Growth Hacking is a new term in the marketing world. It means to put your
business in such a position - and have such mechanisms in your business -
that your own customers become your biggest brand ambassadors.
One of the best examples of a company that has successfully growth hacked
itself is Dropbox. They had a great service, and a mechanism that gave
incentives to their customers to invite others. 500 MB of extra space is
definitely an awesome incentive!
Ecommerce businesses can do something similar using social media - having
customers upload product photos/videos, holding discussions, debates, and
contests - the more buzz you create, the more people you have on board.
Quick Tip: Growth hacking is easier for software as a service(SAAS)
businesses, but it’s not impossible for ecommerce merchants. You just have
to work a little harder to find your “viral spark.” Dollar Shave Club did it
with their cheeky video and awesome service put together.
Resources:
Drew Sanocki blogs about growth hacking eCommerce
A top notch guide put together by Neil Patel on everything Growth Hacking
Variant bandwidth and
bursty traffic: Currently, multi-network terminals are
emerging that can use several networks
to communicate. Typical forerunners are the dual-band devices that are able to
use 900 MHz and 1.8 GHz GSM networks. Soon, there will be products that are
able to also use WLANs and possibly
Bluetooth (Bluetooth, 2000), together
with GSM, GPRS and soon also UMTS
The asymmetric transfer
capacity on uplink and downlink can be applied in a reasonable way if the
network offers broadcast facility. This is unfortunately not a strong side of
the telecom networks, because they were designed for connection-oriented
point-to-point communications. Wireless LANs are better in this respect,
because they apply packet broadcast
protocols anyhow. GSM networks have broadcast facility on the control channels,
but the amount of application data that can be transferred on them is small.
The currently very popular short messages
(max 160 characters) are an example of such data that is transferred
over control channels. If used e.g. to broadcast multimedia contents
over the network, the network would collapse, because controlling the traffic
would not be possible any more- and still certainly no videos could be watched
at the handsets.
Still, the asymmetric transfer
capacity is an important asset in cases
where the wireless client usually sends a short request and gets a large
data set as a response. We have envisioned this kind of behavior e.g. applications,
where the mobile users requests a
local map to be transferred to the
handset.
In particular, server machines
should be provided with a relative high-bandwidth wireless broadcast channel to
all clients located inside a specific geographical region. One should also note
that, in general, it costs less to a client in terms of power consumption to
receive than to send.
