Ian Landsman is Starting From Scratch, May 19, 2008:
What Should I do with 50 iPods?
If you're in the market for a powerful and user friendly Help Desk solution, please take a look at my company's flagship product HelpSpot.
Apple sent me an interesting email today. They have a special program for companies that want to buy iPod’s in batches for use with promo programs. The minimum order is 50 and it can be any iPod type or even a mix of them. I’ve never been big on promo’s though. On the other hand with the discount I don’t think it would be a ton of money to buy 50.
So do you have any ideas of a promo that could be run? Ideally it will help build HelpSpot brand awareness in some way, but I’m not doing anything sleazy like just giving them to people to who link over or anything like that. Perhaps you’ve seen some well done promo’s along these lines before? If nothing else I thought it might be interesting to kick around so let’s hear some ideas.
Discussion
I can think of a TON of things to do with that many IPods. Something I've always wanted to do is a Video mosaic. It's not very "promotional" unless you can tie HelpSpot into the mosaic, but it sure would be pretty nifty seeing a bunch of ipods interfaced together to play a sweet video. 5 rows of 10 ipod touches could get you a video screen around 43" x 24", which is close to 50 viewable inches.
Just a thought to spur the imagination 
Best of luck!
Created by Jordan Sherer on 05.19.2008 11:57 pm
Not sure about your sales volume, but what about the next 50 people who purchase your product get a free engraved iPod? Much better than a t-shirt!
Created by Jean Moniatte on 05.20.2008 12:39 am
You have since day one been blessed with a very active user base, giving feedback and tips for enchancement. You onnly need to check your forum to confirm that!
My suggestion is to run a random pick of the users who have provided tips and suggestions that have moved Helpspot foreward, and I am guessing that you also have some customers that you would like to acknowledge for their work in finding bugs and so on. You could also link the promotion to beta testers, to give a reward to users that take on the nitty gritty testing. 
Created by Ari Oskarsson on 05.20.2008 2:04 am
Ian,
This sounds like a great opportunity. I'd be particularly interested in this promo for my microISV as I have developed a text to speech application that integrates with iTunes/iPods. I wonder if this offer is only open to US-based companies? I'm based in Melbourne, Australia.
In your case you could run a competiton where contestants submit their worst/funniest/most unusual support questions they've had to deal with. The results would make for a great blog post.
Created by Mark Gladding on 05.20.2008 2:06 am
You could use some of them as rewards in a referral program. The current demo request process will filter most of the trash out so you only need to count real quality potential customers. See who can refer the most demos over a specific time period (a few months maybe).
Most likely no one will do sales for you just for an iPod - but your existing customers (and blog readers etc), that would already be willing to recommend HelpSpot to others, might make those recommendations more immediate for the chance at an iPod. Obviously if you already have some kind of reward program for existing customer referrals then this won't be as effective.
Created by Scott on 05.20.2008 9:05 am
I think you should ask for short submissions on how people have set up HelpSpot and are using it in their business; what their HelpSpot workflow is. It would help you understand how people are setting up their environments and it would help your other customers understand what parts of the software are being used effectively in other businesses.
Created by Ryan Anthony on 05.20.2008 12:16 pm
Thanks for the ideas guys.
Giving it to folks who've helped out was the first idea I had, but I know I'd miss people and I don't want to make folks mad so I think there would have to be some randomness to it, not just me picking people.
Some type of submit your stories thing could be interesting, I don't know if I could generate enough of them though.
I've been wanting to do a help desk focused forum for a long time (outside of userscape.com), I'm thinking I could use something like this to build awareness of that. Then again I'd need the time to actually put that together!
Created by Ian on 05.21.2008 9:34 am
An idea I have for you is to give online demos and then pick a random person who attended the online demo and give the iPod to them. Maybe you could pick 5 random people, if you don't want to give 50 demos.
It's a way to promote HelpSpot and UserScape to potential customers and also provide a thank you gift for random users who attended the demo.
Created by Dale Ragan on 05.21.2008 8:42 pm