By Kim Tong-hyung
Staff Reporter
Consumer electronics companies are trying harder to create relationships with bloggers to generate a buzz about their products, which has some tech-savvy housewives sitting on snowy piles of freebies.
These marketing campaigns are a growing breed as blogs become increasingly embraced as marketing tools by companies, although there are questions over whether online product reviews can be relevant and credible when the authors are at the receiving end of targeted perks or payments.
Sony Korea recently gave the latest models of its Alpha DSLR (digital single-lens reflex) camera series to nine ``alpha moms'' in exchange for a promised number of columns on their blogs.
The selected women, aged between 30 to 35 and most of them the mother of one or two children, all have established reputations in the blogosphere, gaining large readerships for their writing about children, cooking, traveling and electronic gadgets. One of the bloggers picked by Sony gets more than 4,000 daily visitors to her blog, the company said.
Aside from posting reviews and photos taken from the cameras on their blogs, the bloggers will take classes from professional photographers and participate in a photo competition, while also presenting ideas for product improvement to company officials.
Samsung Electronics, the country's largest electronics maker, is also looking at more ways to use bloggers for word-of-mouth marketing.
Earlier this year, Samsung picked 50 bloggers to use the latest version of its Zipel refrigerators, selecting them based on the popularity of their blogs and previous postings on the Web community of Zipel users (http://cafe.naver.com/zipelier), which is managed by the company.
The bloggers will provide Samsung with their product reviews and also write on their blogs and the Zipel Web community, which has more than 5,200 members, company officials said.
Samsung pushed a similar marketing scheme for its Hauzen washing machines last year, picking 100 bloggers to write product reviews.
LG Electronics has been regularly selecting groups of bloggers to test the new products of its Dios microwave ovens since last year.
The bloggers are selected from the Dios Web community (http://cafe.naver.com/ovenwon), which has about 11,000 members. The company also uses bloggers to promote its kimchi refrigerators and washing machines.
LG recently also recently launched its official blog (http://blog.lge.com), which features writing from 10 of the company's product designers and allows Internet users to post opinions about the products.
``The product reviews of `power bloggers' are very influential on consumers planning to spend on a product, due to their objectiveness, and their opinions are also important for companies in developing products and marketing them,'' said a Samsung executive, stressing that the use of bloggers provides a cost-effective marketing tool.
However, there are also questions over whether ethical thresholds have been crossed as the lines blur between genuine postings and paid advertisements.
Earlier this year, Web-based media company, Tatter & Media (TNM), found itself engulfed in a controversy for connecting a group of popular bloggers with Samsung to review their latest mobile phones, some of them costing nearly one million won (about $718) on the shelves at the time.
thkim@koreatimes.co.kr
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