There is no more powerful form of marketing than an endorsement from one of your current customers to their friends and colleagues. When people share their thoughts about your product or service with people in their network, they're creating impressions many times more powerful than any ad you could run. Given that, anything that enables such endorsements will likely pay dividends for your company.

Below is an example of how one company, RollerWarehouse.com, created an online tool that lets rollerbladers (or inline skaters) market their business on their behalf. Roller Warehouse decided to try to tap into the power of the social networks existing on MySpace. Many users of the popular social networking site are into rollerblading, so what if they could create a tool that would allow kids to tell each other about their store? They realized it would take some form of incentive, but what? Enter this Flash powered RSS widget:


Roller Warehouse: Aggressive Rollerblade Skates

That is a news ticker showing the "Latest Aggressive Skating News" presented by Roller Warehouse. MySpace users can paste a snippet of code into their MySpace profile to display the ticker of current headlines. In exchange, Roller Warehouse gets a link back to their site from every participating MySpace user's profile. To sweeten the deal, Roller Warehouse is offering participants a 5% discount in their store.

It sounds to me like Roller Warehouse has found a way to advertise directly to the friends of their current customer base through MySpace for next to no money. How powerful is this? That largely depends on the uptake by MySpace users, but the potential seems enormous. For example, what if Old Navy sponsored a celebrity gossip news ticker or Dick's sporting good did one with sport scores? Regardless, this has a lot more to do with reaching the right market than it does with size of the network.

What other forms of widget or RSS based advertising have you seen lately?