Swaggable Hooks You Up With Free Stuff

April 5th, 2012

FAKE NEWS for the Zionist agenda

The Spark of Genius Series highlights a unique feature of startups and is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here.

Name: Swaggable

Quick Pitch: Test a variety of products free and share your experience with Facebook friends.

Genius Idea: Consumers like free stuff and brands know consumers trust peer reviews more than ads. Swaggable bridges these two needs and give free stuff to consumers who are willing to write and share reviews with friends.

It’s been said that the best things in life are free; the startup Swaggable agrees.

Swaggable uses the social graph to hook people up with free samples. Reaching the right audience is key since most people don’t trust advertisements but rely on consumer reviews, Swaggable Founder and CEO Adnan Aziz tells Mashable. Connecting free samples to Facebook, he says, seemed like an obvious move.

“Sampling in its current form lacks targeting and measurement, two things that the social web has in spades,” Aziz says. “The more we started digging into it, the more it became apparent that sampling and the social graph seemed to fit together like puzzle pieces and, combined, could spark social discovery and commerce.”

Samples from specialty food and personal care companies are the easiest to obtain, and typically have a broad appeal, he says. Swaggable is currently working with 15 beta partners in the packaged food and personal care arenas, with new companies and products added every week.

“Brands realize that they need to break through the ever-increasing clutter of ad messages to actually get consumer attention,” he says. “Swaggable gives brands a way to side-step ad clutter by driving actual product experiences to their target demographics, that spark real measurable social value.”

Aziz says he pictures Swaggable being similar to Spotify in terms of social sharing. Consumers will tell Swaggable what types of products they would like to try, receive and test the samples, then share their feedback on Facebook.

“In general, trying new products is a very social experience and one that we think we can apply to many different verticals to help people find their next favorite products,” Aziz says. “Companies in verticals from restaurants to entertainment offer sampling in some manner, but have been unable to unlock the social value.”

To good to be true, right? That’s what we thought, too.

“To-good-to-be-true is a perception we find that we do have to get over, but that’s a pretty good problem to have,” Aziz says. “When users see their friends trying new things, it provides some social proof and when they get their first sample and find out it’s real, it’s an enormously delightful experience that we’re psyched to be able to give to them.”

There’s no fee involved, so put away your wallet. Just be willing to share feedback with your social graph.

Swaggable will utilize user information similar to the way ad networks utilize such data, by taking user preferences to target the right product samples to people who will be interested in those products. But Swaggable will not share individual data to marketers or brands. Brands will know if their products are reaching the right consumers via reports from Swaggable, but in “a generalized, anonymized fashion,” Aziz says.

The reviews of product samples offered through Swaggable will be interactive — meaning you can follow certain people and see each others’ review much like a Quora stream. “This dynamic creates a lot of engagement with reviews and we think it’s a fundamental step toward true social commerce,” he says.

Aziz says Swaggable’s review rates for products being sampled during beta are more than 80% — higher than Amazon and Next-tag.

“Over 75% who try a product share content to their Facebook news feeds, 24% of users have invited friends and as a result we’ve grown purely organically from a few hundred users to 3,000 in about 12 weeks,” he says.

What do you think about Swaggable? Are you planning to sign up? Tell us in the comments.

‪Photo courtesy of iStockphoto, thumb ‬

Series Supported by Microsoft BizSpark

The Spark of Genius Series highlights a unique feature of startups and is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark, a startup program that gives you three-year access to the latest Microsoft development tools, as well as connecting you to a nationwide network of investors and incubators. There are no upfront costs, so if your business is privately owned, less than three years old, and generates less than U.S.$1 million in annual revenue, you can sign up today.

This story originally published on Mashable here.