Multichannel Merchant reports on the expansion of UK gadget merchant Firebox into the US market. Unremarkable you’d think, accept for these juicy parts:
Bill Linn, a partner with Sandbox Strategies [Firebox’s PR firm], says his firm looked for blogs popular with techies or pop culture enthusiasts, then e-mailed them messages about unique products, deals, and contests offered by Firebox.com. The company started with major blogs such as Boing Boing, Engadget, and Gizmodo; news of Firebox then circulated among smaller blogs that linked to the larger ones.
“Not every one of our clients can get away with that, but when you have product lines like gizmos and toys, you can feed the blogs and generate sales,” Linn says. “We found that blogs don’t respond well if your message is too corporate, so we cut that out and got to what’s important to the reader.”
Yep, that’s 3 of the biggest names in the blogosphere: Engadget (Weblogs Inc), Gizmodo (Gawker Media) and Boing Boing, all happy participants in a scheme that was nothing more than a marketing ploy to make sales.
Before any one tut tut’s me though, I’m not necessarily saying this is wrong, and indeed it’s something that’s been going on for a couple of years now, but many in the blogosphere still hold themselves high upon the dais of perfect morality, when the truth is we all get spinned to, all the time, and some of the time we nibble on the bait.
Tags: Gizmodo, Engadget, Boing Boing
This is completely erroneous.
We didn’t do a SINGLE post about their inane US launch, or mention them in anyway on the site. See here for yourself, our last post even mentioning them was more than seven months ago: http://www.engadget.com/supersearch/?q=firebox&sort=date
I have no clue why they would misrepresent their US launch like this.
Regards,
Peter Rojas
Engadget
Duncan/Peter – please don’t be too hasty in jumping to conclusions from this news piece, some of Bill at Sandbox’s comments have been taken out of context and Firebox isn’t the evil corporate villain that we’re being made out to be.
Tim Parry at Multichannel Retailer was interested in our U.S. launch strategy and the low-key approach we were taking. We don’t have the huge budgets of other online retail brands and he was keen to hear how we were planning to reach U.S. consumers. Blogs came up in our conversation and he’s chosen to focus on it for his piece (which is his prerogative as a journalist, and we can’t influence this).
Tim was really keen to understand why blogs would even figure as important to retailers and brands as he hadn’t come across this before. We explained that sites such as Boing Boing, Gizmodo, Engadget, Popgadget can all be incredibly powerful in driving consumer awareness of products and brands.
And, for the record, these sites were mentioned purely as examples of popular and influential blogs – and NOT as examples of sites that have actually featured Firebox. Duncan is quite right in that Engadget hasn’t featured a Firebox product for many months. (Which is obviously a shame…)
Anyhow, the real story here is that tech blogs are just as important as mainstream media in getting messages out to an online-savvy audience about new products and services that consumers would be interested in.
Just look at all the current CES coverage as an example – all the blogs featuring the iPhone aren’t unwitting participants in a marketing ploy to make sales for Apple Inc – they’re communicating news that their readers want to hear about!
Hope this sets the record straight.
“all the blogs featuring the iPhone aren?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢t unwitting participants in a marketing ploy to make sales for Apple Inc.”
Christian: I was with you up to the iPhone comment. Of course the iPhone announcement was designed to set off a feeding frenzy in the blogosphere and the media. Of course it’s a marketing ploy to make sales for Apple.
The fact that it was a successful marketing ploy doesn’t mean it wasn’t a well-planned attempt to create major buzz about what Apple hopes will be a major profit-maker. Apple put more thought and planning into their announcement than the U.S. put into its Iraq strategy.
Next you’re going to say bloggers never make provocative statements to get a little traffic coming their way…
Loved to read your blog. I would like to suggest you that traffic show most people read blogs on Mondays. So it should encourage bloggers to write new write ups over the weekend primarily.
regards
sears parts
Loved to read your blog. I would like to suggest you that traffic show most people read blogs on Mondays. So it should encourage bloggers to write new write ups over the weekend primarily.
regards
sears parts
Loved to read your blog. I would like to suggest you that traffic show most people read blogs on Mondays. So it should encourage bloggers to write new write ups over the weekend primarily.
regards
sears parts