Branding in the Blogosphere
Something everyone who manages a blog must know (that I’ve discovered since opening this one) is: how many spammers try and hijack your blog to post links to their “ringtones” website or whatever. This is the reason you can’t post a comment on this blog without it being run through an approval process. The blog would be all spammy links if it weren’t this way.
Anyway, it’s easy enough to delete these hijack attempts as they come in but then there’s the word-of-mouth-marketing business that’s opened up, whereby ad agencies, marketing firms and PR firms all explore the blogosphere/social media space looking for blogs on which to post comments favoring their product or issue.
There’s even payperpost.com – paying people $5-$8 per post to make product-favoring posts all over the place. Apparently these people can disclose the commercial nature of their relationship by signing themselves as ppp (pay per post), but I doubt that many of them do.
Edelman, the big public relations firm, recently blundered with their “Walmarting Across America” campaign – somebody within the company apparently thought it would be cool to pose as a disinterested party and make blog posts about how happy and well cared-for Walmart employees all seem to be. All across America. From what I’ve read of Walmart’s employee policies, that this backfired is a no-brainer. (I gather Edelman are putting their people through a rapid ethics refresh.)
You have to wonder how much of this goes on. Advertising’s not my business (I’m an experimental filmmaker/website designer) but I went as invited guest to a forum run by the Interactive Advertising Bureau last week. One of the panels was called “Taking Control of User Generated Content“. Yes, I’m serious. Questioned on the inherent contradiction in terms, one of the panelists did mention that when they learned of the title of the panel they were to be sitting on, the panelists themselves were uncomfortable with it but hey – somebody advanced that idea, thinking it was OK.
I’d be curious to hear other stories on blog-hijacking. Post away…
Not exactly about branding in the blogosphere, but related: I read a couple of weekends ago a New York Times article about the artist Brice Marden – related to his big new show at MoMA. The content of the article, accompanied with a photo of the artist’s studio with a line-up of about a half dozen packages of Bounty paper towels, was almost completely (half, at least) about how the artist’s favorite tool, practically, is [those] paper towels. Yes, not any old paper towels but [those] ones. Because they’re thicker and more absorbent and you can re-use them, etc etc. It was mind-bogglingly pluggy. (I’m using the [those] format to avoid adding to this.) Besides all this plugging away and a run-down of how many homes this man owns, there wasn’t much about the paintings at all. Seriously odd.
Well, if branding’s become the game of the blogosphere and the artworld, I’m more for the barely-subtle approach of Haruki Murakami, brandname-dropper par excellence. How’s this, from KAFKA ON THE SHORE:
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Hoshino looked up rental car agencies in the Yellow Pages, picked one at random, and phoned them. “I just need a car for a couple of days,” he explained, “so an ordinary sedan’s fine. Nothing too big. Nothing that stands out.”
      “Maybe I shouldn’t say this,” the rental clerk said, “but since we only rent Mazdas, we don’t have a single car that stands out. So rest assured.”
      “Great.”
      “How about a Familia? A very reliable car, and I swear nobody will notice it at all.”
      “Sounds good. The Familia it is.” The rental agency was near the station, and Hoshino told them he’d be over in an hour to pick up the car.
      He took a taxi over, showed them his credit card and license, then rented the car for two days. The white Familia parked in the lot was, as advertised, totally unobstrusive. Turn away from it for a moment and every memory of what it looked like vanished. A notable achievement in the field of anonymity.
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You have to love Murakami…