Steve Rubel’s suggestion for boosting awareness of Tablet PCs: Give away Tablets to key online and offline personalities that others go to for advice, such as Tom Peters and David Allen.
Actually, I bet the Tablet PC team would work with any of these individuals today. They may already be. I’ve passed names of influential people along that I’ve met or know who I think they should be talking with and sometimes I find they already have been talking or are very eager to see what can be done. And forgetting Microsoft–there are some OEMs that have gone out of their way to assist the market too. It makes good business sense.
From what I’ve seen, everything is on a case-by-base basis. There are a great many people that want them. Also, the machines may be loaners rather than keepers, but it all depends. I can’t remember the particularls, but on a coule occassions whole events have been given Tablets for CEOs or world leaders, etc. I’ve heard of others working with television shows. For instance, we can’t forget about the Fujitsu Tablet during NBC’s election night coverage. Oh, and we met a Newsweek editor at CES that had been given no less than three Tablet loaners–one of which he bought because it was so desirable that one of his staff members took it and kept it.
Anyway–and this is just my take on it–the key for some of these people is providing one-on-one marketing time. And to have the most impact you really need to shape the solution to their needs. They need to see how a particular set of programs or equipment setup can make their presentations better. They need to see how they can write, edit, markup, and send documents or comments to others more easily. Handing a Tablet to someone in a box will have far less impact otherwise.
I like the idea though.
A couple other Tablet promotion ideas I keep coming back to:
* Give away a Tablet a day for 30 days to a blogger that writes the best post as to why they should get one. If you feel particularly generous, make it 100 Tablets a day.
* Take away the price issue. Give every graduating high school student this year a $300 rebate on a Tablet PC. And yeah, you could do it for every student if you have enough money.
Of course, all these ideas cost money.
Actually, from a cost standpoint, not much beats talking, talking, talking with everyone every chance you get. Just sit next to Frank Gocinski on an airplane and you’ll see what I mean.