I hate to say it, but blogging is just like publishing. The “cleaner” you stay editorially, the more people will trust you. If you shill for anything – and especially if you gets paid lots for doing so – people will start to believe in you less. You takes your money and you pays your choice (or something…)

the innovative level of this is skyhigh my friends !

and Ben, it is not common practice for companies to whine about ” unfair advantages” they usually copy it to their own brand.

and if it hadn’t been stormhoek it would have been somebody else.

Im just happy that it is a tiny wine brand instead of some multinational company looking to innovate themselves…

if Hugh had decided to promote Nike instead, that my friends would have been selling out the blogosphere..

the blogosphere is in my opinion the land of small voices being heard..

all the best

‘you (on behalf of the wine company) are asking other blogoshphere “peers” (ie not the company) to promote the wine in return for an incentive (free bottle).’

I signed up but didn’t see this request anywhere?! I think you have it backwards – it’s not ‘promote the company and get free bottle of wine’ it’s ‘get a free bottle of wine and we hope you’ll like it enough to tell your peers about it’.

AND I posted about it – does that mean I’M asking ‘peers’ to promote it? Even though there’s nothing in it for me?

Anyway, I made this point on Mr Coates’s site: there’s a slight difference between giving bloggers bits of tech kit that they can demonstrably use as part of their blogging — for instance, a cameraphone — and giving them bottles of wine.

Competition necessitates advertising, especially for a start-up brand. What’s so different about Stormhoek’s “blogvertising” from say, GoDaddy.com’s advertisements during the American Superbowl? Not as splashy (certainly less expensive) and maybe Hugh doesn’t look like the GoDaddy.com chick, but both campaigns have people talking. GoDaddy.com is a bigger brand now than Network Solutions, if I’m not mistaken. Good for them; they got creative and won the space.

if you’d actually read the reviews, you’d see that people aren’t calling it great wine. they’re calling it a good value. nobody is claiming that its an elite wine.

don’t be jealous that stormhoek has an incredible marketing campaign.