AgWired

At first glance this may not have anything to do with agricultural marketing. My old buddy, Bennie, from high school emailed this picture to all the committee members of my 30 year high school reunion that’s coming up in a couple weeks.

He dared me to put it on the reunion blog I’ve been running and well . . . I’ve spared you the full photo btw.

This might have been taken back in 1976. You can see that I had that entrepreneurial gleam of intensity way back then. A few hair cuts later and here I am, trying to bring you the best news from the world of agribusiness.

I want to thank those of you who have already taken the AgWired survey. I’m hoping to have at least a hundred of them filled out by the first of October, so please take just a few moments (3 minutes at most) to fill it out. I know a lot of you do surveys of your customers and various audiences and know how important this is. I will greatly appreciate your support in this project.

I thought I’d share another comment from one of the surveys already filled out:

“It’s difficult to tell if you ever cover anything because you think it’s newsworthy for agriculture and ag communications, or if you are only covering things because you have sponsors paying you to do it. Most of your posts appear to be directly related to your sponsors. Perhaps that’s not a bad thing, but some transparency about who your sponsors are would be helpful.”

Very good point. I know I’ve probably been guilty of not making it obvious in every post I’ve done. However, if I have a sponsor for event coverage my policy is to place a sponsor company logo/tagline in each post. I can’t think of a way to be more transparent. Otherwise I post items solely because I think you might find them interesting. To date, I’ve had no direct website advertising support (only because I haven’t solicited it – that’s about to change).

Having said that, my company has done a lot of project work for most of the major agribusiness companies and agencies in the country. We have our AgNewsWire.AgWired.com service for example that produces and distributes text and talking news releases and publishes them on a highly search engine optimized website. We are hired for photography and audio production services and will often write about an event that we’re attending while conducting these services for a client. Name a company or ag group and we’ve probably done some type of work for them. A lot of these projects have helped finance my AgWired habit which attracted over 10,000 unique visitors last month.

I really appreciate comments like this one and you can be sure that I’ll do my best to take them to heart as I continue to publish the only weblog devoted to agricultural marketing.

A ZimmCast earlier this summer featured an interview with Commodity Update founder Joel Jaeger. We just sent out a talking news release for him via AgNewsWire.AgWired.com.

I’ve been a subscriber for several months now. The service is flexible and I picked 5 commodities I wanted to keep up with. I elected to have the open and close for them sent to my Palm Treo each day. It’s just like clockwork. They automatically show up on my phone and I’m up to date without having to do anything except look at my phone when the alarm goes off. Very cool.

Imagine if I was receiving short text messages of valuable information that’s branded by a company that’s supplying me with it. Got your creative juices flowing? Give Joel a call (866-376-6094) if you’d like to discuss it.

I would put this in the category of “new media” and the Long Tail.