VComm/New Tech Press Success: ICEPhone

One of the companies that presented at VComm last week was ICEPhone, who bill themselves with the unimaginative descriptor of "the Swiss Army Knife" of mobile phones.  It is really a neat gadget--a cross between a microlaptop, mobile phone, and portable game console.  I want this phone even though it runs Microsoft CE (and anyone who knows me knows that is a BIG admission).


Among the benefits of being in VComm was getting a New Tech Press video interview and ICEPhone was the big winner in views on the New Tech Press site--more than 200 in the first couple of days after posting.

"Only 200?!?" I hear you exclaim.  Ah, but who was among that 200?  The answer demonstrates the power of the internet, sponsored content, and highly targeted audiences.

The guy running PR for ICEPhone in the UK is a young college student who has been playing around with viral internet applications.  He took that NTP video and sent it to a few key media people.  The result was CNET, PC Magazine, and TMCNet decided to do their own video report on the device in the CES reports.  The resulting coverage created a huge surge of interest in ICEPhone that resulted in close to 200,000 hits on their website and a call from USA Today who is running the ICEPhone in their review of smart phones in April.

New Tech Press doesn't boast a large audience in itself.  What it publishes is free to any other publication for use.  More importantly, it is free to the companies to use as they see fit to raise their own profile.  In the case of ICEPhone, they used their NTP coverage to leverage the interest of really BIG media houses and it worked REALLY well.

Too much of our marketing efforts today is passive.  We throw out almost identical press releases to the identical short list of editors and the identical wire services and release portals and think it makes a difference.  The ICEPhone flack took something completely different than anyone else and went aggressive.  

NTP made ICEPhone different from everything else at CES.  THAT's what I'm TALKIN' about.

More to come...