Upper Midwest Gourmet, a wholesale distributor of specialty food service ingredients, organic coffee, gelato, equipment and supplies, now has a weblog on its website. I’ve helped them with a complete site conversion using WordPress with their exisiting design.
I’ve been working most closely with Western Sales Manager, Michael Applen, who has taken on full responsibility for the site. That’s Michael on the right in the photo (click to enlarge), along with company founder and CEO David Chall… who today, posted his first blog entry titled Upper Midwest Gourmet is getting ‘Greener’ everyday.
Michael wants the UMG weblog to be a group (staff) blog. I warned him of the perils of a group blog so he’s taken an interesting approach: assigning staff to blog once a week or so as if they were beat reporters. If he wears the editor’s hat with the CEO’s support, this just might work because they’ll know that no one else is going to be blogging on their topic area (“beat”).
Earlier this week, Kevin Selig, Director of Sales, posted a story about his recent visit to a customer, a local coffeehouse. Without any coaching from me other than “Tell stories, Kevin,” he’s shown himself to be a natural born blogger. He weaves his own business philosophy in with a little Italian business philosophy as he describes what the owners have done with the shop and its role in helping to strenthen the fabric of the community. His mentions of the UMG products are subtly sprinkled into the blog post. They don’t distract you from the story, yet their presence and links to the relevant pages of the site serve the overall strategic goal of selling UMG products and services.
Next up: they’re going to start using audio and video clips, not only in the blog but on the product pages, too. Cool.
