Keeping it simple, adventures in blog marketing

[by Todd] Okay, let's start with my confession. I am responsible for the controversy of Raging Cow, the first acknowledged attempt at blog marketing. (Here, see for yourself in this Wikipedia entry.)

I am not ashamed of that, in fact it was a great adventure. But I know all too well that there are those who consider our use of teen bloggers as an invasion of the blogosphere's purity.

Oh please! We asked a handful of teens to add a maniacal cow to their blog roll. What was the risk that someone would confuse a cow for a legitimate blogger? Sure, we made some mistakes, and I'd be happy to discuss them with anyone who wants to delve into the past. But overall it was a huge success.

The key to Raging Cow, and any other blog marketing project I've worked on, is simplicity. Blogs are inherently simple devices, a place where someone with enough passion about a topic can give voice to those passions. Blogs that thrive do so because of their credibility and simple, relatively unfiltered view of some corner of the world.

Which is why I think the latest blog marketing program by Budget Rent-A-Car resonates as a home run effort. The Up Your Budget Treasure Hunt is composed of two key elements, great original content, and a simple contest to engage consumers.

The original content comes from the authors of Weird U.S. : Your Travel Guide to America's Local Legends and Best Kept Secrets, Mark Moran and Mark Sceurman. Throughout June they will  journey across the country in a Budget rental, posting written and video blogs about their travels to odd locations. The posts contain all sorts of obscure information, but not the location. Like this one from stop #6:

In 1968, seventy-seven year old Henry Warren built a waterwheel to accompany his yard's goldfish pond. Once the waterwheel was done he quickly began construction on a motorized miniature mill to connect to it. From there, building-by-building, Warren built what he came to call his Shangri-La -- an elaborate miniature village.

Ideally you'll figure out how easy of it is to determine where they're at, after all you're already online. By registering on the site you can guess how far it is from the last stop to the current destination. Every week the person who guesses the right distance first wins $25,000. Of course there are options for people to upload their own stories of weird destinations around the country.

See it's nice and simple. It's organic to the brand and leverages conversational tone of blogs in a way a more traditional contest couldn't. AdRants notes that the program was developed internally at Budget. Kudos. What do you want to bet at least one of the people who came up with it is a blogger?

As Sunni has noted, account and creatives in agencies all too often learn the buzz words of blogs without taking time to understand the environment. Budget even used the blog format to post the rules of the contest.

Well done.

Comments

[Peter Harrs]

Nicely done. I'm a fan of both the Raging Cow and the Budget blog. I don't feel advertising pollutes the blogosphere at all, though, granted, I'm relatively new to the sphere. People're going to skip predictable advertising, and it's up to the ad execs to continue to find new ways to gain brand recognition.

[Josh]

I'm one of the winners of last year's Up Your Budget contest, and they haven't changed what I considered the major flaw (from a marketing perspective) from last year: I assume that the organizers want news of the promotion to spread throughout the blog universe, but the way the contest is set up, if you want to win, your best bet is to keep the contest a secret until after it's over. The fewer contestants there are, the more likely I am to win. What's my incentive to spread the word?

I suspect this is why Up Your Budget hasn't gone viral, except among the marketing bloggers. (One of whom, BL Ochman, was the designer of last year's contest.)