Amazon Crowdsources Holiday PR
The New York Times Bits blog has an interesting post today about how Amazon is tapping several of its regular customer reviews contributors to talk to media about holiday gift advice.
This is a great way to go if you have users / customers that are passionate about your offering and more importantly are getting value from your products. This particular approach can work for Amazon becuase its users will be talking to interested medai about the products… that just happen to be available on Amazon.com.
Its not like the typical use of customers for media. Normally, when a journalist is covering a product or company, customers are served up by the company to talk about their experince as it relates to the company / product. This is basically to humanize the story.
In the Amazon case, customers are actually fielding calls directly from media. The customers then share with the media the hot gifts, good deals, what is popular this season. This is usually a task for junior PR staffers at the company or the partner PR firm.
During the holidays, the demand for this kind of information can be a lot for PR teams to handle. That’s why Amazon’s approach makes so much sense. Instead of upping the PR budget for the holidays, Amazon can instead rely on passionate customers to carry this burdeon. They aren’t delivering company messaging or positioning a story, they are simply assisting journalists with a simple task and something they know a lot about.
To be clear, this is nothing like GM’s ill-fated attempt at user-generated ads. GM hoped Chevy fans would make their own ads and that the ads would spread virally across the web. This worked to a degree, but the most popular ads were negative.
