Social media effort boosts notebook sales
Earlier this year HP's high-powered, relatively high-priced HDX Dragon notebook computer was making little headway against the competition. So the company gave away 31 notebooks as part of a monthlong social media promotion and got an immediate 85% sales bump in Dragons, a 15% increase in traffic to the hp.com Web site and a “halo effect” 10% hike in total consumer PC purchases.
Cost to HP? The price of the 31 laptops.
“31 Days of the Dragon” ran for five weeks in May and June. It was built on long-standing relationships with 31 of the most influential private bloggers on the Internet, with a combined reach of about 50 million readers, according to metrics from the Alexa Web information service.
Scott Ballantyne, vice president/general manager of the personal systems group, says that for the last year or so HP has made it a practice to involve such people in its business — from product development through rollout and into marketing and support.
Ballantyne stresses that affiliations with these bloggers weren't based on any financial quid pro quo: no HP ads placed on their blogs, no pay-per-post influence and no rafts of free stuff. HP simply found a way to let them look at the workings of a consumer-tech giant and write about what they saw.
Having built this trust equity, HP and social media agency Buzz Corps set about leveraging it to push the Dragon line. They designed a marketing program that would allow the bloggers to run any kind of online contest they wanted, each with one of the $5,000 notebooks as a prize. HP's only stipulations were that the contest launches be staggered daily during the promotion to build interest for its mid-June product intros; that each contest run for a week; and that each blogger run links to the other 30 contests on their Web real estate.
HP gave 31 top bloggers the green light to run any kind of contest they wanted, each with a $5,000 HDX Dragon as a prize.
