Hugh McLeod has a great update post about the progress of his blog marketing campaign for Stormhoek:
Blogging doubled Stormhoek sales in less than twelve months.
So, great ROI, right? But more key is the insight that Hugh offers about how it worked:
I have been saying this for years, and still not everybody believes me: “Blogs are a good way of making things happen indirectly.”
No, bloggers and their friends didn’t start suddenly descending on supermarkets, buying the wine in large numbers. That’s not how it works.
What happened is that by interfacing with the blogosphere, it fundementally changed how Stormhoek looked at treating their primary customers (the supermarket chains) and the end-users (the supermarkets’ customers).
i.e. It caused an internal disruption, both within the company and the actual trade. Wine drinkers’ basic purchasing habits didn’t change because of the meme, but the meme allowed Stormhoek to align itself more closely with said habits.
Technorati Tags: gapingvoid, hugh+macleod, stormhoek
We are in the process of upgrading our blogs to the new version of WordPress – version 2.0. We just finished with the release in our dev environments and applied it to the SimpleTicket blog. Over the course of the next few days we will upgrading all of the blogs (please excuse our dust in the meantime).
We will be shifting to the new feed icon standard shortly, when are you going to switch?
Wink is a new search engine that is about to launch to the general public. It combines tradtional search results with a global look at tagged social bookmarked sites. So, now you can easily search across pre-filtered content, which Wink users can reinforce by ‘voting’ on certain stories that match their search terms. The more we all use it, the more we collectively filter the results.
More from Steve Rubel, Mike Arrington, Matt Marshall, & Om.
Technorati Tags: search, steve+rubel, tag, techcrunch, wink
Our designer pal Dan Cederholm has a new addition — Jack Murphy, born just this past weekend. Welcome to the party, little Jack. Make sure your pages validate, keep it oh so simple, and use that great big heart you’ll inherit from your Dad.
One of Rex Hammock’s posts today echoes my point yesterday about the LayerOne story:
For me, there’s a peace-of-mind in knowing I have one place where I can tell my story the way I see it — even if it’s not that significant a story. Before blogging, we all had to depend on other people’s platforms to “interpret” our story. If you we’re doing something significant in your community or business, it was the “media” who told our story. If it was something significant to fewer folks, it was the “grapevine” who told our story.
Blogging lets you tell your story, unfettered, uninterrupted, uninterpreted. Of course, it can also be remixed, repointed, reinterpreted, etc., but that’s the joyous to & fro of dialogue. With a blog, you get to play a more major role if you can plus up the conversation.
Technorati Tags: blogs, layerone, rex+hammock
Weblogs Work & M Ventures are featured in an article on Web 2.0 in a piece in yesterday’s Seattle Times — a syndication of an article that ran a few weeks ago in the Star-Telegram. The piece focuses on Alex’s rapid development of elfURL, one of the apps in the Big in Japan toolbox we’re working on. I was able to put in a plug for the sandbox meme (check out Peter Merholz’s ‘Designing for the Sandbox’ blog):
“Web experiences aren’t things you control so much,” said Brian Oberkirch, chief executive of Weblogs Work, a self-described Web 2.0 company. “It’s more that you create a sandbox people can play in.”
Technorati Tags: alex muse, biginjapan, brian oberkirch, elfurl, mventures, web 2.0, Weblogs Work
We were at the Syndicate conference last week talking about the Slidell Hurricane Damage blog. While things have slowed down with that project, it still serves as a unique example of how blogs can be great at both gathering and disseminating information. Here is an email we got just yesterday. It’s from a producer at Extreme Makeover: Home Edition, hoping to use the blog as a way to gather inspiring stories about the rebuilding of Slidell.
Hey Brian – been looking at your blog, and my name is Vinny Rutherford & I’m
a producer on the show Extreme Makeover: Home Edition on ABC. We’re
currently researching stories regarding the victims of this past hurricane
season and the rebuilding efforts in Texas, Mississippi, New Orleans &
Florida. We’re going to be shooting these 1 hour episodes in Feb., and I’m
part of the team assigned to the New Orleans area.
Our execs feel strongly about using our shows popularity by doing some
projects that will have an impact on the community as a whole like
rebuilding playgrounds, get supplies to schools, rebuilding food ministries,
etc.
In addition to that we’re also looking for personal stories and how maybe we
can help individual families in some way. From throwing a wedding that got
cancelled to helping a displaced family who has a member that needs a bone
marrow transplant, right now the range is that wide. By doing all of this
it’s our hope that what is happening down here gets back into the national
news cycle in a positive light and ultimately, get more help from the rest
of the country.
I recently had a meeting at Mt.Olive AME Food Ministry with the Mayor,
Police Chief and other town officials of Slidell. We’re currently
considering doing a project or projects in Slidell and are wondering what
needs the community has and I’d like to hear it from the people themselves
as well.
If you could ask your readers, what they’d like us to do (aside from
building them a house, we’re not doing that on the specials)- do you need
anything that the storm destroyed, etc…are there any personal stories of
heroism, or going above and beyond the call of duty – things of this nature.
Write or give me a call at my New Orleans cell. The more stories I have in
Slidell the better the chance they’ll choose this town to shoot in.
Technorati Tags: extreme+makeover, slidell+hurricane
Start Up guru & evangelism evangelist Guy Kawasaki sent out word that he’s going to start blogging on January 1. We encourage you to watch his site for it. We really dig Guy’s style. You can also participate in a free online seminar on some of Guy’s ideas in a recent book, The Art of the Start:
http://snipurl.com/artseminar
This is the link for the online seminar for The Art of the Start. It’s
January 4th at 10 am Pacific, not 9 am Pacific.
Technorati Tags: artofthestart, guy+kawasaki
We got to say hello to Shel Israel again last week at Syndicate. First met him at the Blogging Enterprise conference in Austin, and enjoyed hanging out a bit during the panels. Shel & Robert Scoble wrote the book on corporate blogging, and we’ll have a review of Naked Conversations for you in the next week or so.
