@Chhavi I never thought about the selling on overstock.com and come to think of it, they might use the used devices to “bribe” more bloggers by giving it away.

@TwilightFairy edited your name and the URL to .in. I think what you are saying is correct by I still am trying to understand why me. I understand that I can voice my thoughts to a lot of people and they will get to know from a human, a first hand source, they might test it, borrow it from me but why ME :D

@Gaurav posted a comment on blog :) And for the benefit of other readers, I think it should be BOTH pull and push. And yes Nokia should use link love. And yes apart from link love, they should help you promote it even more by giving you free tools to create more media. Probably sponsor the show (by not paying cash but by giving you dope for the vidcast). The opportunities are endless if they use some imagination. Question is, are they using it .. ?

@Pavanaja I dont think money would make sense. Moment my contacts know that I am being paid for it, they might not trust my opinion. They would know that this is something I am being paid for and hence the review might be biased. And yes even I hope .. rather PRAY that they send me a N96 :)

@Shefaly On metric .. Honestly I dont think its about the number. I think its about being at the top of search engines when someone queries for E66. With Google Blogsearch and other such social media search tools, recency plays a vital part. More people talk about the device, more relevant results and higher in the results they get.

ON BOM .. I ignored that one completely. Read about it and yes agreed that the price that they can manufacture a device for themselves can be ridiculously low.

And yes, it helped :)

@Mark Hope this is not one of those spam comments masqueraded at genuine comment to drive traffic. You must have read that I get only 20 visitors a day :)

Regards,
SG

Thanks for asking me to look at your post and give my views. Sorry I could not do it sooner.

Many large organisations are beginning to dip their toes testing the waters of social networks for marketing purposes. Both official efforts, such as this one, and bootleg ones, which companies do not acknowledge or just turn a blind eye to (as long as the brand is not damaged) are growing.

There is however nothing foolproof about experimentation. For instance, you say that perhaps 20 people will read your review. The questions here on are two-fold. One, is 20 a sufficient number? Perhaps, yes, if it is a well-selected audience. Secondly, is 20 a sufficient number to get into the hassle for? You will find out soon enough depending on how many ask you now that you have revealed the metric which they had possibly assumed to be larger for any number of reasons! :-) Besides you do not know all the bloggers who were approached, so, it is safe to say that much of your analysis here is based on several assumptions.

Companies such as Nokia can absorb the costs if they are reasonable. In your analysis, for instance, you are using end user price as the metric. To understand what it means to the company’s marketing budget, you need the BOM of the phone. As an illustration of the absurd ‘relationship’ between the BOM and the price tag, see this:

http://blogs.zdnet.com/Apple/?p=1896

In the UK, iPhone with contract sells for nearly £400/ US$ 800. Nokia’s BOM may be smaller because it has realised its economies of scales. Its components are also more integrated (iPhone 3G uses 2 chipsets whereas most other 3G phones use one chipset; design has significant bearing on weight and costs but now I am digressing).

Asking select people for reviews is also not new. Nokia is trying, as far as can be seen, to cultivate its own community. Amazon, with a well-established community of reviewers, has a programme, Amazon Vine, which sends free books/ CDs/ software etc to reviewers who then write reviews in huge numbers. I have been a top-1000 reviewer on Amazon-UK for a while and am also a Vine Voice reviewer. For Nokia these costs may well be being capitalised, not just expensed under ‘marketing’. Getting advance previews is also helpful in shaping opinions and influencing purchase since WOM is promoting all reviews written. And don’t under-estimate the warm-and-fuzzy that many young reviewers will get from this cross-linking, encouraging them to turn into Nokia mouthpieces without getting paid or even realising.

It was said of advertising dollars that half of them were always wasted, the trouble was we couldn’t say which half. The same can now be said of social marketing expenses.

The efforts have to be framed with the firm’s specific and the industry’s broader context to assess their relevance and cost-effectiveness. Hope this helps. Thanks.

-Pavanaja

BTW - I prefer being known as Twilight Fairy in the online world :).. and yes, my URL is twilightfairy.in , not .com :).