The New York Times this morning features an interesting case study about a small company faced with the choice between a traditional advertising strategy and a social-media/web-based plan for marketing its new line of products.

Those products: hand-rolled cigars from the Dominican Republic.

Pretty tradicional, no? Turns out, that’s not where the company’s mindset is.

Though the EPC Cigar Company was established last year, the family that runs it has roots in the cigar trade that go back to 1968. So when faced with the need to market their new label of cigar, E.P. Carillo, the Perez-Carillo needed a strategy that was cost-effective, efficient and that built upon the family legacy.

The family hired the agency Devito/Verdi to put its $300,000 marketing budget to good use.

The agency came up with a traditional advertising strategy that involved the usual stuff: taking out ads on major TV networks like Spike and VH1, taxi-cab toppers in New York, radio ads in major cities, print ads in The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Wine Spectator, Cigar Aficionado, and so on.

The social strategy, on the other hand, had three website concepts that would be cheap to implement and reach cigar lovers everywhere. The article says: “one involved a collage on the company Web site of live, online mentions [via Twitter] of the company and Ernesto Perez-Carrillo Jr.; a second featured a world map (from Google Maps) on the Web site that showed the origin of real-time Twitter messages about cigars; and a third would use a Facebook page as the company’s main online presence. In any case, the digital strategy would involve the use of Twitter, Facebook and Flickr.”

Which strategy do you think EPC marketing director Ernesto Perez-Carillo III went with?

If you picked the second one, you win the stogie.

Perez-Carillo III decided the traditional media approach wasn’t worth the money. He chose to spend $40,000 on the digital initiatives and save the rest of his $260,000 for “trade shows, cigar-enthusiast events, point-of-sale material and some traditional media.”

Check out the company’s website, EPCarillo.com, and you’ll see a live, Google-based Twitter map showing tweets about cigars from all over the world. That’s just tweets about cigars, period. Not the company’s brand, necessarily. The site’s design is not great, but the idea is definitely powerful.

As the NYT article says: “Social media allow the company to communicate directly with cigar buyers, retailers, tobacco growers and others with whom it does business, according to both EPC Cigar and its agency. This is particularly important as the popularity of once-fashionable cigar bars wanes and public smoking bans proliferate.”

The site — which again, is kind of janky in places (on you, Devito) — features YouTube videos, Flickr photos and maps. Stare at that Twitter map for a minute, and you’ll see that the world does love a good smoke. And they love talking about it. (As I looked at it, I saw several tweets about this story.)

What a great illustration of how a small, family-run company can generate conversation about its brand organically — that is, by showing how real people are talking about the brand and the larger market in a meaningful way.

Kinda makes us wanna fire up a nice Dominican.

Image courtesy epcarillo