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

Q&A: CNET’s Caroline McCarthy

Attention’s Colin Nagy recently spoke with Caroline McCarthy, Social Media reporter for CNET. She shared her insights on brands getting it right on Twitter, the future of mobile, what not to do as a startup, as well as the tactile merits of American Apparel swag t-shirts. In addition to her news reporting, Caroline blogs at The Social.

Name some brands who you feel manage to convey a tight, concise brand message while communicating across various social platforms (Twitter, Facebook, etc)?

The Obama campaign.  “The Colbert Report” and its green screen challenges.  Threadless.  JetBlue and Virgin America — but I think JetBlue’s winning right now, since I think Twittering fare specials and auctioning off mystery getaway packages on eBay (perfect for the serendipity-and-quirk image that the “Happy Jetting” campaign goes for) is much more lasting than getting BoingBoing to endorse your airline.

Apple, obviously, but my favorite of their social-media campaigns has been giving away free iTunes playlists to college students who joined their Facebook group; what a great way to market to the BitTorrent generation.

The ABC TV show “Dirty Sexy Money” has been tragically disappointing, but I loved that they advertised by buying space in Gawker Stalker last year to put in fake sightings of the celebrity characters.

What do you foresee as emerging trends in digital media for 2009? (Besides lasers)

I’ve been talking for a long time about location awareness on mobile devices, and now that the iPhone 3G is out we have more evidence about what people are willing and unwilling to do.  They’re very hesitant to catch onto location-sharing applications, which most of us didn’t expect; applications like Loopt and Brightkite were supposed to take off like wildfire once all those iPhone owners had GPS in their hands, and they didn’t.  There’s still time, but I think this is definitely an indication of industry predictions not meeting well with the popular audience.  But other location apps, like Yelp’s application that can direct you to the nearest Chinese restaurant or cocktail lounge, are doing great and are proving to be very useful.

Video search is obviously going to be big, too — there’s all this buzz around a new company called Videosurf that’s getting backed by Al Gore and Current Media.  But hype hasn’t always been a great indicator in the video space recently; everyone thought Joost was going to be the revolution, and it thus far has shown few signs of emerging from its post-debut slump, and everyone thought Hulu was going to be terrible but it’s been a great success story.

What’s one piece of advice for early stage companies trying to build awareness online?

Do not try to get your name out there prematurely; this is something that applies both online and offline.  I’ve seen companies sponsor parties, hand out T-shirts, and do other preliminary promotional work months before they even had an invite-only alpha.  Even if they’re collecting e-mail addresses for when they do launch, this doesn’t work.  At best, it’ll make it look like they don’t have their act together; at worst, people will start to label them “vaporware” when the better part of a year goes by before we’ve heard anything.  Some early-stage companies might see this as a way to get a leg up on competitors, but that’s just counterintuitive.  The fact is, if your competition puts out its product before you do and starts getting traction, it’s not going to matter whatsoever that you had some test screenshots on TechCrunch or used a chunk of your venture funding to rent out 111 Minna months ago.

What the best piece of swag you’ve gotten recently?

At genomics start-up 23andMe’s party this week, they gave out T-shirts — those really soft, retro gray ones from American Apparel — that said “I am genetically predisposed to be really, really ridiculously good-looking” on the back.  You will see me wearing it at the gym.  Frequently.

PR Week Interview

Attention’s Curtis Hougland recently did a video interview with Alexandra Bruell from PR Week.

During the discussion, Curtis notes that the two social media skill sets that the industry should focus on are:

1. Measuring and analyzing key social media soft metrics, i.e. tonality, share of voice, and volume

2. improving the production and distribution of digital content assets.

The discussion will continue on October 3rd at the PR News conference: Digital PR- Next Practices Summit where Curtis joins other panelists to delve deeply into measurement in social media.

PR Week

Social Media and the Velvet Rope

It’s September, which means the tents have risen in Bryant Park and a new season of style is upon us.  Once the bastion of fashion’s elite: buyers, magazine editors and celebrity stylists, Fashion Week continues to evolve as online and social media grow in significance. Simply put, bloggers are demanding more and more access each season and many traditional PR agencies are slow to adapt.

On this topic, The New York Observer published a thought-provoking article this week, “Oh Lowly Blogger, Your Seat’s in the Back.” Writer Gillian Reagan discussed the experience of both bloggers seeking access and the fashion publicists, who are accustomed to traditional forms of media, that must vet them.  Reagan points out:

“…the glossies also have a different relationship with the fashion houses, designers and publicists who fund their print publications with advertising and offer access. Blogs are a riskier affair: Writers tend to say what they want about a designer without worrying about access to interviews, and they can attract ads by building their traffic, which seems to increase commensurately with the level of cattiness or attitude.”

What this feature ignored is that there are many blogs, in every industry, that hold more authority and influence than the vast majority of print magazines. In the fashion space, these include sites like the The Sartorialist (blogger and former Bergdorf Goodman buyer Scott Schuman is quoted in this feature), nitrolicious and Style Bubble, which drive awareness and visibility for designers featured, not only reporting on trends, but shaping them for a rabidly loyal following.
What many PR firms may not realize is that there are relatively simple, cut and dry ways to assess the credibility and authority of individual bloggers if you take the time to observe and do a bit of digging using tools like Alexa and Technorati.  By denying access to all, many traditional publicists will find themselves at a distinct disadvantage when driving measurable results for clients.

Read the full New York Observer feature here.
-Dina Fierro

Attention in the news

Our own Curtis Hougland was recently featured in PR Week as one of the key figures leading the way in social media.

The article, published on August 4th, recognizes Curtis along with Jud Branam of MS&L Digital, Brad McCormick of Porter Novelli, and Virginia Miracle of Ogilvy PR.

The article highlights Attention’s ongoing work with WWE and explains how the agency was instrumental in helping the brand understand, coordinate and execute their activities in social media.

Curtis is quoted as saying, “Social media success is often based on frequency, consistency, and authenticity of message.  Everyone’s trying to produce content. Most isn’t that authentic; therefore it’s not viral. If you’re going to start a conversation, you have to sustain it…”

PR Week: Creative Minds Thrive on the Digital Scene (registration required)

Social Media Done Right

Mashable points us to 35 solid examples of corporations employing social media. 

A few of our favorites:

-Adobe’s social bookmarking page on del.icio.us

-Cisco’s hosted blogs

-Southwest’s direct communication between employees and customers

-Wells Fargo’s student finance blogs

The entire list is here.

Any other particularly strong examples? Leave a comment.

Tweet-Spam and Evolving Community Norms

Beyond the (semi)lovable “Fail Whale,” Alley Insider today reports on another issue for Twitter: a growing spam problem:

The service has gotten popular enough to attract spammers, and Twitter is trying to combat them — namely by blocking accounts that “follow” many people but don’t have any followers themselves. Presumably spammers will try to combat this by rigging accounts so that they have lots of artificial followers.

We also can’t help but notice the level of blatant self-promotion on Twitter. It’s not surprising when you consider the audience of tech-savvy early adopters — many with their own projects to plug. But as Twitter grows in popularity, this activity — if gone unchecked — could strangle the usefulness of the service.

Perhaps the social norms and community guidelines in micro blogging need to evolve.

Should Twitter users be asking themselves: “Is my tweet worth an opt-in text message?”*

On the Facebook front, perhaps a ratio of 5 posted items in the general interest of your friend network for every 1 blatant post of self-promotion?

Twitter and Facebook are incredibly useful utilities. But it is how the community norms and self-policing evolve that can keep them vibrant. If there is a social stigma to being a self-promotional spammer, perhaps the noise will die down to a mere rumble.

-Colin Nagy

*assuming there’s a monetary or attention-based value to an SMS.

Social Networking Stats: Facebook and LinkedIn Surging in US

Some useful social media statistics:

According to Nielsen Online:

“Facebook swelled to 29.2M unique visitors in the US, up more than 10 percent from May. Meanwhile, professional social networking site LinkedIn grew more than 20 percent month-over-month to 9.5M uniques. Year-over-year, that represents 77% growth for Facebook, and 187% for LinkedIn, respectively.

Meanwhile, it would appear that MySpace has officially hit a plateau in the US, though it still more than doubles up on the competition. Its 59.4M visitors in June represented zero growth over last year, and was a marginal decline from the 60.6M reported by Nielsen in May.

Elsewhere, Ning debuts on the charts with 2.2MM unique visitors, up 326% from last year when the create-your-own-social-network site was just getting off the ground.”

Attention at PSFK Conference San Francisco

Just a quick note to our friends on the west coast – Attention’s Colin Nagy will be  moderating the “San Francisco Snapshot” panel at PSFK San Francisco on Thursday, July 17th.

The panel includes Amit Gupta (Photojojo), Jeremy Townsend (Ghetto Gourmet), Kevin Allison (Financial Times) and Liz Dunn (funnyordie.com) discussing what aspects of local culture inspire them the most.

The complete conference agenda can be found at www.psfkconferencesanfrancisco.com

AP O-NO

For those of you who saw The Associated Press reaction to bloggers re-posting articles, it seems they are making the same mistake as the record labels. Rather than try to enforce compliance, they should encourage a dialogue and the spirit of “Fair Practice.” The AP’s long-term relevance hinges on, like many media companies, its relationship to social media. I hope they know that.

Here are some other articles for the curious