OK, brace yourself. This is a really easy one …
The time NOT to market your product via bloggers is when you HAVE A LOUSY PRODUCT.
If you have a lousy product, whatever you do, don’t send it to bloggers. Hopefully, they won’t see it, won’t realize it’s a lousy product, and won’t post on it. There is, after all, a variety of word-of-mouth marketing that you don’t want.
If you have a lousy product, hide it.
Don’t let bloggers see it. Keep it far away from clueful people with their own personal electronic printing presses.
Instead, sell it via mass media to people who still read paper magazines and paper newpapers. Use advertising on network TV.
This way you can show your product to people who can’t try it, market to people who won’t know it sucks, and sell to people who don’t check out the online buzz first.
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This post inspired by Joel Spolsky’s post on the incredibly bad Sprint Power Vision network, and the free LG Fusic they sent him to try. Talk about disaster.
[tags] sprint, joelonsoftware, joel spolsky, LG, fusic, cell phone, power vision network, social marketing, blogging, WOM, word-of-mouth, john koetsier [/tags]