Wednesday, April 7, 2010

The State of Social Media

Last weekend we endured the Hypiest of Big Hype release with the launch of the Apple iPad. A few days in and there’s some talk of drastically overoptimistic first day sales estimates, some genuine buyer’s remorse, and of course the inevitable backlash from trendsetters looking for the New Shiny Object.

The official host of the iPad Honeymoon turned Hangover party is Hewlett Packard, which seems to have a lead on gaining the sought after “iPad killer ” moniker for it’s offering in the space, the iSlate.

What’s interesting for social media marketers is the anatomy of HP’s campaign to win back some mindshare from the savviest consumer electronics company in history: pure social media. Leaked photographs through Engadget and Gizmodo, and a blog launch you can find on industry blogs but not from HP’s homepage (at the time of this writing), etc.

This isn’t a huge surprise considering the demographic and technographic HP is targeting but it is somewhat of a milestone. This is the most important product launch HP has had in years and the cornerstone is a video blog? Although we would expect there to be a big budget Old Media campaign to debut later in the year once the iSlate is closer to release, it’s notable that the medium HP chose to highlight its New New Thing is a blog that’s not even two years old.

One way to spin this is that HP is making a clear case for what they think is most effective at this stage of their campaign. The other is that they’re making a clear case for what they think is not effective. HP didn’t integrate social media elements into an old media campaign. They just went all in.

3 comments:

GBabies said...

So are you saying that you're not going to get an ipad?
~Latrice

LaSandra Brill said...

Not necessarily. I have an iPhone and I have a Mac and I know enough about Apple that you don't want to buy a 1st gen anything. They are missing some key features, if they address that and sweeten the pot I might be interested. =)

Roy K said...

Nice bloog you have