American actor Ashton Kutcher is working for Lenovo to enhance the Yoga notebook. A major part of his job is to create more followers of the Yoga. And, speaking of the job, Lenovo hired Kutcher just before he went on to play the lead role in the movie Jobs, a biography of Apple founder and high tech visionary Steve Jobs.
But David Rabin, the executive director of marketing, Lenovo Americas Group, does not have a problem with that. Rabin pointed out to CDN that Kutcher has more than 16 million Twitter followers. Actually Kutcher has 16,044,282 Twitter followers, which is the 36th most followers of anyone one on Twitter, just in front, oddly enough, of Microsoft founder and chief Jobs rival in Bill Gates, who has 15,883,563 Twitter followers. In case you are wondering the person with the most Twitter followers, it’s singer Kate Perry with 52,898,181 followers. Second is Canadian singer Justin Bieber.
According to Rabin, social media outlets such as Twitter and Facebook are proving to be a relevant channel for Lenovo. “We want to push the digital engagement and get involved in many world markets. This gives us an opportunity to interact with people we are associating ourselves with,” Rabin said.
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Partnering with Kutcher isn’t the only thing Lenovo is doing from a social media standpoint. Rabin said that the company has created a LinkedIn group called the Lenovo Partner Network and that group has already gained 1,045 members.
Lenovo also announced a French-language partner portal for the channel.
“This is real-time communication and we are proactively reaching out and getting solicited feedback. It also gives the channel an opportunity to network with their peers,” Rabin added.
Lenovo is a purpose built vendor who has innovative and talented engineers on staff, Rabin said. One of the big questions the company asks itself when releasing a new product is if there is customer value.
“If there is no customer value we are not going to produce it. If you look at our family of products you will be hard pressed to find any you would not use,” Rabin said.
With the Lenovo Yoga product, it’s a two-in-one device with one power charger and it provides the user with a hard drive so that they do not have to carry two separate products.
Kutcher has advised Lenovo on the 18 hour battery life, adding the kickstand so that people could work on the Yoga on an airplane, lightening up the product because customers have told Lenovo tablets in generally are too heavy to hold.
“We create different tablets for different market place. It’s purpose driven and based on customer feedback,” he said.