Playing with the Blogosphere

With my first choice of sessions overfull, I decided to see what was new with the blogosphere. Henry Copeland of Blogads moderated a panel of B.L. Ochman of What’s Next Online and Sebastian Paaw from the Netherlands Board of Tourism talking about case studies from a blog based campaign each had created.

B.L. did a campaign for Budget that was a 16-city, 4 week treasure hunt for cash prizes. The idea was branding, specifically to make Budget a bit more “hip.” They had a goal of bringing one million visitors to the Blog based site that they created for this promotion, and a total budget of $25,000 that was spent buying ads on 177 blogs.  That was the total advertising budget. The rest of the advertising came from people in the game and articles about the game. They reached their goal of one million uniques in a month, and created a great interactive experience.  They even allowed some “hunters” to become bloggers because user created content is one of the keys to making it real.

Sebastian told us about the Bloggers In Amsterdam promotion where they sought applications from 25 bloggers whom they would give free trips to Amsterdam in exchange for 3 things: 1) an interview for the Dutch Tourism Board; 2) one month premium ad space for Holland.com; and 3) put the Bloggers in Amsterdam logo in their nav bar for a year. No blogging was required - and not a lot was actually done. But the blogs were not why this was done. They did record 75,000 visits to the site, which had 3,000 blog comments, and somewhere on the order of 900 pictures on flickr.

The idea was to generate interest in travel to Holland. While not measured, it was expected that those who read about the deal, read the posts, saw the pictures, or otherwise found out about this might consider a trip to Holland in the near future. Some bloggers get cameras or books to review to build awareness of the item. But this is travel. As Sebastian commented, “you can’t send Amsterdam to the bloggers, it would be illegal in many cases!”, so they instead sent the bloggers to Amsterdam.

All panelists felt that the community was one of the most important parts, and that even the bloggers role may change.  Sebastian noted that not everyone can blog, so taking just anyone and having the blog was not as effective as taking well known bloggers with popular sites and letting them write about it.  B.L. said that she was starting to get “sick of the pontification in blogs - including me” and that blogging would have to change.