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Cross-posted from Brand Republic (free registration):

If you’re interested in social media and marketing, or have wandered into a Forrester briefing of late, you’ll most likely have heard of the Stormhoek wine marketing. The upstart South African winery crashed its way into the highly competitive UK market (we drink more than the French, apparently) by creating buzz about its wine among the blogging digerati, mainly by sponsoring “geek dinners” around the world.

The man behind this stuff, Hugh Macleod, posted this week on his Gapingvoid blog about how he’s helping the brand with its sponsorship of the British Comedy Awards.

Sound a bit “over-ground”  for the brand its cunning social marketing genius? Well naturally they are going beyond slapping a logo on the stage and a bottle on each table:

We created a range of large bottles [Magnums], each with a different cartoon on it. Thirty cartoons in all.

….As everybody will have a different cartoon on each table, we’re hoping people will check out the different bottles on the other tables. Yeah, you got it. Conversation starters.

It’s a nice idea, and a blog post well worth reading. Not least because it could introduce you to an excellent insight about how social media sites and services work: the concept of social objects.

Social objects are the things around which social networks form: photos on Flickr, videos on YouTube, gossip, chatter and tidbits of information on Twitter.

As Hugh says, “I believe Social Objects are the future of marketing”.

He’s right you know: pass the bottle…

: : Read more about Hugh Macleod’s thoughts on social objects here.

: : And if you want this idea from source, Kevin Anderson has a good summary of a talk by Jyri Engstrom on his social objects concept (along with the original slides). Jyri is the founder of Jaiku, a Twitter-like service that Google bought recently.