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I have noted a couple of times before that Nokia sent out phones and internet tablets in the past to some bloggers. Most were pretty cool with it, some questioned it's ethics, and I certainly didn't see any accusations of bribery etc that the Vista laptop "give away" kerfuffle produced.

As a blogger who get's sent stuff on occasions, mostly books and t-shirts, I do wonder what the best way is to approach this process and how to get the most out of it. I really liked the criteria that Gaping void had for sending out wine to bloggers, their criteria was simple and clear, although again, that's a $20 bottle of wine, and i'm talking about $500 devices here.

Beyond bloggers could you actually work with other kinds of communities, like Nikon did with Flickr? How about giving some devices to top contributers, or the Elite on Yelp, helping them take pictures or do video reviews of restaurants? And what are you building here? Positive WOM? Finding some "lead users"? Seeding the 1 percenters?

What are your thoughts? If your a blogger and you got an Nseries "multimedia computer" in the mail what would you do with it? How would you feel about it? Obligated? Bribed? Important? Valued? I know when I get a book or t-shirt in the mail I feel like a valued person, and somewhat obligated to write something.

I'm going to tag some bloggers that I would like to hear from on this:

David Armano
Shel Holtz
Neville Hobson
Steve Rubel
Mack Collier
Greg Verdino
Tom Coates
Ben McConnell & Jackie Hubba

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About the Author

Karl Long believes the experience is the marketing and social media is how customers share experience and has been blogging about it for several years. Karl's primary blog Experiencecurve lives at the intersection of marketing, social media, social software and
remarkable customer experience. Karl holds an MBA in Design Management from the University of Westminster and is currently the Web/Social Media Integration Manger for the video game group at Nokia. Karl also writes about t-shirts at tcritic.com