February 26, 2006
stormhoek in the sunday telegraph
Nick Dymoke-Marr, the big cheese at Stormhoek just got a big article written about him and this whole Stormhoek blogospheric thing in the business section of The Sunday Telegraph, on of the big UK national papers:
Last May, six months after Stormhoek launched, Dymoke-Marr despatched a bottle of his mid-price Sauvignon Blanc to 150 of the UK’s most frantic-fingered “bloggers”, the burgeoning community of internet diarists.
It was a plan that didn’t lack bottle. After all, since their emergence at the end of the 1990s, bloggers have become a nightmare for businesses the world over. Microsoft, Tesco and McDonald’s have all fallen victim to vicious blogs written by irate customers or seething employees.
But Dymoke-Marr’s gamble elicited barely a sour grape. “We were just really honest,” he says.
“We didn’t say we were selling the best wine in South Africa. We just said: ‘Here’s a nice wine, reasonably priced, tell us what you think.’”
The bloggers got to work, tapping away about the virtues of the vino. Estimates of how many bloggers there are around the world range from 15m to 30m. Up to 80,000 blogs are thought to be started each day. If you had punched Stormhoek into Google last June, 500 references would have popped up. That figure stood at about 85,000 last week.
Rock on, Nick. Nice to see Big Media finally starting to pick up on it.
That being said, I’m more interested in the US launch these days; in particular the “100 Dinners” idea. If you have an idea for that, please sign up on the wiki and/or send me an e-mail. Thanks.
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Weeeeeeeeeeeee! Rock on, Hugh, too!!!!
You know what might be cool and aid navigation on the wiki? A clickable map. 100 dots here, a bunch more there.
Add one, David… that’s what wiki’s are for
“Nice to see big media finally starting to pick up on it.” I think I must have misunderstood a while back….
Re the map of 100 dots, there’s a google beta called frappr around that allows exactly that.
Just passing through, I’m digging the blog…
Hugh, I was looking for your name in the article and was surprised not to find it. Are we being stealthy in the mainstream?! What gives?
Frappr… Sounds like…
A cool way to plot your Stormhoek dinner. A couple of weeks back, Hugh did a nice post about the Telegraph article on Nick. John commented and suggested that we could set up a Frappr account (I had never heard…