stedavies.com - communications consultant

UPDATE: The Behind the Buzz blog also has some additional insights.

Last month I was sent a Toshiba Tecra A8 by the nice chaps at talkToshiba. Interested to find out more, I email one of the guys, Jason, from talkToshiba on the outreach programme they’re working on. Here are the Q&As. (my questions are in bold)

Thanks for taking the time to answer these questions, Jason. First off, can you give me a little background about yourself and your role at talkToshiba?

I’m the Editor and Project Manager for talkToshiba. As well as editing the English language articles, I oversee site development and the trialist campaign. I try to make myself sound important but in fact, I’m a mere menial: Lola, Sondre, Franziska, Karen, Lucy, Jenny and Sylwia most do of the hard work and bully me mercilessly.

Now, can you give me some background on the Blogger Outreach Programme you guys have been working on? Is this the first of its kind for Toshiba?

Toshiba has recognised the value of engaging online voices for a while now, but the LoveToLead competition which launched the R400 was their first formal Outreach Campaign. LoveToLead was so successful that talkToshiba was initiated to build upon this.

I noticed that the talkToshiba blog is multilingual (English, French and Dutch), is the programme of a European scope or is it UK specific?

It targets the UK, France and Germany, but the interweb tends not to respect national boundaries so we have to be flexible.

Note: Ma bad. I obviously don’t know my Dutch from my German.

What is the primary objective of the programme? Is it simply to gain online coverage or are you looking to build relationships with the online community?

Both of these objectives are important. We want to encourage discussion about Toshiba and distributing trial notebooks to bloggers is an effective way to achieve this. Building relationships is also vital: conversations can’t merely be one way and the best blogs/bloggers are not aiming to be megaphones. They don’t have much time for those who only aspire to monologue.

How many bloggers have you approached in the programme? What are your reasons for choosing this number of people? And why did you approach the people you did?

We aim to keep the trial notebooks in peoples’ hands as much as possible and to do this we approach a broad cross section of the blogging community. It’s always nice to get the laptops back, so we generally only lend to relatively well established bloggers. At the moment we’re keen to get notebooks to Linux users. I’m an Ubuntu fan and buying a notebook is a very different experience if you intend to install a Linux distro or dual boot. Hardware compatibility and ease of installation both need to be checked before purchase and for intermediate users (such as me) an online installation walkthrough for your particular model is a godsend.

Has anything surprised you since being involved in the programme? Anything unexpected?

The French element of the campaign has been a huge success and Sondre’s done a fantastic job of building up relationships with French bloggers. Less of a surprise, but nevertheless pleasing, is the quality of reviews that have come through. Most of the bloggers who’ve trialed the A8 have looked at how the Tecra A8 impacts on and interacts with their work and lifestyle – your own review is a prime example. That’s so much more useful than if they’d installed benchmarking software and reeled off a list of figures! To be honest, a touchpad that doesn’t lead to RSI is more valuable that another gig of RAM. After all, RSI slows you down a lot more .

If you could give one piece of advice to anyone considering a Blogger Outreach Programme what would it be?

The team is vital. Everyone involved needs to have a clear idea of what you are all trying to achieve and ‘be in there for the long haul’. After all, relationships are built by people, so if the team is changing every month then don’t expect very much.

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You can read the talkToshiba blog here.