Taking "Free" to the Next Level for
Internet Hard Drive Storage

Mission: Leap Frog the Competition. netdrive.com offers free storage of files, music and photos on the Internet. Consumers who travel for business or pleasure, or who wish to share files with others, access their information from any Web browser, anywhere. And the service is free. But the field of Internet storage is crowded. netdrive.com called on ShapeTechnology to launch them right to the top.

Warming Up the Thrusters. ShapeTechnology undertook a competitive analysis, then worked with netdrive.com to develop both business and marketing plans. A critical component — the decision to offer users 100 MB free, instantly making netdrive.com a major online storage vendor.

An Ambitious Flight Plan. Getting noticed is getting harder. So ShapeTechnology drew up an ambitious launch plan targeting the IT/computer press, consumer publications, the business press and broadcast media. We then added a vertical market component to meet the needs of the marketplace, placing stories or obtaining coverage with parenting (sharing photos of the kids with grandparents), women's and men's magazines (accessing documents anywhere), music (having your favorites tunes follow you) and travel publications (sending vacation photos while you're still away).

Major Air Time. As netdrive.com's print and public relations campaign was taking off, ShapeTechnology also created a Video News Release (VNR). One of the relatively few agencies with both print and broadcast expertise, we created a "lifestyles" VNR that ran on TV stations across the nation.

Making the Viral Spiral Work. The best publicity is still word of mouth - spreading like a virus. At launch time, we mailed out tubes with juggling balls (netdrive.com makes juggling files easy for anyone on the go) as a distribution method for the company's press release. The media got it - and started spreading the word. We also went to portals and online chat groups to tell the netdrive.com story.

The Net of It. The buzz got loud. netdrive.com hits soared from 0 to 2000 REGISTERED users a day. The company positioned itself as the leader in the industry offering the most value to consumers and positioning itself for rapid growth. Within the first 8 weeks after the launch, netdrive.com already had over 100,000 registered users. This was a number that they thought would take at least 4 months to hit. Another successful PR launch pays off!