Blogger Campaign Boosts Sales 10% at HP

As reported by VentureBeat, HP announced an almost unbelievable blogger campaign, in which they boosted PC sales 10% by giving away just 31 PCs to key bloggers:

HP, one of the country’s biggest computer companies, is boasting that it boosted its PC sales by 10 percent in May after it leveraged the blogging community to promote the launch of one of its computer systems.

All HP did was give away 31 new HDX Dragon computer systems to 31 influential members of the PC blogging community, so that the blogs could give them away in a competition among their readers. The bloggers went nuts. They made videos of the systems, wrote up engaging posts and cross-linked to each other — all of their own accord. The publicity this created spurred an increase in sales, according to Ballantyne. Since the bloggers were credible to their readers, and they were talking about the HP systems on their sites, the readers went out and bought systems even if they didn’t win one in the competitions.

The results?

[D]uring the blogger competitions, sales of the Dragon system shot up by 85 percent compared to the average monthly sales of the three months before hand. More impressively, overall HP PC sales grew 10 percent higher in the U.S. than the company had forecast, as HP PC systems overall got more publicity from the Dragon campaign. Visits to HP.com increased by 15 percent.

IBM's Blogging Policy

Here's some very useful information IBM has shared about their corporate (customer facing) blogging policy:

Ibm Blogging Policy And Guidelines (2)

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own.

Differing opinion on Web 2.0 technology adoption

In an article on Web 2.0 adoption, Ann All cites a few pieces of evidence that Web 2.0 adoption is slowing or even falling into disfavor:

In my post about a slowdown in IT hiring, I cited an InfoWorld item that quotes M. Victor Janulaitis, CEO at IT staffing research company Janco Associates, as saying that the sluggish economy has halted Web 2.0 investments. Demand for Web 2.0 technologies has “atrophied,” says Janulaitis, after “a slight increase in demand” earlier this year.

Indeed, Web 2.0 deployments likely fall under the discretionary spending column at most companies, and thus are prone to elimination as tech execs look to cut IT spending. As a Goldman Sachs analyst put it, execs are “searching for solutions with a high and fast ROI,” a criteria mostly lacking in Web 2.0 technologies.

Ann also writes:

But check out the Robert Half numbers of CIOs taking a pass on technologies: tagging software (67 percent), blogs (72 percent),wikis (74 percent) and virtual worlds (84 percent). ZDNet’s Dignan expresses surprise at the lack of love for wikis and speculates that maybe they are popular among in-the-trenches types such as software developers and project managers but not among CIOs.

I think that Ann and the sources she quotes are missing the elephant in the room: employees are adopting these technologies whether the CIO wants them to or not. Professional blogs and professional social networking tools are still on the rise, and don't depend on internal IT resources. Likewise, wikis and community tools are available from hosted providers, usually for free. All it takes is one enterprising person from marketing to start a customer community, or an enterprising developer to start a wiki. 

When social media tools are hosted internally, I've witnessed over and over that they start as skunk works projects, below the radar of official IT. So the CIO may not endorse Web 2.0 tools, but company employees will adopting them both inside and outside the company firewall. In fact, the biggest risk that a CIO may cause by not adopting Web 2.0 technology in an appropriate and timely fashion is the exodus of implicit and explicit company confidential information outside the firewall.

And regardless of what the company may officially do, and what employees may unofficially do, of course a company's customers can and will adopt Web 2.0 technology on their own.

Customer Service and Support 2.0 Blog

It's always nice to find others focusing on the service and support aspect of Web 2.0. In this case, John Perez has a nice blog focusing on Support 2.0, including many useful links to research from the SSPA, Universal McCann, and others. 

John has even provided the IBM guidelines on blogging, which is tremendously helpful to any organization looking to foster engagement of their employees in social media.