Wow. Well, if anyone had any doubt that using the web to market is worth the time and investment comes this news from an article in today’s New York Times (full disclosure: My close friend Douglas Quenqua wrote the piece):

As the first component of a yearlong partnership with Google, the company is holding a “Will You Marry Me?” contest to find the season’s most intriguing marriage proposal. Love-smitten users can log on to a special 1-800-Flowers.com YouTube channel starting on Monday and submit a video of themselves proposing.

Doug’s article outlines the reasons that 1-800-Flowers.com is holding such a contest, but they all boil down to one thing: The more people that post videos to YouTube for this contest, the more links the company has online and the higher they rise in search-engine rankings.

Of course, on a much smaller scale, that’s what bloggers are doing. I read something online, write about it and link to the original content. Then I comment on the original post and point readers of that comment to my post thereby giving the first poster a link, getting one for myself and, hopefully, enticing some new readers from the first site to mine. When I see companies as large as 1-800-Flowers.com doing the same thing, I know I’m on the right track.

A footnote: If this contest had taken place last year, I’d be a shoe-in for most unique proposal. I spent last winter working at the South Pole (it was summer there). While there, I proposed to my now wife who was 10,000 miles away via email.

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This entry was posted on Monday, January 7th, 2008 at 1:29 pm and is filed under Blogs and Business. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.