Enter the Dragon
Early this year, HP found itself with a high-powered, relatively high-priced notebook PC, the HDX Dragon, that was making little headway against the competition. The tech maker set up a social media promotion that lasted a month, gave away 31 notebooks, and got an immediate 85% sales bump in Dragons, a 15% increase in traffic to its www.HP.com Web site, and a “halo effect” 10% increase in total consumer PC sales. Cost to HP: the price of the 31 laptop awards. Nothing else.
Interested yet?
The “31 Days of the Dragon” promotion ran for five weeks, from May 2 through June 8, and built on pre-existing relationships with some of the most influential and passionate private bloggers on the Internet — real influencers chosen for their engagement with the tech industry and for their audience reach. All told, these 31 bloggers regularly reached about 50 million readers, according to metrics on Alexa.
They all also had long-standing relationships with HP, says Scott Ballantyne, vice president and general manager of the company’s personal systems group. For the last year or so, HP has made it a practice to involve influencers in its business — from product development through launch and into marketing and support.
The relationships with these bloggers weren’t based on any financial quid pro quo, Ballantyne stresses: 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 inside the workings of a consumer-tech giant and gave them the freedom to write about what they saw.
Having built this trust equity with influencers, HP and social media agency Buzz Corps then set about leveraging it in the service of the Dragon notebook line. They designed a co-marketing program that would essentially give these 31 top bloggers the freedom to run any kind of online contest they wanted, each with a $5,000 Dragon as a prize. HP’s only stipulations were that the contest launches be staggered daily from May 1 through early June, to build buzz for its big mid-June product launch season; that each contest run for a week; and that each blogger run links to the other 30 contests on their Web real estate.
That’s it. No corporate message or branding, no authorized promo materials. And no cost other than the notebook prizes.
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