EBay's Blogger Christmas.... A Company Doing It Right.

Photo by LifeLovePaper
I help a lot of companies determine which bloggers they should work with and I'm always a bit surprised by which writers companies decide will work best with them. Some pick the best writers they can find, some choose people that will write whatever they want them to, some choose mommy bloggers because.... well.... they are popular right now.
So this Christmas Ebay is pairing up with Martha Stewart and has asked a few bloggers to shop on their site and write about their experiences for Christmas. This is one of the first blogger outreaches that I've seen by a really commercial company that has actually chosen good bloggers. In fact, some of them are bloggers that I read almost every day.
Black Eiffel
Desire To Inspire
Charles and Hudson

This is why they did this correctly:
They chose 3 good bloggers that are an amazing fit instead of sending a mass email to 100 bloggers to try to get them to say that Ebay has great stuff for sale.
They chose bloggers with great potential. These bloggers have a great following so they know how to write with a company and (hopefully) won't let the attention ruin their blogs. On the flip side, these blogs have probably not gotten as big as they are going to so they likely will be able to capitalize on their growth. Lots of companies choose bloggers that are already as big as they are going to get and don't get as much benefit from them plus those bloggers charge a lot more to work with them.
They chose niche bloggers. These bloggers all write about the design of home, products, and projects. All three have an amazing eye for design so they will likely choose really cool objects to review.
Bravo Ebay and Martha Stewart.