Ellee Seymour

A conference in Paris on Le Web 3 turned into a French farce when it was hijacked by presidential hopeful Nicolas Sarkovy and used as a political platform.

Even though Neville Hobson missed it, he gives a great view on the outrage felt by bloggers, and this pic by Ben Metcalfe says it all.

One of the bloggers who attended, Tom Raftery describes the reasons:

“The conference was completely hijacked and changed from a conference about new web technologies into a presidential campaign for the next French election. Two of the candidates, Nicolas Sarkozy and François Bayrou were parachuted in to the conference schedule at the last minute, displacing other speakers.â€?

Simon Collister who attended also highlights the French fall out on his excellent post.

Organiser Loic Le Meur makes no secret of the fact that he supports Sarkovy, and, like American politicians, French politicians are keen to have bloggers on their side too; there were 1,000 people from 35 countries at the conference. But this was obviously not the right time or place to go into overdrive about politics. It is a shame that what should have been a positive for this high profile conference turned into a negative. If you were there, I would love to hear your comments about it.

Was Thresher’s viral marketing ploy a success or not? The 40% discount voucher was downloaded 1 million times by its first day. And with another 9 days for the offer to run, and sensational national media coverage , I wondered what the total figure was, it could easily have doubled.

The answer is I don’t know, Thresher is very keep tight lipped about it and issued the following unwhelming press release:

“The 40 per cent offer has been an outstanding success for Threshers and for its customers.

“When we made the offer, we did not expect quite such a response but the wine has literally been flying off the shelves. For our customers, based on an increase of 60% in sales in many areas, it looks like being a very merry Christmas! For Threshers, we have won many thousands of new customers and, with so many more bottles selling at a positive margin, it is all making for an excellent end of the year for us too.”

It was accompanied by the following terse message from an obviously very anxious press officer:

“Please note that this is our official statement and we will not be making any other statements nor entering into any dialogue relating to this topic.”

The statement is noted for what it doesn’t say, in spite of its cheery tone, what impact did it have financially, how many bottles “flew off” the shelves, how many vouchers were used, would they repeat such an exercise, and will it really mean a happy Christmas for them, or just their customers? Thresher is not saying, but if anyone knows the answers, I would very much like to know.