Hurricane Katrina

The HP Auction to benefit Habitat for Humanity ended last night. Top portraits in the Auction:

1. The Police (by Kevin Mazur), winning bid $1025
2. Jessica Biel, $640.16
3. The Beastie Boys, $505
4. Terrence Howard and Lucy Liu, both at $455
5. Kevin Smith, $405

HP is matching the winning bids on each portrait, up to $1000 each.

A huge thank you to all the fan site, forum and list owners who helped spread the word to their fellow fans. In particular, we are extremely grateful to Jessica Biel and www.jessebiel.com for including the auction in two emails to her fans.

And my personal thanks to blog pals, old and new, for mentioning the auction:

• Toby Bloomberg, Diva Marketing
• Elisa Camahort, Worker Bees
• John Cass, PR Communications
• Mack Collier, Beyond Madison Avenue
• Yvonne DiVita, Lip-Sticking
• Maria Niles, Fizz from Consumer Pop
• Betsy Palmieri, Contrary Valley
• Robyn Tippins, Practical Blogging

NOTE: June 3, 2007 — Comments and Trackbacks closed on this post due to comment spam.

HP’s Backstage at Sundance blog is progressing nicely. The bloggers are doing a great job sharing their experiences at the festival. And I am having a blast pulling WireImage pictures to accompany our posts about stars who’ve agreed to participate in the charity auction.

For me, the fact that we are announcing who is participating in the auction on the blog is pretty much the most exciting thing about the blog.

Yes, you read that right: HP is using a blog as a primary method to disseminate news. Now, granted, not news related to its core business, and definitely news well suited to online outreach. And we are also doing PR outreach in the traditional fashion.  But there won’t be a traditional press release about the auction participants until the festival is over, whereas we are releasing the names of the stars on the blog as they join.

Bottom line, in my opinion, it is a very positive step forward when a big company “gets it” in any fashion, large or small.

And the blog is about more than the auction; the HP employees who are its principal writers are on the ground in Park City as volunteers and staff for HP’s many activities throughout the festival. They are blogging about being there, who they meet, where they eat. And so on…

I particularly wanted to alert my readers to the auction. Of course, some of the stars are very well known like Jennifer Aniston and The Police (!) and their pics will probably sell for a lot (or at least they will if I do my job!). But some are less well known, if equally talented, and it is possible to get a cool picture and a cool printer for a decent price that also benefits charity. What could be better than that! Last time, I bid on (and won) the picture and HP printer signed by Alan Cumming. We love the printer and the picture is going in my son’s room (Alan Cumming was in X-Men 2.)

Check it out. Tell them I sent you 🙂

Tags: Blogs, Blogging, Charity, Sundance

As some of you know, last fall, I helped HP promote a charity auction of celebrity signed photos and printers from the Toronto Film Festival.

Well, we’re back 🙂

HP is a presenting sponsor at the Sundance Film Festival, which opened today, and is doing the auction again, this time to benefit Habitat for Humanity.

As a sponsor, HP has a lot of activity at the festival – from providing the technology backbone to the entire festival, as well as all the festival “printables” (posters, signs, and so forth) to a pretty neat consumer promotion where attendees can win HP digital photography gear. Plus of course, the HP Portrait Studio produced by WireImage, where all the celebrities come to get their portraits done.

As part of the overall Sundance effort, HP decided to do a blog. With all the staff and volunteers on the ground in Park City, we had all the makings of a cool blog: stuff going on and people there to write about it.

So, Backstage at Sundance was born:

The Backstage at Sundance blog is your backstage pass to what’s happening at Sundance. HP is a presenting sponsor at the 2006 Sundance Film Festival, and a group of HP employees have agreed to blog all about it. So those of us who can’t be there will feel like we are! Everything from what’s happening on the streets of Park City to interviews with the stars coming into the WireImage Portrait Studio, to film reviews, to a backstage look at the HP technology that’s powering the festival. It will all be here! Plus, the blog will have the first look at the celebrity photos that will be available in our charity auction on eBay in February.

I helped HP with the blog’s editorial development including helping them clarify the overall objectives of the blog, training the bloggers (most of them new to the medium) on general blogging principles, giving them some general guidance on what “blog what you experience” means, identifying  “beats” such as film reviews and Portrait Studio reports, and generally supporting the writer-volunteers. I also am blogging for them (from a distance unfortunately) during the festival and auction, mostly about things I find on the ‘net about Sundance.

Our hope was that the bloggers’ excitement at being at Sundance would permeate their writing, and from initial reports, I know it will. I spoke to one of the bloggers this morning and she was jazzed! She had arrived in Park City last night, and already had about four blog posts in her head from people she had met everywhere from the airport to the shuttle to the restaurant at dinner!! She just needed to get online and write the posts!!

And that’s the key – real people will be blogging from Sundance all about their experiences. HP products may be mentioned, but the bloggers have been told that there is absolutely no requirement to ever mention a product. It fits what you want to write, go for it. It doesn’t, that’s fine too. A fun, entertaining blog will enhance the HP brand far more than a bunch of posts about products. 

Some of the things we blog you may be able to read elsewhere. And some you won’t. For example, the PortraitStudio is not open to the public; Backstage at Sundance is the only place you’ll be able to get behind the scenes. As well as get a first look at which celebrity portraits will be in the auction.

And for me, that is one of the key parts of the blog. I will again be doing the fan outreach for the charity auction once we know which celebrities have agreed to participate. Having an active blog really helps set the stage.

So: if you are interested in the Sundance Film Festival or think you might want to bid in a charity auction to benefit Habitat for Humanity, please check out Backstage at Sundance !!!

Tags: Blogs, Blogging, Charity, Sundance