Skype hype puts word in your mouth

THE online telephony revolution is poised to become a word-of-mouth business tool, with consumers being able to connect with businesses recommended by their friends with the click of a button.

by Simon Canning - The Australian

Advertising is the new frontier for Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) pioneer Skype, which hopes to have more than 1 million businesses listed globally on its websites by the end of the year.

Skype offers computer users the ability to talk free of charge over the internet, and also offers services to allow people to phone traditional mobile and landline numbers at a discount to normal telcos.

The operator is competing with the likes of Yahoo Messenger, MSN Messenger, Buddy Talk and Glo Phone, as well as VoIP service providers such as Engin, My Net Fone and Freshtel.
Skype Asia Pacific vice-president Scott Bagby said he saw the new system, called Skype Find, as closing the loop between search and people actually contacting a business by phone.

He said it also gave new impetus to word-of-mouth marketing.
"Skype Find is a user-generated directory," Mr Bagby said. "Basically it allows people to recommend to friends small businesses like, say, restaurants and stuff.

"It will also help encourage advertisers to attract more buyers. It reinvigorates the pay-for-call model that has been languishing on the web for a couple of years now."
Under the Skype Find model, people will be able to use word of mouth to recommend businesses by placing the business on their Skype profile.

Businesses signing up for the Skype model will be able to use the telephone component of Skype to let consumers call them directly from their PC through the phone icon on the Skype page.
And they will not be bound by national borders, enabling people to talk to businesses around the world.

"It is a global collection of local businesses," Mr Bagby said.
"It's all about communication and it is a logical step for the buyers to contact the sellers directly and Skype enables that. It allows you to call them directly."
Calls are placed by simply pressing a button on the Skype web page.
The model also allows people to see which businesses are the most called.
"We can enable a shortlist result of the most called and we can see which one in an area is the hottest," Mr Bagby said.

"There is a huge marketing opportunity for these services. Global local search and online advertising opportunities will be expanding from $15 billion to $31 billion by 2010."
While Skype claims to have more than 171 million registered users worldwide, Mr Bagby declined to say how many there were in Australia other than to say the number was "significant".

Skype has also launched a second version called Skype Prime, which allows people offering services such as financial advice, tutoring or other verbal services to market themselves through Skype.

Skype e-commerce chief Sten Tamkivi said: "Skype Prime opens up a whole new market by letting you sell your knowledge to Skype's global community."