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YAIP: Yet another iPhone post

Apple is giving an iPhone to every employee. 

That’s pretty smart. Companies agonize over finding evangelists, influencers, and word of mouth talkers. Your employees usually are your best, biggest fans.  They want to talk about you. They want to brag about where they work.  When you do something cool: Make sure employees are the first to get it and the first to talk it up. How many Motorola employees carry a Q?  How many Dell employees have the new XPS M1330?

You should do this because it’s awesome marketing and awesome employee relations.  If you don’t, it raises some troubling questions: 

  • If your employees aren’t thilled evangelists, you’ve got a bigger corporate-culture problem. 
  • If your employees’ friends notice that the employee doesn’t feel a need to upgrade to the latest product … what does it say about the product?

NewLaunches.com figures that it will cost Apple $12 million (retail) to give it to 17,000 employees. But it’s a fraction of that wholesale, less if you figure that Apple is already buying thousands of competing phones and blackberries already for staff.  Net cost to get 17,000 super-hyped evangelists?  Less than one prime-time TV advertising blast.

Thanks to John Moore.

Original article in the San Jose Mercury News.

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