Excellent points by Technogoogles about the Stromhoek Blogger’s Wine Freebie: I’ve been following Hugh’s sideline, ie new client, with interest. He’s levereging his muscle in the blogo-world to generate some PR for a wine called Stormhoek by giving aw…

Sure, wouldn’t we all love the blogosphere to be magically turned into product pimps. But that would be too easy, too predicatable.

Not to mention, uneffective.

What’s more interesting to me, and more part of the long term plan, is not using bloggers as an external advertising mechanism.

What’s far more interesting to me is how this interaction with the blogosphere will affect the internal conversation… how it will affect the internal culture of Stormhoek itself.

In the Hughtrain, I wrote “the future of advertising is internal”. This is what I’m talking about.

The story isn’t, “buy this product so you can be more like us”, which is what typical “cool” brands try to do. We want to be more like them, not the other way around. We dig what’s happening in the ’sphere, and we want to be part of it.

So it’s more about “outreach” than “selling”.

i.e. we want the conversation to move from the external to the internal, not the usual “firehose” mass media internal-to-external.

That’s the plan, anyway. And yeah, I agree, there is some risk. But you got to try these things.

Again, thanks for the input =)