Exadata, Machines, and Blogger Giveaways

Dear Larry,

I was sitting in my hotel room, packing up to leave Oracle OpenWorld 2008, when I ran across this article from Venturebeat (as shared by Sarah Perez):

HP, one of the country’s biggest computer companies, is boasting that it boosted its PC sales by 10 percent in May after it leveraged the blogging community to promote the launch of one of its computer systems....

I talked with Scott Ballantyne from HP, VP & General Managers for Personal Systems Group, who oversaw the program. He said HP didn’t pay the bloggers a dime. All HP did was give away 31 new HDX Dragon computer systems to 31 influential members of the PC blogging community, so that the blogs could give them away in a competition among their readers. The bloggers went nuts. They made videos of the systems, wrote up engaging posts and cross-linked to each other — all of their own accord. The publicity this created spurred an increase in sales, according to Ballantyne. Since the bloggers were credible to their readers, and they were talking about the HP systems on their sites, the readers went out and bought systems even if they didn’t win one in the competitions.

Larry, notice that it's your buddies in HP who did this blogger promotion. Funny, I just heard that you've been doing a couple of things with HP yourself.

So why don't you talk to those guys in HP, then talk to the A-list bloggers that have been here at Oracle OpenWorld. They could then hold a blog giveaway for an HP Oracle Database Machine.

Now THAT oughta spur up some publicity. You know that the kids are looking for places to store all that music.

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