Character blogs, collaborative blogs

A good friend of mine refers to the type of conversation we are having about character blogs as "inside baseball." It’s the kind of conversation where those inside it are very engaged and those outside of it can’t follow it, don’t want to follow it, and if they do manage to figure it out, think it is pretty silly. That said, I just can’t seem to let it go, so "batter up."

Rok Hrastnik posted an essay about character blogs, and used as an example the Buffyverse. In his example, he cites different types of blogs that the creators of the two television shows that comprise the Buffyverse [Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel] could create to entertain the fans of these two dearly-departed shows.

The reason I think character blogs have potential is that pretty much all the examples he cites have already sprung up, albeit in unauthorized fashion, in the online fandom already.

Fan fiction. WHEDONesque, a fan blog where Whedon posts from time to time. Spoiler sites. Bulletin boards. Role plays in which people take on the characters and create a collaborative story (often using livejournal). There is an obvious hunger to interact with these shows and these characters as well as the real people behind them. And the interactions among the fans are pretty real — friendships and flamewars alike.

Rok’s example resonated with me because I am a fan of the Buffyverse. If Joss Whedon, the creator of the two shows, decided to build a character blog as the next installment in the story, and brought his talents, his great writers and perhaps even some of the actors to occasionally give voice or visual to the new story, I would subscribe. I’d even pay 🙂 I would not be alone, not by a longshot. Are you listening, Joss?

This would be a character blog for which I AM the audience, and only then would I judge its content. As I have said before, we have to separate the form, the character blog, from the content.

BTW trust me, I know "Spike" is just a character. I still really love the lifesize cardboard figure of him that my mom gave me for Christmas. To my husband’s chagrin, it is still in the living room.

Neville Hobson also posted on character blogs today: Just because you could doesn’t mean you should. He’s got a nice definition of the difference between character and fake blogs, and also provides a bit of a recap of yesterday’s Hobson and Holtz Report discussion on the topic.

Okay, enough about character blogs. Intellectually, I think they deserve a shot, and that’s why I have been so vocal on the topic.

Personally, however, I think the blog form that holds the most promise for companies is the collaborative weblog. As I mentioned a while ago, I am working on one for a client. We are just about to start promoting it, so I should be able to post more details by the end of the week. To whet your appetite, here’s a preview.

We went with a blog for two key reasons: it fit with the overall marketing strategy and it gives voice to our customers.

The company is in the education market, which is particularly fertile ground for collaborative and online communications. The company has happy, loyal, articulate customers and we wanted to find a way to include them in our marketing efforts. We believe that their experiences, both with our products and in general, would be far more useful to our prospects than any brochure we could develop. In the past, we might have posted a bunch of case studies on our website. The collaborative weblog offers a much richer communications environment.

Initially, our bloggers will be drawn from our customer base; hopefully, over time, other educators will join us, first on the blog and then as customers.

Our goal is to create a rich community resource about topics that are at the intersection of the company’s and the customers’ interests. We will post company information from time to time, but the intent is for the bulk of the content to be community created. The combination of the blog content and our sponsorship of it should drive interest in our products without "lame marketing posts." In other words, we do good by doing good.

More later this week.