Lifes a Bench

Blog about VistaDB and get a free copy! Sounds like a good idea? right? Well maybe, but if you read on in their page its not so great. To get this free copy, you have to quote verbatim their ‘glossy’ marketing spiel, they don’t encourage you to try the product before you do this (there is a trial version available but it is not mentioned or linked), and while I have no doubt that people will blog this and get their free copy and your PageRank might even go up a notch, I really don’t think this is the right way to use bloggers to gain publicity.

Take a leaf out of the book of a company that is doing this properly and offer people that free copy of your software for just proving they have an active blog and leave it up to them if and what they post about it. You have obviously decided that you can take the revenue hit by giving free versions of your software away to bloggers but this way you will get better publicity out of it because you will get real publicity out of it. You might even learn something about your users, what they like and more importantly what they dislike and as a company will gain credibility too, if I read your press release copied and pasted onto 100 blogs, I will know that is exactly what it is and think, well… I will think (and blog) exactly what I have written here. However, if I see 20 or even 2 people blog about it with real experiences (good or bad, as long as its not really bad, but you do believe in your product, don’t you?) I will be 10x more likely to try it and talk about it.

You had a good idea by using bloggers to get publicity to your new product, however it is not too late to save it from being badly executed. Don’t be afraid to change it now.

Technorati Tags: VistaDB, Meme, Blog Marketing

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 27th, 2005 at 11:06am and is filed under Technology, Blogging. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.