffic system.

How does it work?

If you have ever signed up for some of the big social media sites like Facebook, for example, you would have been asked straight away on the thank you page to invite your friends to join.

The slick part is allowing you to use your login details from your GMail, Hotmail, Yahoo, AOL etc… accounts. This allows you to pull in ALL of your contacts and send the invitation to them with one mouse-click.

Technical Integration

From a technial perspective, there are 3 main integration methods with your site:

#1 Direct Hyperlink

This is the most simple method to use, when you have installed and configured your software, all you need do is point your visitors to an ordinary hypertext link backed by the importer.php page.

#2 Modern Popover

This method allows a new window to popup (using DHTML) so your visitors don’t have to leave the page they are currently on. It can look snazzy and many people might like it but I’ll detail a potential pitfall in a subsequent post.

#3 Squeeze Page Templates

This last method allows you to create squeeze/landing page “triplets” really easily. What do I mean by “triplets” I hear you say! There are predefined optin pages (To get visitors to signup to your list), Invitation pages (which has the Viral Inviter, invite your friends page) and finally Thank You pages. All you need do is choose which set (different look and feel) you like, edit the optin index file, you have a choice of 2, one configured for GetResponse and one for Aweber.

The Problems/Issues

I’m going to talk first about some of the problems I have encountered. There were some bugs (no point rehashing them here as they are now resolved) I encountered having an early version of the software. That said, there are 2 things I have to talk about:

#1 Malformed recipient address – Unfortunately, there is a bug at the moment whereby invitations are not being sent out by the software correctly. I have been in contact with the support team and they say it will be resolved in an upcoming release. I’m not sure if it is affecting every user but it is me so I await a fix eagerly.

#2 Support – Norman and his team have been a victim of their own success. Turnaround times on support tickets have been in the order of days rather than hours. It’s understandable given the launch of a new product (especially one which has such promising potential. Still, it’s irksome for the customer.

#3 The Biggie: Security – I came across an interesting analysis of issues with scripts like Viral Inviter on Andy Beard’s site (see resources at the end of this post for more info). Andy is quite right in his analysis of the problems associated with Viral Inviter and scripts like it.

W.r.t. Viral Inviter, I have managed to “lock-down” the script as best as possible by firstly ensuring submission of any user credentials is via a secure link to my server. Secondly, I created a script which verifies the integrity of Viral Inviter to ensure there are no malicious breaches by hackers.

Is it foolproof? No, not by a long way but it is as good as it can be as and until the software is written in a different fashion to access webmail providers. There is no such appetite to do this according the the VI team as to do so would require a major rewrite.

Bottom Line

Very useful piece of software (when finished). Right now it’s got some issues which prevent myself from using it and so, I can’t recommend it at this time. When the problems are ironed out though, I’ll let you know.

When the bugs have been resolved, you’ll still need to take extra precautions on your own server (with a custom script to ensure the integrity of the software is correct).

For now, I’d recommend sticking with something like Paul Galloway’s TAFPro.

[Editor Update 06 August 2008]

Although there still seems to be a problem with the malformed emails, it would appear there was also a problem on my server with respect to DNS setup. Now the script is still throwing warnings but is sending out the tell your friend messages. I shall test it out in the wild…

[End Update]

All the best,

Tom

Related Resources:

Review Viral Inviter – It allows users to easily and instantly invite ALL of their contacts from Google, Yahoo, AOL, & MSN [34 services total] with just TWO simple clicks. • Harnessing the exact same technology that powers Facebook, [...]

Comment on Opt-in Accelerator Warning – Security Risk – Read This … – Hey Andy… while I respect your views on these tell a friend scripts I personally think viral inviter rocks… In the past week I have been using it i saw a crazy jump in traffic so that’s good for me… But yeah the risks are certainly …

Viral Inviter to be launched – Viral Inviter is launching today! If you have been longing to attract unlimited non-stop free traffic to your web sites,. go buy yourself a copy. Don’t delay… Because if you do, you are wasting a chance to …