Samsung has been dipping its toe into the social media waters of late. Last year they sent me the Samsung SC HMX10 high-def camcorder to blog about and try out for a year. My interviews with author Sarah Lacy and the co-founder of Breaking the Silence were conducted with the ultra-portable HMX10, which I reviewed here.
Now my good friend Ayelet Noff, aka Blonde 2.0, tells me that Samsung is working with McCann
Digital on a campaign to promote their new phone, the Samsung Omnia i900 . (The i900 is the latest “it” phone; see a review here and specs here.) As a big part of their campaign, they are giving the phone to bloggers for free — that’s right, to keep, not as a loan — to try out the features and use in their everyday lives. (If you’re interested, post a comment to Ayelet’s blog.)
One of the things Ayelet, Chris Heuer, I and others are doing at AdHocnium is to help companies turn to bloggers and other social media influencers to establish a real, genuine connection with the users of their products. We’re seeing firms like McCann Digital increasingly turn to the tools of the social Web to help advance their campaign by recruiting bloggers to become customers and in turn potentially reach millions of users. I’ll be watching to see how McCann Digital’s effort progresses.
JD Lasica, founder of Inside Social Media, is also a fiction author and the co-founder of the cruise discovery engine Cruiseable. See his About page, contact JD or follow him on Twitter.
Interesting, JD. Especially in light of the conversation happening on Chris Brogan’s blog about Panasonic, sponsored posts and blogger relations.
Giving away product is easy, but what value do you and AdHocnium ascribe to participation?
The social media success stories we saw last year were companies like Comcast, Dell and JetBlue that were participating, not just giving away product in hopes that people would blog about it.
I don’t know yet where I fall on this, and of course there are no rules.
But “pay for play” is an old PR tactic, and one that we (other PR people, the public) used to react negatively to. It seems strange to me how many leading bloggers are now warming to or justifying it as a new and acceptable outreach model.
Anyway, thanks for staring the conversation.
Aaron, I’ll have to take a look at the conversation at chrisbrogan.com but I think companies need to do both: participate/engage customers but also to try to get them to evangelize your product by putting it in their hands.
That’s a very different thing than paying bloggers to blog about your company. They’re writing about their genuine experience (good or bad).
i think i saw this at Zroob blog
http://www.zroob.com
who said the pink revolution?? :)
This is really interesting because it creates yet another middle man in the marketing process. The public relations “pay for play” idea aside, by giving a blogger a phone to use and ultimately write about (good or bad), it is adding another person into the mix. Instead of connecting the product to the consumer, it becomes a grapevine of company, marketing agency, blogger, consumer. Is it really that efficient and worth it to add all the baggage? Just a thought.
Granted, it has already saturated the market, but I just like the simplicity of a direct relationship from company to consumer.
Thomas, in this case the blogger is the customer. (And I never use the word consumer.) People trust people who use and evangelize products rather than those who just pitch them.