Guinness is blogging. Well, sort of, and just in the UK.
Basically the marketing team will offer a behind-the-scenes look at what it does at Guinness. Here’s the premise:
Everyday we get loads of letters, photos, emails and phone calls – not just from our mums, but from other people who drink GUINNESS® too! Some of these are about specific issues – these are dealt with by our dedicated consumer helpline (the phone number is 0845 7882277 & the email address is [email protected] in case you ever need it).
But lots of people also send us things like suggestions, questions about what we might be doing in the future, photos of them enjoying a GUINNESS® and other stuff that we love to hear and see. The problem is that we get so much correspondence that we just don’t have time to read it all and respond. Well, to be more honest, we don’t have time to do that AND do our day jobs. (Indeed some of letters are people asking us what our ‘day jobs’ actually involve!).
The result is a blog that isn’t like most. For one thing, you’ve got to verify your age to enter. For another, they plan to moderate all comments before they are posted – and they don’t work weekends, or after 5 p.m. weekdays.
(Quick note: given the amount of spam comments we get here each day this seems like a really good idea. The spammers seem to have decided about 4 a.m. is a good time to strike – not realizing we’re just going to bed.)
It will be interesting to see where this goes. If it works for the marketing team, maybe Guinness will branch out.
Just a few breweries have embraced blogs so far. Some start and then run out of things to tell us. Let’s see where Flossmoor Station, blogging less than a week, goes.