I've always believed that the most engaging, most effective blogs for marketing are not CEO blogs, rather they use guest bloggers; either different employees, or better still, customers.

The award winning Tourism Ireland Taxi Challenge is another good example social media campaign of a customer video blog I featured a couple of years ago.

The Blog Your Way to Antarctica campaign

The Blog Your Way to Antarctica campaign example I feature here is similar, but in this case social media is being used effectively to recruit the customer blogger.

You may think this is a me too campaign similar to the "Best Job in the World Campaign" , but I think the way of getting customers involved is different in that it focuses more on blogging and encouraging bloggers to link back to the site.

Campaign results

A Yahoo search linkdomain:www.blogyourwaytoantarctica.com -site:www.blogyourwaytoantarctica.com shows nearly 19,000 unique domains linking to the blog site, over half these include the text "vote for me"!

Campaign success factors

The essential ingredients of a captivating offer fitting the brand are here, but the key feature is the viral nature of the campaign where competitors use their blogs and social presence on Twitter, Facebook, etc to encourage their contacts to vote for them.

There is good integration with the Quark Expeditions site with links back to the main product areas, but a 301 redirect approach would possibly have been a better approach for SEO. Developing social widgets for bloggers to include would improve the campaign too potentially (particularly with backlinks to the main site).