CASE HISTORY AND SAMPLE CLIPS
Generating Coverage after a Product Has Launched
Kima Labs asked The Bohle Company help acquiring users for Barcode Hero, a social shopping iPhone app, just before the holiday gift giving season. The company had already launched the app several months earlier at DEMO, gathering major coverage from Tech Crunch and most of the other sites that follow interesting tech start-ups, so TBC needed to find ways to generate interest in the product beyond general application use.
Bohle first capitalized on the season. While the assignment came well into the holiday shopping season, we were able to pitch new media categories including:
• Holiday themed shopping app round-ups for tech, iPhone and app sites
• Family/children’s consumer media doing gift stories
We then developed several additional concepts:
• Shopping tips for consumer and personal finance editors, money saving sites and blogs
• Black Friday commentary for shopping reporters
We also suggested Kima Labs offer Mom Bloggers the chance to win holiday shopping gift money by reviewing BarCodeHero. Multiple hits ensued.
After securing media on all of these ideas, we came up with one more – We asked the founders if the app could be further developed, allowing kids to scan the barcodes of gifts they really wanted for Christmas and then send a wish list with the photos they had taken to Santa. Kima agreed, and did the programming over Thanksgiving.
• We sent the Santa feature and visuals to mommy/daddy bloggers, generating more hits
The team’s efforts resulted in dozens of stories in top targets including Mashable, CNET and MSN as well as with shopping editors and mommy bloggers.
So much attention was generated that business reporters started taking notice of the company. The team provided media training and coached Kima Lab’s CEO on how to respond to reporter inquiries, allowing management to capitalize on every interview. In fact, the Forbes.com interview turned into two totally different pieces, both highly promotional for BarCodeHero. A BusinessWeek story added more excitement.
A capstone accomplishment was securing in a story for the company in the Wall Street Journal.
