Please forgive me if I go off on a bit of a tangent. Just can’t help it once I hear the sound of a Harley-Davidson and now, every time I  go to my Google homepage, that is what I hear - and I hear it live.

Live Video via Google Gadget

“A large portion of the avid motorcycle community–some 450,000 strong–is in the Black Hills of South Dakota this week attending the annual Sturgis Motorcycle Rally. Thousands of other bikers and fans who couldn’t make the rally in person are flocking online for unprecedented live video coverage–via Harley-Davidson banner ads and a downloadable Google Gadget.

This marks the first time a Google Gadget has included live video, while the display ads arguably represent the greatest use ever of live video in a banner ad–offering 10 hours of coverage each day.”

I lit out of here to get mine, and so did a few others.

“The campaign… actually caused Google to expand its “unlimited bandwidth” on Monday, as users exceeded the search giant’s original capacity by spending an average of 13-1/2 minutes watching the live video via the widgets.

By Tuesday, 3,000 of the Harley-Davidson Google Gadgets had been downloaded…”

I like how this marketing campaign was executed as much as I like my Harley widget.

“…the gadget availability was only promoted through word-of-mouth and seeding of relevant blogs… as the agency “leveraged the social nature of the brand.”
(Source)

As soon as I saw “relevant blogs” I went jamming to see if one of my local dealers had the lucky relevant blog. I wish I could say that I had found stellar examples of blog marketing but, none of the sites have even incorporated blog site platforms, let alone capitalized on this superb marketing opportunity.

Ignoring Your “Community of Passionate Users”

So what we see here is the best and the worst of online marketing. The Harley/Carmichael Lynch campaign is representative of excellent use of new media marketing that, frankly, any of these small dealers can employ on a scale calibrated to their budget, talent and desired reach.

The worst is represented by those retailers who are not taking advantage of, nor serving very well, their “community of passionate users”, totally missing out on the power of “the social nature of the brand”.

Tags: Blog Marketing, blog-site-platform, gadget, harley_davidson, marketing_campaign, widgets

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 8th, 2007 at 2:21 pm and is filed under Blog Marketing, Blogging Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.