I left my business partner Dave Cote at about 3pm yesterday afternoon after two days of meetings with our brand new client Seemage. I went home to finish the day answering emails, prepping blog posts for Monday, setting up my weekend schedule of various writing assignments — the usual. I went to bed at 8pm.

At 6am this morning I opened an email from Dave that contained a link to our new client's brand new blog. You can see it here. In fairness, our new client, Seemage, already had the blog name in mind and they had created the artwork. All Dave did, all afternoon and all night long, was the following:

He applied one of the themes the client selected; customized the theme with the 3D Mojo logo; populated the property with an initial blogroll; added an 'About 3D Mojo' page; he customized the Meta tags section; set-up initial categories for future posts; wrote an introductory post; set up a backup subdirectory and a weekly schedule for automatic backup; he set up an FTP account so the client could access files and directories; added features making it possible for the client to upload images and then use the AJAX editor to insert and resize images to be used on posts; activated Google Analytics; activated the SEO optimizer plug-in; customized the "Editor Monkey" plug-in which makes it possible for our client to more easily edit posts directly with a WSYWIG editor; and, he established user names and passwords.

That all? Well, no.  You see, for one thing, this isn't a traditional blog. It's a hybrid. It combines features of a Web site and a blog. This means earlier in the week, Dave found and mastered a new blogging package. A free package, too, by he way. Using this new solution, visitors get fresh content all the time and access to more static pages of relevant interest: news releases, upcoming events… anything and everything that will enrich the content and further elevate the client's presence in the all-important community where it wants to make a connection. Only an online community property like this can achieve this.

In the end, that was probably Dave's greatest overnight achievement. You see, Seemage has a tremendous story to tell (more on that in subsequent posts). They have a vision of enterprise product data access that establishment CAD companies will want to shout down. Great new ideas are at a big disadvantage when left to use only traditional PR. Establishment companies can buy a lot of noise in that communications channel. They can't necessarily buy a great new idea. In the online world as represented by this new Seemage site, no amount of money makes any real difference. It's the power of the idea. This, then, is the great equalizer… a way for new companies to go had to head with established giants on terms that matter most to users: who has the better solution and why. Smart customers don't make product decisions on the basis of a company's ad budget or the number of big time public relations firms that are on retainer. Blogs like this leverage that incontrovertible truth. The power of this is astonishing, and I say that from a long career in traditional public relations.

Overnight, Dave built the platform where the vision of Seemage can be shared, debated, tested, praised or disputed freely, openly… constantly and directly. Seemage doesn't have to purchase this presence with full-page spreads; it doesn't need to influence the influencers to see the merit in its vision. Here Seemage CEO Chris Williams can speak for himself and people can hear what he has to say without any of it being passed through the establishment filter that can so distort what's being said. I still believe in the value of traditional PR. But I'm blown away by the power of this new medium… and Dave's mastery of it.

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