This startup says it has found a way to monetize referrals

Jordan
Glazier

• Former consultant and eBay executive Jordan
  Glazier is unveiling Wildlink, a platform that rewards
  consumers for making recommendations across social and digital
  channels, while driving incremental revenue for brands.
• Wildlink automatically detects product referrals and
  transforms them into trackable links, which can be shared across
  email, text messages, social media and other peer-to-peer chat
  platforms like WhatsApp.
• The links, when clicked, allow anybody to make money if the
  receiver ends up making a purchase from 20,000 participating
  brands.

It often isn’t banner ads or TV commercials, but word-of-mouth
referrals from friends and family that drive consumers to make a
purchase.

But there wasn’t really a way for brands to track those real
world referrals. Nor was their much tangible benefit for
consumers — until now.

Former consultant and eBay executive Jordan
Glazier believes that he has found a way to meld word of
mouth with digital shopping. He is rolling out Wildlink, a
platform that rewards consumers for making recommendations across
social and digital channels, while driving incremental
revenue for brands.

While Wildlink can’t gauge what happens when you verbally
recommend a great restaurant or flash sale to your friend, it can
help brands track what kinds of sales result from people sharing
recommendations digitally, per Glazier.

Plus, the company wants to spur people to make recommendations
more frequently — by paying them.

Wildlink wants to turn recommendations between friends into
marketing you can actually measure

Here’s how Wildlink works: According to Glazier, the platform can
automatically detect product referrals using natural language
processing and transform them into trackable links, which can be
shared across email, text messages, social media and other
peer-to-peer chat platforms like WhatsApp.

These links, when clicked, allow anybody to make money if the
receiver ends up making a purchase from participating brands. All
users have to do is download the Widlink app on iOS or Android,
or on their
desktops. 

“People predominantly use the web for peer-to-peer communication,
and yet it hasn’t been effectively commercialized and all of the
ad formats around it miss the mark,” Glazier told Business
Insider.

“The purpose of Wildlink is to help people effortlessly get their
fair share for the recommendations they make to their friends and
family.”

The app, according to Glazier, is attractive for both brands as
well as users. Wildlink essentially enables anyone to earn cash
from their everyday purchase recommendations to friends and
family.

And unlike existing rebate services, which give cash back for
users’ own shopping, it rewards users for suggestions they share
with others. Those who sign up also have access to a
dashboard, where they can track the earnings from their
suggestions, and can make anywhere between 5 to 25% commission on
their recommendations.

Recommendations from trusted friends are still very powerful

On the brand side, Wildlink should help motivate word-of-mouth
suggestions (the digital variety at least), which helps influence
purchase decisions. According to the most
recent Nielsen
Global Trust in Advertising Report, 83% of people said
that they would act on recommendations from people they know.

There’s also something in it for the biggest tech platforms.
Wildlink plugs into the APIs of companies like Facebook, Snapchat
and Slack, so its product links can be embedded and generate
revenue. 

Of course, it won’t be easy for an unknown brand like Wildlink to
get its app onto people’s already crowded phones. Especially at a
time when people are more cautious than ever about sharing person
data or billing information. But  neither the platforms and
merchants nor Wildlink get any purchase history or profile data
of the buyers, Glazier said, and the attribution is
anonymized.

Tanya
Dua

Wildlink is also making adoption easier, by trying to weave its
way into different mobile operating systems while keeping in
mind specific user habits, Glazier said. In the case of iOS
users, for example, people tend to share links by finding the
share button at the bottom of the browser. So Wildlink has
can be added into the share sheet, alongside other apps where
users tend to share links such as Facebook Messenger.

“Our goal is to become ubiquitous and make it easy for people to
earn from their referrals wherever and whenever they
recommend something to friends or family,” said
Glazier. 

While Wildlink officially launches today, it has been tested by a
roster of big-name brands including Walmart, Expedia, Lowe’s,
Neiman Marcus, Hotels.com among others over the course of the
last quarter. Over 20,000 brands and merchants are already part
of the Wildlink network, and are seeing promising results.

“We know that personal recommendations play an important role in
travelers’ purchase choices,” said Todd Schindele, senior manager
of partner marketing at Hotels.com. “It’s a powerful platform for
driving new bookings for our hotel partners.”

The app’s parent company, Wildfire Systems, has also raised $2
million in a seed round led by Mucker Capital in 2017.