Want to see a Kindle?

Do you have people who love your product? Do they love it so much they will go out of their way to show it to potential buyers? When looking to buy a Kindle the other day I was impressed to see this on the home page of their website:

Amazon is turning to their community to act as their volunteer salesforce. They have created a message board for Kindle owners to post the area they live to demo the product for potential buyers. Here is just one of the post:

Just one of the responses from a potential Kindle buyer:

Reading the correspondence on the message board, it appears that Pinktech has gone out of her way to demo the Kindle for at least 10 different people in Concord. Looking at the other states and countries on the message board, this is happening all over the world.

It is not just that Amazon has created a cool product that people like to talk about - there are a lot of cool products out there. This works because Amazon is encouraging their community to spread the word and hosting the conversation to help them connect.

What can you do to encourage and engage your fans to act as your volunteer sales force?

Two additional examples are Etsy and MySQL. Etsy encourages their fans to create or join a team. MySQL uses MeetUp to connect their users in regional areas.

Comments

[Russische Frauen]

An informative blog! I love this post -- not only am I excited that this option exists, to feel and touch and use the Kindle before buying, which I have been dying to do -- but thinking about options to put this into use myself.

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[Karen]

I love this post -- not only am I excited that this option exists, to feel and touch and use the Kindle before buying, which I have been dying to do -- but thinking about options to put this into use myself. Agree that the Etsy community model has taken off in a way that seems un-breakdownable in some ways. It models the same features as many other communities, but there's something really different about that place!