A Rocking Good Product Launch
The Rockmelt Team Offers Text Book Product Launch with New Browser
While the ongoing contact turf war between Google and Facebook rages on there was another significantly interesting item of news in the same category on Monday morning November 8, 2010 – Rockmelt.
What I find most interesting about Rockmelt is that I know the name of the new socially oriented browser.
The Rockmelt team has executed what every tech firm wants to achieve on their product launch, almost immediate buzz. I am impressed with the discipline that must be behind the launch. Consider my personal experience of discovering the new technology. Monday morning I do what I frequently do in the beginning of the day and that is to browse over the headlines of the news of the day on the Wall Street Journal. There I noted an article about a new browser that was hitting the marketplace with an interesting name. At the time I didn’t really give much mental real estate to the newly learned fact, browser wars are interesting but yet another competitor? “What could possibly be so newsworthy about that?” I asked myself.
I moved on with my day but on the train ride into the city as I scanned my twitter feed I 
noticed both Mashable and TechCrunch had stories about the interestingly named browser. When I arrived at my office and logged in I saw the name yet again, Rockmelt was officially trending on twitter, and continued to do so throughout the day and into the next. It was an orchestrated launch and capturing the social media and tech blogs certainly was part of the plan. Want some proof? Take a look at the stats for Rockmelt mentions on twitter below here from Trendistic. By mid day on Monday the 8th of November Rockmelt was driving .3% of all twitter traffic.
How significant is .3% of twitter traffic? Well to offer some context consider the traffic that Rockmelt received against some well traveled and established corporate entities or products on twitter; iPad, Google Facebook. The Rockmelt launch has generated nearly as much twitter traffic as the iPad, Google or Facebook.
Adding to the good week that the Rockmelt team is obviously having is the fact that the Google vs. Facebook war heated up a bit. This generates conversation about the very foundation that Rockmelt has been built upon, the social web. In fact the timing seems so incredibly fortunate that the conspiracy loving side of me wants to suggest that there was at least some awareness on the Rockmelt PR team that that fight was going to heat up this week.
What I love most of all about the launch is that Rockmelt has nailed its audience which is clearly the social media savvy, mobile toting, technology loving key demo of 18 to 35. Just view the video here explaining what the new browser is all about.
Note there is no discussion at all about features or functionality. No ‘how-to’ providing information on integrating the browser with your digital presence. No claims of increased security or speed. Rather the video completely narrates a story how one would use Rockmelt to do what they will feel as natural. There is literally no risk to giving the platform a try, on the contrary the risk seems to be that you might be left behind if you did not give it a try. I would love to see the download numbers from this first week, I’m sure they surpass the objectives they set out to achieve. (sidenote: it is worth checking out news stories on Rockmelt, you’ll see some of the minds and investors behind them – the links above are good place to start).
This is text book product marketing launch in my opinion. The Rockmelt product management, product marketing and PR teams are to be commended. Who knows how they will fare in the very competitive browser market, but they are certainly off to a ROCK solid start.
