Page 204 - 100 Great Marketing Ideas (100 Great Ideas)

98 USE A WEBLOG

The internet has certainly fired people’s imaginations, but the
possibilities are far from being fully explored. At first, the internet
was seen mainly as a kind of extension of traditional advertising—
most websites were just presence sites, directing people to
telephone or call into an office. The interactive possibilities were
largely ignored.
However, it is the possibility of online interactions that makes the
internet different from anything that has gone before. Consumers
have been quick to flock to online forums and weblogs to express
their opinions of companies and brands, yet companies have done
relatively little to encourage or influence this.

The idea

When Toyota launched the new Auris in Greece, they identified a
number of regular bloggers (weblog contributors) and gave them
each a car to test drive for a week. Needless to say, they posted the
results of the test drives on their blogs.
This fitted well with Toyota’s desire to approach a young, affluent
market: internet use in Greece is still less than in most European
countries, and therefore the Greek internet system is dominated by
better-off, educated, usually young people. Getting several reviews
of the car onto blogs was a major coup for Toyota: there were 52,000
visits to the websites by 41,000 visitors, leading to over 2,000
requests for test drives.

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