OPEN

UK online marketing bible NMA
ran three pages on blogging in its last issue. If you didn’t catch it take a
look here and see the case study on Budget Car Rental here.

Quality soundbites

In
the piece (written by Ben Bold) a couple of quotes stand out for me:

• Simon
  Waldman of Guardian Unlimited, says "One of the most important barometers
  of our online health is the fact that we’re the fifth largest blogged news
  source"; and, on the risks of engaging with the blogosphere: "Most
  organisations have more to lose than gain from blogs. They’re more likely to
  find someone slagging them off."
• Steve
  Hall of Adrants.com "It’s very easy to mess up because the space is very
  vocal. If you don’t blog, it’s very likely you’ll look stupid entering the
  space without in-depth knowledge of it. Anyone interested in doing something in
  the space should work with a blogger.

Cillit-ism story runs and runs

The
Cillit Bang blog blunder story from last September continues to run and run. It looks like the story has taken on the same kind
of cautionary tale status for online communications that Hoover’s free flights
debacle did in the 1980s for
sales promotions and is mentioned repeatedly throughout the NMA article as a how-not-to-do-it example.

Case studies show potential

We’re
light on the ground though for UK case studies of effective campaigns with
blogs. Hyper Happen gets a good write up for its Samsung Anyfilms campaign with
its efforts resulting in "more than 100 blog postings reaching millions of
Web users", although the piece concedes that the full impact of the
campaign has yet to be audited.

B
L Ochman‘s campaign for
Budget Car Rentals gets a whole page dedicated to it and has some good hard stats to make its point:

$22,000
was spent on advertising on 177 blogs, which generated50% of the campaign’s
traffic at a cost of 25cents (14p) per click. Bloggers
wrote hundreds of posts about the campaign resulting in as many as 20,000
unique visitors an hour to the Budget blog and well over 1 million unique
visitors over the four weeks of the campaign.

Great
stuff. I’m looking forward to seeing some UK campaigns hit similar highs soon and start blazing the trail for marketers here.