San Francisco-based micro-blogging service Posterous launched a marketing campaign back in June that raised a few eyebrows across the Web for its apparently brazen approach. The company has been rolling out new tools since the beginning of the campaign aimed at helping new and existing users transplant their data onto Posterous from other services – services it referred to as “dying platforms.” Today, the campaign came to a close with the release of the company’s final switch tool for the behemoth blogging platform, WordPress.
“We knew we had to make some bold statements to break through the clutter but weren’t intentionally trying to piss people off.”
– Rich Pearson, Posterous
According to Posterous, which today listed the top 5 reasons for switching from WordPress, “thousands of WordPress users” have made the jump to Posterous in just the last few weeks. User testimonials cite frequent updates, the amount of free features and mobility as reasons for switching (or at least trying the service out).
As for the campaign as a whole, Posterous’ VP of Marketing Rich Pearson says the company is “thrilled at the results.”
“It’s too early to gauge the long term bump, but in the short term, it’s been huge,” Pearson told ReadWriteWeb.
With today’s import tool launch, WordPress joins services like Flickr, Tumblr, Movable Type, Ning, SquareSpace and Blogger – all which full under Posterous’ definition of a “dying platform.” At the launch of the switch campaign, Posterous used the phrase to openly call out its competition – an action that some saw as a misstep and a gross overstatement.
The debate was heated even further when posts discussing the issue were deleted from the popular news discussion forum, Hacker News. Some accused moderators of the forum – part of Y Combinator, a startup incubator from which Posterous graduated – of intentionally removing the anti-Posterous discussions.
Pearson says the company didn’t intend to offend anyone with its campaign, but that the wording was no accident.
“As for the switch campaign, we knew we had to make some bold statements to break through the clutter but weren’t intentionally trying to piss people off,” he says. “We believe we have the best product so any type of head-to-head comparison was going to benefit us.”
Posterous may have seen a bump in usage over the last few weeks, but its reputation may have been damaged by its choice of language. Whether or not it was wise to go toe-to-toe with over a dozen large competitors by calling them “dying platforms,” potentially alienating thousands of users of multiple services – the company seems pleased with the outcome.
“We have nothing against our competitors – we’re just playing to win,” says Pearson.
