IF!’s 2c : Why Edelman’s Blog Buzz Strategy For Zune Failed

There’s an interesting post over at Valleyway that suggests that, frustrated by the lack of positive blogger response over the Zune, Microsoft’s buzz agency Edelman has decided it might be best to hit the old school journos. Valleywag says:

Microsoft’s marketers had entertained a fantasy: that the blogs, which increasingly determine buzz on products, would embrace it; the virtues of digital device would spread, virally, as people exchanged music with their friends; and a traditional press relations campaign, with a focus on tame business and national titles, was redundant.

After $100 million was spent on a marketing budget to promote the Zune music player, today it sits at just number 20 in Amazon’s music player chart. Someone at Microsoft should be kicking up a storm at their agency offices, especially at Edelman’s gaff.

It’s not hard to understand Edelman’s strategy – every PR agency in town seems to be trying to get bloggers to write about products and services. The International Herald Tribune carries an interesting article about how brands are apparently showering bloggers with gifts to get a mention on their sites – but our feeling is this has nothing to do with over-gifted bloggers.

One of the biggest errors in the strategy was that Edelman sent Zunes to the wrong bloggers. They sent it to tech folk like Om Malik and Robert Scoble. Om and Robert are very influential in their own technology fields – but they were the wrong bloggers to go after. Maybe by being so cosy to these folks in Seattle and San Francisco, Edelman misunderstood the real target of their campaign.

(Maybe, we can’t put all the blame on Edelman though. Maybe they were responding to the brief: Microsoft is a technology company after all and they make technology that is interesting to technology enthusiasts)

Anyway: two blogger genres were seriously overlooked: cool products and music.

OK, ok, it looked like Josh Rubin at Coolhunting got a couple of the players – but what did he do? He gave them away! Couldn’t have been that good. The other cool/design blogs remained silent on the subject. Young pretender Josh Spear was silent and Coolhunting 2.0 site Notcot just talked about the Zune‘s art site.

These cool product sites are read by people fascinated with new products and style. Zune didn’t even register – and maybe that’s because cool goods blogs feed off other genre blogs to gauge buzz – like music.

As far as we could see, the Zune music player didn’t even feature in the music blogs. Edelman appears to have forgotten to send their free products to anyone who actually might be interested in using the product beyond the technology. They missed the people who were actually swapping music already – and may have utilized the peer-to-peer technology built in the Zune.

What will be interesting to note now is whether a change of tact to target old media will work : not only have they already been snubbed, old media relies on blog buzz to decide on what stories to write about these days!

[IHT article via T Cook]