.FLYINGHEAD PALMPILOT IN THE ENTERPRISE
.TITLE The great PalmPilot giveaway
.AUTHOR Richard Echeandia
.SUMMARY There’s an interesting new trend in the corporate world: using the PalmPilot as a motivational tool and a giveaway incentive. In this timely article, Contributing Editor Richard Echeandia explores how you can motivate and sell using the PalmPilot as a giveaway. He also points out some free contests where you can enter to win your own PalmPilot device.
If a single PalmPilot is good, then more PalmPilots must be better, right? In a move somewhat reminiscent of personal computer adoption in the early 80’s, Personal Digital Assistants (or PDAs) are being purchased by individuals on their credit cards and then being expensed back into the company on a rapidly increasing basis. This pattern is being greeted with emotions ranging from resignation to alarm by the Information Systems (IS) departments of most organizations. In this article I’d like to briefly touch on some of the reasons for this resistance, discuss how IS departments can have this trend work in their favor and talk about how to incorporate PDAs into various aspects of your company’s operations.
PalmPilots are hot – there can be no doubt about that. With a market share close to twice that of all its competitors combined, they are seen everywhere. But as pervasive as they are becoming, their utilization is still largely based on individual use, again like the experience of PCs in the 1980’s. In the increasingly connected 90’s, isolation is the exception rather then the rule.
Enterprise Digital Assistants (EDAs) are small convenient hand-held devices used by employees to perform personal and business functions for which laptops or desktop PCs are not ideally suited. Some of the common applications which are coming into prominence include remote data collection in the insurance and medical industries, inventory spot-checking and remote email monitoring.
These applications are just beginning to come into use. In my opinion, the next 12 months will see a rapid increase in the scale and type of applications for which businesses use PalmPilots.
.H1 PalmPilots as employee incentives
Can you use PDAs as incentives for your employees? I’ll outline what some companies are doing below.
Our firm, like most others in the IS field, wants to keep its employee’s skills up to date and competitive. One of the ways to do that is to have employees become certified by the vendors of important technologies. At Tactica we reward employees for becoming certified by giving them a PalmPilot once they’ve earned their certification. We feel that this gives them a tool for work as well as something to assist them personally.
Although our organization is comparatively small (less than 30 people), we’ve seen almost one quarter of the employees take advantage of our PalmPilot offer and elect to study for certification on their own time. When compared to the cost of formal technical training which can sometimes cost eight or nine hundred dollars a day, the cost of a PalmPilot is a bargain.
Finally, there are a variety of ways that PalmPilots can be used by departments outside of your IS organization. These are just some of the ones that I have seen companies employ.
.BEGIN_STEPS
.STEP Rewards for the best new suggestion in a company idea box
.STEP Use them as a signing bonus package for new recruits
.STEP Internal rewards for meeting sales quotas or other important goals
.STEP Gifts at Christmas parties or other company events
.END_STEPS
These are only the tip of the iceberg. You can probably come up with many more yourself.
.H1 Using PalmPilots for promotions
If businesses are just beginning to use PalmPilots internally, there is already extensive evidence that they are using them even more frequently outside their four walls. What kinds of things could you do with a PalmPilot outside your organization? Check the list below and see how many you recognize.
.BEGIN_STEPS
.STEP You can use them to draw people to your web site. Many times over the last several months, I’ve received an email message or seen an advertising banner advising me to register to win a free Pilot. I performed a very brief search of the web looking for sites which are giving away PalmPilots and found these two without too much trouble: http://www.arg.com/arg/contest/ and http://www.placements.co.nz/PalmPilot.htm.
These sites are particularly effective because PalmPilots are especially attractive to executive, computer savvy people or skilled knowledge workers, a demographic which is in great demand by advertisers and placement firms.
.STEP You can use them to draw people to your booth. At the time that I was writing this article, I was attending a technical conference in Orlando, Florida. In the vendor showcase section of the conference, there were approximately 200 booths. Of these 200 booths, 7 were raffling off a PalmPilot. The price of admission to the raffle: your business card. In speaking with the people who were manning the booths they told me that booth traffic had increased around 20% compared to when they didn’t offer the PalmPilot. That’s a very high return on investment for a promotional items which costs less then $400. The next time you go to a technology event, look for the companies which do this and see if there isn’t more traffic in their area.
.STEP You can use them to draw people to your company’s events. IBM is currently offering NT training for its network server platforms. The event is several days long and priced accordingly. To entice people to attend its seminars over its competitors offerings, IBM is giving away an IBM WorkPad (which is really just a PalmPilot with a black case) to everyone who completes the seminar. This offer was prominently displayed on the outside of the envelope to keep their marketing material from being filed in that round plastic file cabinet that we all have under our desks. Did it work? I read the materials and at least became acquainted with what it was they were offering. Couldn’t your marketing department use something like this too in its mass mailings?
.STEP You can use them a thank you gifts for customers. The next time that you complete a large project or land a major account consider using a PalmPilot as a thank-you gift. Instead of a round of golf or an expensive dinner why not give your customer or client something that will last for a while. The trick here is to pre-load the Pilot with as much information as possible about your company. If the Pilot contains the fax, phone numbers and email addresses of the relevant people within your organization, you’re making it that much easier for the customer to do business with you instead of someone else. If the Pilot also contained product information or specifications, project outlines or company information, you’ve now put this information in your client’s hands in a form that they will take with them wherever they go. Contrast that with printed materials or a web-site.
.END_STEPS
.H1 Conclusion
These are just some of the ways that you can use the Pilot in your organization. I hope that I’ve stimulated your thinking a bit and opened up some avenues which you hadn’t considered. In the coming months I’ll be writing more about the enterprise use of PalmPilots and how you can use them both personally and professionally. If your company has a PalmPilot project underway, let me know. I’d love to see more examples of PDAs being turned into EDAs.
.BIO
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