Links for 02 January 2007

• Have you RSS'd yourself? A must-learn (easy) trick for 2007
  I am a big fan of Debbie Weil’s The Corporate Blogging Book, and in this post she gives a lovely little tutorial on using some common social media tools to monitor the chatter of the Internet. Has some good links, and great explanations in (almost) layperson’s terms.
  
  
• blogging delivers five-fold increase in stormhoek sales in less than two years?
  In addition to being an A-list blogger and clever cartoonist, Hugh McLeod blogs for a small winery called Stormhoek. In the link referenced above, he posts a fascinating summary of his efforts and rewards in the blogosphere in 2006. In a post from last year, he explains how interacting with the blogosphere in 2005 changed Stormhoek’s marketing philosophy, and doubled their sales in just twelve months:
  

  We're talking tens of thousands of cases, here. […] I have been saying this for years, and still not everybody believes me: "Blogs are a good way of making things happen indirectly." No, bloggers and their friends didn't start suddenly descending on supermarkets, buying the wine in large numbers. That's not how it works. What happened is that by interfacing with the blogosphere, it fundementally changed how Stormhoek looked at treating their primary customers (the supermarket chains) and the end-users (the supermarkets'customers).

  
  
• Top 10 Viral Video Moments of 2006