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Company: Hewlett-Packard
Contact: Scott Ballantyne, VP & General Manager for Hewlett-Packard's Personal Systems Group
Location: Palo Alto, CA
Industry: Information Technology, B2C
Annual revenue: $104,286,000,000
Number of employees: 172000

Quick Read:

Hewlett-Packard Personal Systems Group VP and General Manager Scott Ballantyne simply handed over a $5,000+ computer prize package to each of 31 bloggers, asking them to give away the prizes to their readers in any way they saw fit. He trusted their influence over the market he was hoping to reach.

It was a promotion designed to increase sales for the company's HDX Dragon Entertainment Notebook, and it involved zero advertising and not a single new marketing message from HP. With the exception of a couple of minor stipulations, each aspect of the giveaway was designed by the blogging community for its readers—a risk that paid off in spades.

More than 50 million impressions were registered during the 31-day promotion, leading to an 84% increase in HDX Dragon sales, a 10% increase in overall consumer PC sales, and a 14% jump in Web traffic (comparing the five-week period before the contest to the five-week period after it).

"The results were stellar," Ballantyne said. "Sales went through the roof."

Challenge:

In mid-2007, Hewlett-Packard introduced its Pavilion HDX Entertainment Notebook PC. Nicknamed the "Dragon," the system—which boasts HP's first 20.1-inch widescreen display, an HDTV tuner, a subwoofer and four Altec Lansing speakers, a low-light Web camera, a dedicated ATI HD2600 XT graphics card, and fingerprint reader technology—is one monster of a machine and, not surprisingly, carries a hefty price tag, starting at $3,000. Accordingly, it attracts a fairly niche target market: 25-34-year-olds with plenty of disposable income.

Considering its specs, the Dragon was well received by the tech community when it first came out, but sales didn't measure up. The pressure was on Scott Ballantyne, VP & General Manager for HP's Personal Systems Group, to effectively reach this target market and turn sales around.

Campaign:

Ballantyne saw his answer in the blogosphere and together with Austin, Texas-based Buzz Corps, a social-media and word-of-mouth marketing firm, created the "31 Days of the Dragon" promotion to play out within selected blogging communities.

Identified for their influence within the HDX Dragon's target market, 31 bloggers were summoned to develop their own contests for giving away an HDX prize package valued at over $5,000 (including software and movies). A new contest was launched every day between May 2 and June 1, 2008 on one of the designated blogs, which were responsible for creating all of the rules, messaging, and Web 2.0 tools for the giveaways.

HP's only stipulations were that (1) the prizes had to be awarded to readers and (2) the bloggers had to regularly promote the giveaway throughout the 31 days with posts about the other sites' competitions as well as their own.

Several of the contests, including those from AbsoluteVista and HardwareGeeks, resulted in blog postings and videos on sites such as YouTube and Blip.tv, submitted by contestants who explained how the Dragon notebook would benefit them, such as improve their productivity and mobile gaming. HardwareGeeks offered extra points for producing a commercial-like video promoting the HDX system.

Others instituted innovative ideas for increasing traffic to their blogs, such as the following:

  • DigitalMediaPhile designed a treasure hunt. Users had to search through the blog's posts to find an image of the HDX Dragon, specs for its Intel processor, and other information, such as the first HP Pavilion Entertainment PC ever referenced in the blog.
  • GearLive monitored the activity of its members during its week-long competition and awarded the prize to the user who collected the most points, which were granted for various site interactions, such as posting (non-spam) blog comments and participating in forums.
  • Notebooks.com readers had to (1) submit a post to the site's forum explaining why they need and deserve the HDX Dragon, (2) get at least five friends to comment on those entries, (3) start at least five non-contest-related forum threads, and (4) write substantial comments on at least 10 other forum threads.
  • LockerGnome picked a blog post at random and chose the winner from the reader comments left to that post; that approach goaded users to comment on all of the blog's posts.
  • TheDigitalLifestyle made its readers search through the site's forums to find the details on its competition.

Others used the promotion as a means for learning more about reader preferences. For example, Jake Ludington's MediaBlab asked readers to share their opinions on the best freeware available in 22 categories, and TheGreenButton requested suggestions for improving its blog.

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Case Study: How HP Boosted Product Sales 84% by Letting the Blogosphere Run Its Online Marketing Promotion

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Kimberly Smith is a freelance writer. Reach her via dtkgsmith@gmail.com.

LinkedIn: Kim Smith