Dell; China promotion through social media: Almost, but not quite.

Continue from yesterday’s entry, China domestic PC brand Foundertech and International PC brand Dell both created a doodle contest, and both are promoting it through a Chinese SNS site – Xiaonei. After reviewing Foundertech’s campaign, now it is time for Dell.

Dell’s doodle contest website:

Dell’s Xiaonei banner took me to its independent website for this doodle contest – dellyouth.com. By using its own site, Dell allows everybody to join the contest, not like Foundertech – built the contest in Xiaonei so only Xiaonei user can join. On the homepage, Dell set up two entry buttons, one for Xiaonei user and one for others; Xiaonei user can also share the doodle artwork they like with their Xiaonei friends. On the side, Dell is promoting its desktop and laptop products through the entire site.

Dell’s doodle contest started from July 7 and lasts to July 31. Different from Foundertech’s doodling on laptop cover, Dell ask participants to choose a letter key (A-Z) then doodle (3D) on it. 3D sounds pretty complicated, right? To satisfy my (and everybody’s) curiosity, I tried. Those painting tools are not difficult to use, but to doodle a nice looking one really takes time and perhaps some painting skill. Final winners are also chosen base on votes from other visitors. However, the prizes are less “practical” compared to  Foundertech’s – weekly winners can get Dell T-shirts, and top 18 participants get the chance to work with popular actors, director and anchor for a day.

The entire website is built in flash, very cute and well interacted with users; but due to the loading time for flash, waiting period between pages is pretty long.

Some popular letters among participants have been doodled for around 200 times; less popular ones, around 50 times. Also by roughly calculating, there are around 3043 contest participants and a total of  20,000 votes so far. The top artwork so far got 1873 votes (see below), the artwork looks pretty impressive.

Dell’s marketing channels

Dell is using mainly social media to market this contest, along with some online news releases. Those social medias include video sites, blogs, forums; below is brief summary on each one:

1. Video sites

There are exactly same 2 videos posted on 3 popular video websites – youku.com, tudou.com and 56.com; all did by brand itself. However, the result doesn’t seem so good. Up to today, youku videos got 38 views, tudou’s got 60 views and 56.com’s got 46 views.

One of two videos Dell posted.

The other one.

2. Blogs

It seems Dell hired some Sina Bloggers to post one same doodle contest’s announcement article on their blogs, pretty much like all the other event announcement you can see everywhere. Regarding the effect, 47 views for 3 articles we found. For contract, one average article from my “baby” missniuniu.com gets averagely 300 views per day. I think you should have an idea how bad it is…

3. Forum

We did find Dell using some BBS to promote this contest, and mostly IT BBS. For the content, it seems they just simply use the contest’s news release article – one SAME news for all the BBS. So far, we haven’t found any comment or replies.

4. News release

Similar to Foundertech, Dell is also doing news release on many websites (most IT websites). The news release content is the one they are using for forums, so basically, they are just sharing that one news release article between forums and websites.

Thoughts:

After reviewing those two similar contests, it’s time for a little conclusion. Here is the total doodler contest participants and votes both contests got up to July 21st -

Foundertech (up to July 21st) : 460 participants; 300,000 votes

Since the PR event isn’t for promoting the contest, and we didn’t find other marketing methods Foundertech used for promoting the contest other than boring news release. It seems that they just built the contest on Xiaonei and wait for people to come.

Dell (up to July 21st) : 3043 participants; 20,000 votes

Dell built its own contest site, then uses not only Xiaonei, but also a variety of social media to get people know and join the contest.

If we only look at pure engagement, then it is clear that Foundertech got more people engaged in its contest. However, the majority of this group of people only voted for the artwork they like, which seem to be a very low level of engagement, especially for a relatively high cost product – computers. On the other hand, Dell got 3043 people actually spent time to doodle on a website full of Dell’s brand/product information, to participate in the contest certainly requires more involvement compared to simple voting. So, next time when those 3043 guys go buy computers, chances are they will consider Dell.

However, after looking at these two campaigns, I saw areas Dell can improve:

1. Use Xiaonei

The benchmark of marketing computers through Xiaonei, established by Foundertech, is 300k votes. So if Dell can build a contest on Xiaonei to take good advantage of its huge user base, instead of sending people back and forth between Xiaonei and Dell’s contest site, the result will be much different.

2. Improve marketing content

When we look at what Dell is “saying” on those blogs, forums and websites, basically 2 videos and 2 articles, which are introduction and announcement. From my experience with marketing missniuniu.com on China social networking sites, people like to see fun things and personal experience/opinions they can connect with, but they don’t like to see company sponsored promotional announcements. Dell’s contest itself is fun, but its method with engaging people is not fun.

3. Choose the right marketing channel

From my experience, SNS forums are fantastic places to get traffic, but why Dell’s forum strategy didn’t work? The problem is they chose IT forums. As I mentioned above, Dell is promoting it desktop and laptop products on the contest site, so the target is a young 20-30 years crowd. If that’s the case, young crowd seldom go to IT forums! Again, because IT forums are no fun… For people Dell’s contest wants to target to, it seems Douban, Tianya kind of SNS forums are better places to spread the word.

The takeaway:

Foundertech built a contest on a SNS site and waited for people to come, Dell built a promotional contest site, and got people through SNS marketing. What if Dell built the contest on Xiaonei, and also promoted it using the right channels? My guess is that the engagement levels of both participants and voters would be much higher than what we see now.

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