Rally, a marketplace for direct engagement and community building built on blockchain technology, has today announced the formal launch of its social marketing app, with more than 20,000 people registered and using the blockchain-based platform in the three weeks since it started its beta test.
Rally is a tokenised economy where engagement is king and registered users are rewarded in tokens for promoting their favourite brands to friends through word-of-mouth endorsements.
Rally’s rapid growth is a major proof point for the power of its incentivized marketing model, where users are rewarded in tokens for engaging with content and building communities. Rally’s commitment to transparency is only possible through blockchain and crypto tokens allow for a frictionless method of rewarding users.
Research shows that only 25% of people buy-in to advertising, yet 83% of people would follow a brand recommendation from a friend. As a result, word-of-mouth programmes generate twice the sales of paid-for campaigns, and achieve greater customer retention.
The intense and rapid uptake of the Rally marketplace is entirely organic, demonstrating how the power of community-sharing and a token can be used to stimulate mass market activity.
Rally founder, James Cashiola, who spent over twenty years in network systems and telecoms before creating Rally, commented:
“The point of Rally is to grow a community where people are, for the first time, being rewarded for an activity they’ve always done as part of their everyday lives in a complete transparent way.
“Think about how many times a week you send a friend, colleague or loved one a link about a new article, book or product that you like and would recommend. People do it all the time. Up until this point, however, we’ve never been rewarded for doing so. Rally changes that. Users earn Rally tokens from brands with every link that they share – whether it’s public or private.”
“We have invested a great deal of time and money in building our word-of-mouth marketing ecosystem, and it is gratifying to see the power it has generated in such a short space of time.”
Rally is different from other social media platforms: rather than trying to own its users by limiting their interactions to just the Rally platform, it encourages users to share content via email, messaging, SMS and social media. People still use private channels to share 84% of the content they want to with their contacts. Rally is built upon this truth, so users can choose whichever channel they prefer to connect with their friends. Each sharing interaction is rewarded with Rally tokens, and those with larger communities earn more tokens.
Users can start to build a community of followers based upon an authenticity of promoting the brands they like and use – swapping comments, tips and insight on their favourite brands with like-minded individuals. The platform has proven popular particularly with influencers, who want to communicate with their followers in an authentic and transparent way.
For the brands themselves, Rally delivers a cost-effective route to generating scalable word-of-mouth marketing programmes, while improving budget efficiency.
With the current advertising model, brands pay platforms like Facebook significant amounts of money for simply a number of clicks or ‘likes’ (over 90% of social marketing ad budgets goes directly to social networks). Actual interaction between the brand and its customers is non-existent and brands struggle to really understand their consumer base as a result.
With Rally, brands directly reward their customers for their actions with Rally tokens, which builds stronger brand loyalty and deeper customer knowledge, which brands can then leverage for greater market insight. An action from a user could be a share, like, post, follow, joining, purchase or set-up – the possibilities are endless. Each action is driven by a decentralised and secure tokenised system.
James Cashiola commented:
“We all know and appreciate the power of social networks – people love to interact with others, share information and make new contacts, while brands love a platform from which to target current and potential customers.
“Having worked in telecoms and IT for many years, I became ever more aware of how social networks operate behind the scenes. When I thought about the inequalities of social advertising and marketing, I could see that blockchain, with its decentralising qualities, presented a way to challenge the established social networks who centralise profits for themselves. The potential for a social network like Rally, which benefits customers and brands so completely, is phenomenal.”
The platform has already been integrated via 20,000 unique crypto wallets and is on course to reach 50,000 users by the end of the year.
The Rally token is fully operable within the Rally community and will be made available for trading on crypto exchanges in 2019.
About Rally
Rally is a tokenised economy where engagement is king and registered users are rewarded in tokens for promoting their favourite brands to friends through word-of-mouth endorsements. The platform has already been integrated via 20,000 unique crypto wallets and is on course to reach 50,000 users by the end of the year. The Rally token is fully operable within the Rally community and will be made available for trading on crypto exchanges in 2019.