A great case study from MarketingSherpa (what else would you expect from those gals?) on how Red Hat, the commercial Linux experts, combined the power of a blog, a worldwide customer tour and MeetUp to achieve fantastic outreach for “1/5th the price of a trade show.” An excerpt:

A big part of Red Hat’s brand is that it’s an open source company. [Chris] Grams [Senior Manager, Marketing Communications, at Red Hat] took that to mean that communications should be as open, honest, and even human as possible, rather than “corporate-sounding.”

“I want to give people the sense that Red Hat is made up of real people. You’re not talking to a building, you’re talking to an individual, and some pretty darn smart individuals at that. We’re proud of that.

“I really believe if you talk in a real person’s voice, you reach people in such a deeper way. We try not to make the message so watered down and so enterprise antiseptic that it appeals to no one. We may make at least a couple of people mad, but I’m hoping an enormous number of people feel a deeper connection.”

The blog averaged 3,000-5,000 readers per day during the tour. A link to Red Hat’s blog here.

MarketingSherpa: How to Use a Back-stage Blog & Virtual Community Networking to Maximize Your Road Show’s Impact