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.
Interesting, Dixon. But the fact that the company went bust doesn’t have to ruin the case study. The reason for their trouble can come from something completely different. But it does loose credibility.
It will be interesting to see if someone can point out good cases. Real cases are always better for selling than “imagine if”…