Blog me, I’m famous
Posted on June 8, 2009
Filed Under Business Ideas, Trends |
Select a limited number of popular bloggers, give each of them one of your new products and let them post about it and even give those products to their readers. What would you achieve?
Well, in the case of HP, quite a lot.
Few months ago, they gave a model of their laptops to 31 bloggers, letting each one give it away to its readers in a week-long contest. The campaign took 31 weeks (one for each blogger), and the results were pretty astonishing. For instance:
- Sales of this new product increased by by 84% (surprise. The model had already been in the market for almost a year);
- Overall 10% increase in PC sales;
- 14% increase in traffic to HP’s webshop site;
- About 380,000 Google searches matching “31 Days of the Dragon”, the name of the contest.
There was no extra media spend, the bloggers were not paid to participate in the promotion, and their estimated collective reach is, in HP words, in excess of 49 million from their 31 participate sites, reciprocal links and other sites covering/mentioning the giveaway since its inception.
Amazing, isn’t it?
Then, why not trying to duplicate this with your company?
Blogging campaigns are nowadays a known method to boost the reach of an idea, project or product. But, in any case, this type of events remain the domain of not-for-profit campaigns. With few exceptions, like the one mentioned above, only NGOs with health concerns or political ideology are making use of this powerful tool.
Some examples of the first type are BBC’s Cancer’s campaign, the Spanish campaign anti-anorexia or Drink Water to Give Water, to mention a few. In terms of politics-oriented blogging campaigns, one can find the one launched a year ago in the UK to influence the government or the antiblogger movement before the latest Russian elections.
The question is basically: why isn’t this method applied more often in the business world? Are we so outdated in terms of integration our company into a 2.0 environment? Is it due to a lack of trust, a lack of interest or a lack of knowledge?
It is unlikely to think that a medium sized business can replicate the numbers HP obtained during their marketing campaign, but this does not mean that such an idea does not have potential. Most of us don’t hold a business with the same name recognition than the example mentioned above, or probably our products/services are not as attractive as HP’s for internet users (hey! What? Internet users? Aren’t we all?). In any case, that does not mean a campaign of this type would not result profitable in terms of return of investment. At the end, what’s the investment, besides taking the time to convince a few blogs to advertise you?
Think of the costs. On one side, you have to do a certain research to see which blogs are in your line of business, attracting potential customers. Besides, you need to give away a number of units of your product or service (5, 10, 50?). Unless you are selling planes or houses, that’s shouldn’t amount to a high capital or operational expenditure.
On the other side, you may think bloggers will not be willing to advertise you. Why not? You are offering them a way of increasing the number of visitors to their site, being thus able to create a loyal visitor base and to generate income through external advertising.
The risk, compared to traditional marketing campaigns, is negligible. If one compares this way of marketing your product to masses, specially if our company has an international focus, with more standard, old-fashioned, ones (putting away Google Adwords), it is difficult to come up with any disadvantage.
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Good writing. Keep up the good work. I just added your RSS feed my Google News Reader..
Matt Hanson