My buddy Chuck posted the following to his blog (AgWired) today:

“Hi there AgWired fans. This morning I’m doing a new media presentation with the folks at John Deere and their agency, BCS Communications. This is an example post for the presentation.”

So what? For many (most? all?) of the people in the room, updating a web page is a Dark Art. Magic. At the very least, a pain in the ass. Some person or persons (or a committee) has to approve the copy and then send it to the web people and –eventually– the web page gets updated.

Chuck just logged in to his Word Press account. Bangs in the copy above…hits the submit button…and publishes for the world to see. It took less time than it is taking me to tell you about it.

I’ve used this analogy before but it’s a good one. When a room full of execs see a demo like this (I wasn’t there but I’ve done a few of these)… it’s like the scene in every Tarzan movie with the Great White Hunters “make fire come from stick,” or when they crank up the movie projector (where did they plug it in?) for the pygmies.

AgWired’s Chuck Zimmerman shares a story that illustrates the power of the blog. Syngenta (a big biotech company) had Chuck come in and blog a “media day” event a couple of weeks ago:

“This event started around 8am and was finished around 3pm. I posted 20 times including over 20 pictures and 5 audio interviews and they were all on AgWired before the end of the day (same day). Many of the posts were done during the actual presentations.

At the end of the event I burned all the pictures and audio to a CD and left it with them. They can post them onto their own website and it’s my understanding that is exactly what they plan to do. Their investment in this is minimal and yet they have immediate multimedia content that’s online before the other media attending even get home to their offices.”

No studio. No camera crew. No editors. One guy with some consumer grade gear and a truck-load of hustle. Is this journalism? I have no idea. And the people at Syngenta don’t care (as long as what Chuck posted is accurate).

If I were in charge of media at Syngenta, I’d ask everyone that covered the event to send me a link to their coverage (or a copy of the magazine article or a video clip of the TV piece, whatever). Then I’d make up a little matrix showing the coverage; when it got “out there”; and what kind of Google ranking it produced.

My buddy Chuck is blogging and podcasting his way across the US, covering something called the AASHTO Interstate 50th Convey. It’s a paid gig for the Ethanol Promotion and Information Council.

This is just an amazing opportunity to to demonstrate the power of new media and Chuck is firing on all 8 ethanol-powered cylinders.

How would the client have promoted this in the previous century? Well, we’d send out some news releases, inviting the media to come to our kick-off (free snacks!). And, uh, we’d send out some more news releases about what is happening along the way. What else? Oh, we’d take some pictures and put them on our website. And if we were really clever, we’d hire a film crew to shoot a little documentary of the journey. In a few weeks (or months), after the thing is edited (down to say, 30 minutes)…we’d send copies to the media in hopes they’d watch it and be so enthralled they’d do an interview with us and put it on their (Network, TV station, radio station, magazine, newspaper). And if they did do an interview, we’d send out a news release telling everyone about that.

Or, you could invite everyone that might possibly give a shit (or should give a shit) to come along for the ride. And if it’s easy enough, and fun enough… a lot of them will.