With the rise of bloggers as key influencers a growing number of smart marketers are looking at blogs as a way to seed products and develop word-of-mouth while building web traffic and in-bound links.
Most marketers approach seeding products to influential bloggers in an ad hoc manner – they’ll pick a few blogs, send them a sample and see what happens.
Interestingly, there have been some very controversial attempts to formalize this concept be companies like PayPerPost and ReviewMe.
All this had been a rather abstract concept for me until very recently when I got an email from Andrew Milligan, owner of Sumo Urban Lounge Gear, based here in Toronto.
To: Ken Schafer
From: Andrew Milligan
Subject: Contact Form from onedegree.ca
Hi Ken,
My name is Andrew and I have a company named Sumo which makes modern, funky and high-quality bean bag chairs. I could simply say, our Omni chair is the most comfortable chair in the world and truly enhances one’s life!
I am a fan of your site and was wondering if you would be interested in taking a sample of our Omni chair and posting a review on it.
After taking a look at the Sumo Lounge site and checking out the Omni chair he was offering, I sent back a hearty "you’re on – as long as I can blog about you asking me to blog about it".
