CT Biz Blogs

At BlogHer’06, the blogging conference held in San Jose last week, GM was there, outside the conference center, with Saturn cars to test drive (and free goodies). So I took a spin around the block in the Saturn Vue hybrid. This is an SUV (but not a huge one like the Lincoln Navigator) with hybrid power.

These folks from GM were pretty smart — first, they went where their audience was. Never mind that we were at a blogging conference, this was also a conference about women and these cars were pretty appealing.

Next they used the power of informal, viral marketing to record people’s feedback after the drives, with a digital camera.

They quickly made small movies and a week later, started putting them up on GM blogs and on YouTube.

Then they made sure that the bloggers who were filmed — what the heck do you call it now? No film was used and no videotape, either — got notice of the video via trackbacks.

That’s how I found out that I’m now a speck of DNA in a viral marketing campaign for the Saturn Vue Hybrid.

And you don’t need to be GM to do it, folks.

All you need is a decent digital camera, a blog, and YouTube, Google Video, or other video hosting sites.

And if you have a WordPress.org blog, you can make use of an excellent WordPress plugin, WP-FLV, to put a flash video up on your own blog. This is good for folks who want more control over how the video is displayed.

Read Michael Pollock’s how to set up video in a WordPress blog for details.