We’re all bombarded every day with hundreds of advertising and marketing messages. If you’re anything like the media consumer I am, it’s probably closer to thousands. So, how do you make your company or product stand out from the pack?

For years, I have consulted with clients and suggested that it has less to do with branding or ‘front of mind awareness’ or ‘love marks’ as it does with plain old personality – your business needs a personality just like your friends and colleagues do.

So recently I have been encouraging our clients to take up blogging as a way of ‘humanising the company’, or as I prefer, adding a personality.

It’s a fairly low cost way of spreading the word about your services and products, and adding your name to the blogosphere (I shudder at that term).

I recently read about Hugh McLeod, who has found a unique way of flogging wine for Stormhoek. They have been sending bottles of wine to certain bloggers, and to other events such as Tech Crunch 5, as a way of getting the word out about them.

Simple, isn’t it? Get your product to the people with a wide circle of influence, sit back and hope they talk about it. It’d be even better if the talk were positive, which it nearly always is when the wine is free. The guy is a genius.

I remember my wife’s hair salon receiving free movie tickets a few years ago from certain film distributors too – what do hairdressers talk about for the hour they cut your hair after seeing a film? Obvious, isn’t it.

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