Saurabh has some interesting thoughts on the why and how of blogger review programs, including why Nokia might want to ship out Euro 500 phones to little read bloggers halfway across the world.
While Nokia’s blogger review program is great, it would become even better if the website becomes the hub for all social media conversation about Nokia. For instance, I own a Nokia E71, have written a (positive) review on it, and even started a daily vidcast using it. A little link love from Nokia might encourage me to continue to blog about my Nokia E71.
What do you think? Should blogger review programs be ‘push only’ programs or use a mix of both ‘pull and push’ tactics?
From: PR-Agent-Name (pr-agent-name@gri.co.in)
Date: Mon, Mar 31, 2008 at 1:25 PM
Subject: Entrepreneur-Name unveils his second entrepreneurial venture Startup-Name.com
To: PR-Agent-Name (pr-agent-name@gri.co.in)
Greetings:
Please find below press release on Startup-Name.com, a second entrepreneurial venture of Entrepreneur-Name. It will be great if you can review the website and write your personal experience.
Should you be interested in interacting with Entrepreneur-Name, please do not hesitate to contact me.
Thank you
Regards,
PR-Agent-Name
Account Manager
Good Relations (India) Pvt Ltd
I typically receive 2-3 pitches for startups every week, but they are usually from someone in the startup team itself, and very different from the pitch above.
Quick Summary: Read a soon-to-be-real scenario featuring imaginary Indian Social Media Outsourcing (SMO) company BuzzPundit to understand why SMO will be the next big business opportunity for India after BPO and KPO.
Imagine a sprawling corporate campus on the outskirts of a large Indian metro (take your pick from Bangalore, Chennai, Hyderabad, Gurgaon or Pune). Imagine 10000 twenty-something Indians sitting in front of their computer screens. If you must, think of a call center. Except that these twenty-somethings are not making call after call to customers in the US; they are reading articles, posts and comments and tagging them, or responding to them.
Welcome to BuzzPundit. You are at the corporate campus of one of India’s many social media outsourcing (SMO) companies.
Quick Summary: Read about The Xeta Shootout Contest, where you can make your own Xeta TV commercial in a video or storyboard format and win an Indica V2 Xeta.
You can also watch the entries submitted by others and comment on them, participate in a slogan contest on the message board, or tell your friends about the contest.
The ‘Free content -> Free product -> Paid bundled services’ model is an extreme example of a trend we have been seeing for a while now — marketers bundling services with basically undifferentiated products in order to build a differentiation.
Free Content Can Convert Brands Into Cultural Currency
Take Nike as an example.
In spite of all the technology that supposedly goes inside a typical sports shoe, if you take away the logos, it’s almost impossible to differentiate between a Nike, a Reebok and an Adidas (or Puma or New Balance or…) shoe. So, Nike/ Reebok/ Adidas have instead focused on differentiating themselves by converting their brands into cultural currency. We have started talking about marketers becoming publishers and using free content to grab attention only now, but Nike/ Reebok/ Adidas have been doing it for decades. What’s more, it has worked out brilliantly for the sports shoe industry — even non-athletic types like yours truly have four pair of sports shoes — one for jogging, one for trekking, one for cross-training and one for tennis.
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