NMA blog feature

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.