As I was going through my twitter page updating myself with what people worldwide are talking and sharing, I chanced upon this twit…

I was interested to find out how HP increases its laptop sales by 85% using bloggers.

And from there, I clicked myself towards HP latest campaigns where they’re giving out USD6,000 worth of products via 50 blogs. Talking about mass social media marketing campaign!

From the previous campaign, quoted from Janet Meiners…
The result was that the first five pages of Google results for searches on HP and HP Dragon were blog posts about the contest. According to HP they had over 380,000 links to the 31 sites discussing the contest. Bloggers got over 25,000 contest entries and an average 150% increase in traffic. Here’s the kicker though – almost 85% increase in sales of a computer that was released nine months ago!

I recall a brand doing similar concept campaign here in Singapore where LCD TVs were given out as prizes on several blogs. I wonder if they got the same kind of effect as the HP campaign. Anyone has a case study to share?

This is one of the reasons why I prefer twitter than plurk. Twitter helps me build knowledge, plurk doesn’t. I would love Twitter even deeper if it stops hanging itself so often.

It’s been months since I shared my thoughts on social media or blogger outreach/ engagement. My last post was in September! It’s not that I’ve got nothing to share, in fact, I’ve got too many thoughts and opinions that I do not know where to start. And having something up my sleeve *cough*, I’d decided to ignore noises and concentrate on the tasks on hand.

But since there’s some sharing lately on this topic, let’s just carry on with it while everyone’s having this topic in mind. If you’ve not read Brain’s take on why are there blogger events, you might want to pop over first before you continue reading this post.

I’m trying to organize my thoughts as I’m typing this post. So again, it may end up incoherent. I’ll try my best to make it as coherent as possible.

So, the questions that I’m trying to ponder…

• Why are bloggers being engaged by agencies/ brands?
• “Why they’re invited but not me?” The social media problem.
• What’s good about getting invited?
• What’s the bad that others don’t see?
• “So good! They get to play with the latest gadgets!” But are you seeing the process behind it?
• “I don’t have fantastic traffic to my blog. Can I be part of such campaigns?“
• Will this trend continue? My prediction for 2009.

Wow! That looks like a long list of questions and this post is going to take sometime to write. Time now is 1.03am on 29 Nov 2008. Let’s see when I’ll get this post up on my blog…