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Businesses Cellphones Social Networks

LG Will Lend You a Free Phone If You Talk About It On Social Media 22

Posted by samzenpus from the phones-for-flattery dept.
jfruh writes LG will let people in a host of countries use its G4 free for 30 days — with the hope that this will result in positive buzz on social media sites. From the article: "By offering 4,000 people a G4 for 30 days, the company hopes to create some buzz around its new device as flagship devices from its rivals Samsung Electronics and HTC go on sale. The Consumer Experience Campaign kicks off in South Korea on Wednesday, and will then expand to Turkey, Indonesia, Singapore, U.S., China, India, Brazil, Canada, U.K., France, Germany, Mexico, Japan and Hong Kong, LG said."
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LG Will Lend You a Free Phone If You Talk About It On Social Media More

LG Will Lend You a Free Phone If You Talk About It On Social Media

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  • Cheap is cheap. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Needs2BeSaid ( 4062029 ) on Wednesday April 08, 2015 @01:42PM (#49431685) Homepage
    Free for 30 days? Why bother giving free advertisement that, based on Internet standards, last for eternity just to get a 30 day trial? Is the company doing so poorly that they can't sacrifice 4,000 phones? Also, when they take them back, do they repackage them as new? What do they do with the used phones?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Macrat ( 638047 )

      Is the company doing so poorly that they can't sacrifice 4,000 phones?

      A self answering question.

    • Is the company doing so poorly that they can't sacrifice 4,000 phones?

      You do realize that @ $1k each that this is $4 Million dollars right? Where they might be able to write that off as marketing, that's a serious chunk of change even for LG electronics. They may have BILLIONS in revenue, 4 million would be quite the bite out of the profits in an already competitive market segment. They may not have the room jus to eat that cost.

      But I do share your questions about what they are going to do with the returned devices.... Or, a more important question is, how are they going to

      • This phone will self-destruct in 30 days.

        Da, da, da-da...

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by ruir ( 2709173 )
        The "force" part is easy, the devices locks itself after 30 days. Next...
        • More likely, they either require a credit card upfront with the understanding that you won't be charged if you return the device within, say, 45 days, or given that a phone is kind of useless without service, you'll sign an agreement with your carrier that the full cost will be added to your bill if it's not returned.

    • Why bother giving free advertisement that, based on Internet standards, last for eternity just to get a 30 day trial? Is the company doing so poorly that they can't sacrifice 4,000 phones? Also, when they take them back, do they repackage them as new? What do they do with the used phones?

      The returned devices could just be used as loaners for developer testing and device lab testing.

      Or they may just do like Intel and require that you sign a piece of paper saying that you'll destroy the device yourself after the time is up. If the device gets supposedly "destroyed", or even purchased after the fact, then LG Electronics can avoid paying the full retail gift tax rate that some governments may require them to pay.

      • Or they could just reset them and then give them to participants in the next country. There's enough countries out there that by the time they're scraping the bottom of the barrel, the phone will be obsolete.

  • been there (Score:4, Funny)

    by slashmydots ( 2189826 ) on Wednesday April 08, 2015 @03:55PM (#49432635)
    I just got a brand new LG phone and I'd be talking about it on social media constantly with it except it KEEPS FREAKING BREAKING. It's a freezing, glitchy piece of crap.

    • I just got an LG phone (a budget model) and it works fine. However, it keeps nagging me to agree to a privacy agreement, which says LG will collect ALL my data and use it for ANYTHING they like including selling personally identifiable data to third parties and using it for advertising. I don't even want to use the preinstalled LG apps but the privacy agreement keeps coming up anyway.

      Additionally it wants to do a system update which "will improve my experience". That's literally all it says. No details on w

  • nothing new.. (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    companies have been giving people free stuff for (the higher chance of) favorable reviews and posts for ages....

  • No such requirement? (Score:3)

    by Gavagai80 ( 1275204 ) on Wednesday April 08, 2015 @04:46PM (#49433051) Homepage

    The article says nothing about a requirement to talk about the phone on social media. Obviously any company hopes to get good word of mouth from freebies, but that's a very very different thing than requiring positive reviews in order to get the freebie. Is the headline just attempting to slander LG or is there any source that says there's a positive review requirement?

  • "Lend", that's a burden, not a gift.

  • Do I have to sign up for Facebook to get the free phone?

    If so, no thanks.

    I probably was only going to use it with WiFi anyway. But Slashdot is a social network, right?

  • Are we going to get phones too for having to read this Slashvertisement?

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