Don’t believe all the hype you hear in SMO. Last year one of the most hyped successes in Social Media Marketing (SMM) was the Stormhoek Case study. Hey - that’s a CNN link, so it MUST have been great huh?

Well I was with a prospective client yesterday who has been a wine merchant in the UK for well over 100 years. they are not the kind of company to jump onto web 2.0 ideas in gay abandon, so I mentioned the Stormhoek case study with an air of caution as something that had been tried - but also as something that came with risks.

I am so glad I did. They may not know SEO and SEM, but after 100 years in the industry, they certainly know their wine companies. Stormhoek’s parent - Orbit Wines - went bust a few weeks ago and they are lining up bail out buyers.

I find it very hard to find case studies on so many areas of Internet Marketing and I think case studies are increasingly important in weeding out the “wheat from the chaff” and this one - prima facie - was one of the better ones.

The day before I was with one of the world’s largest Internet travel companies, talking to their SEO Manager. He said that he was having trouble finding a decent link building case study. I had trouble believing that, so went to my usual suspects… Sempo, E-consultancy.com and even Eric Ward’s site and guess what? nothing that I could honestly put in front of a blue chip marketing analyst and say “There you are. We did X. People linked to us. This resulted in Y.”

I posted on Webmasterworld in the hope that I was missing the obvious case study, but it appears not so far.