The (inadvertant) power of buzz marketing
Sprint sends a free mobile phone to well known geek blogger Joel Spolsky, in hopes of generating some positive buzz. Joel tries out the phone and then posts his review: he rips it to shreds.
After his shredding, Joel concludes that maybe the phone was just not designed for an alpha geek like him, rather for a younger audience–he says 4 year olds, more likely for teens. But if that’s the case, then why in the world did Sprint send it to him, not to some well known teen (or four-year-old) blogger? I suspect that this morning, someone at Sprint marketing is dreading the request from his boss to come to the boss’ office.