HP Drives Sales Through the Blogosphere

A post on Venture Beat this morning examines an upsurge in HP computer sales that left many incredulous.

In August of 2007 HP introduced the Dragon system to little fanfare.  For the first 9 months sales were ho-hum. But in May the HDX Pavillion Entertainment Notebook—the Dragon—started flying off the shelves.  Sales suddenly shot up by 85% compared to the average monthly sales of the previous three months.  And HP’s overall PC sales increased by 10%.

What was behind the boost?  Blogger outreach.

Venture Beat’s Matt Marshall was stunned, unwilling to believe that engaging bloggers could make this kind of impact:

“And how much did HP have to pay these bloggers for them to shamelessly pimp themselves and their blogs to promote the PCs to their readers?”

Marshall became a believer after speaking with the man behind the campaign at HP—Scott Ballantyne, VP and General Manager for Personal Systems Group.  Turns out, HP didn’t do any bribing or conniving.  They simply found the most influential bloggers talking about PCs and asked if they would be interested in running a competition amongst their members.  Each blogger would get to give away one new HDX dragon computer system.  The bloggers were all for it.  And so were their readers.

The contests—held on 31 top PC-related blogs over the 31 days of May–led to tons of posts, conversations, and ultimately an unprecedented upswing in sales for the biggest PC company in the country.

Who would have thought: blogger engagement an effective means of driving sales?
We’re a little less surprised than the general population.

-Anna Brew