Dropbox Hack Week at New Offices

An article came out recently which demonstrates an example of great, inexpensive, and effective use of social media and public relations for a fast-moving internet company.  Dropbox is one of the industry's fastest rising companies in recent years, and it recently received a $4B valuation based on recent investments in the company. The company's founder Drew Houston has been featured on the covers of major magazines ranging from Forbes to Technology News, and he has shown great skill in using media like interviews and news pieces to generate publicity for his company.

TechCrunch recently ran an article covering Dropbox's "hack week", in which its employees were allowed to spend one week developing software projects they were interested in and to unleash their creativity.  Houston also invited a film-maker to cover hack week and create a video about it.  All of this was featured on TechCrunch as news, and the article also raised awareness over the company, its brand new expanded San Francisco offices, as well as its redesigned product offerings. This coverage was further magnified through online news and social networks. In fact, I found out about this from various shares and likes of my Facebook friends.

Probably more important than all of the publicity and increased awareness for Dropbox about its new location and products, was its potential impact for future recruiting of talent, and for positioning Dropbox as the next great, hot place to be for the best programmers.  Dropbox demonstrates a great understanding of what drives, motivates, and pleases their best workers, and their hacker culture and the brand that they are trying to create within the industry will help it continue to recruit or retain the best and brightest. The video covering their "hack week" also showed all the amenities current employees enjoy, such as catered food, skateboarding, ping pong tables, arcade games, and fun work spaces.

It was a very clever, inexpensive use of an event, media coverage, and expanded shares through social media to further strengthen its brand, build good will among its customers, as well as increase workplace satisfaction among current and prospective employees.