Marketing Roadmaps

Fake/Fictional Blogs

Persona Redux

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Okay. I have a few more things I want to say about fictional blogs and personas, and then I am going to get back to some real work. Or maybe go out and sit in the sun, since Spring has finally sprung.

Personally, I have absolutely no interest in doing a fictional blog. I think it would be very hard to maintain the quality and consistency of voice that would be required. I’m just not that good a writer. BUT I can imagine that an excellent writer, one who could get really into character, could pull it off, and create a fun experience for his or her readers.

There are tons of examples of role play games on the Internet (the grandchildren of Dungeons and Dragons) where people do something very similar. Each writer takes on a role and they collectively write the story. Not hard to imagine that the same people who enjoy this activity might get into having a conversation with a fictional character, even a "for-profit" one.

The writers of anonymous blogs can also create new personas for themselves. There is nothing wrong with anonymous blogging, but when the persona is created, versus your "real" self (and online, what is that anyway, but I digress…) it is pretty much the same thing as the blog by a fictional character like Spencer Katt. The difference of couse is that often you won’t know that the anonymous blogger IS a persona. In fact, Jozef Imrich who commented on my previous post on this topic included a link to an article about just such a situation in the legal profession.

For me, the key is transparency: if you are open and honest about the nature of your activity, you should be free to try out all sorts of new ideas. Some will work. Some will fail. Some people will hate ’em. Others love ’em.

Something isn’t "lame" just because you don’t like it. Something is "lame" if the people for whom it was intended, the desired audience for the thing, think it is lame. My 5-year old son loves a lot of TV programs that I personally think are pretty silly but he loves them (and the products advertised thereon). Home run for Super Robot Monkey Team Hyperforce Go, among others.

There is room for more than one opinion, more than one approach, and in the end, it will be the customers who decide what works and what doesn’t. No amount of posting and cross posting is going to change that.

Personas and fictional blogs

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Earlier today in an e-mail exchange with a fellow marketing blogger, we agreed that much of the sturm and drang around fictional blogs (see yesterday’s post for my definition thereof) reminded us both very much of the brouhaha that occured when the World Wide Web went "commercial" in the 90s. Purists were aghast at the pristine Internet being used for commercial purposes. Well, we know what happened with that 🙂

One of the main beefs that purists have about fictional blogs is that the author of the blog is not a real person, which they argue perverts the authenticity of the blog experience. I don’t agree. As I commented on Paul Chaney’s blog yesterday and he blogged today: what matters is the intended audience. As long as they know they are reading a fiction and interacting with a character, if the blog is well done, creative, entertaining, and the intended audience enjoys it, who are we to criticize. If you aren’t the audience, it just doesn’t matter what you think about it.

So I started thinking about other fictional personas that I have interacted with in my 20-odd years in the business (word choice intentional). And I came up with a fairly well known tech persona that is a fictional character with whom people have interacted with in the pages of PC Week (now e-Week) for many many years: rumour columnist Spencer F. Katt

Spencer has his own e-mail address, and a fairly rich back story that has been created over a number of years. Everybody knows that the column is written by someone or someones at the magazine, but that hasn’t prevented people from engaging with the character.

So I ask the question: if the folks at e-Week decided to change the delivery format of Spencer’s column to a blog, would that be any different than any of the current examples of fictional characters with blogs that are being pilloried: the Moose, T. Alexander and Captain Morgan.

Nope.

And in my book, it would be just fine as long as the intended audience enjoys it, and the company is honest about the fictional nature of the blog.

UPDATE: Tris Hussey dug a bit deeper and discovered that Spencer is indeed blogging (and flogging his column in every post I might add). So, given that we haven’t had any backlash against the Katt, whose blog appears to have started in March, either the people reading it don’t realize he isn’t really a 20+ year old cat or it’s okay for a blog to be written by a fictional character as long as you like him.

Since I think most people realize Spencer is fictional, I’ll go with option 2. Which proves the point. If the intended audience enjoys it, a blog by a fictional character is just fine. If the audience hates it, it will die the death it deserves. Therefore, incumbent on marketers to create good, fun enjoyable blogs, whether written by real or fictional folk. 

Fake blog. Fictional blog. Potato. Poe-Tah-toe

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Nice commentary by Shel Holtz on the whole fake blogs issue (courtesy Topaz Partners)

Here’s what I said on the subject about 2 months ago when the fake blog conversation started (remember LincolnFry).

Net it down: there are fake, or false, blogs, that purport to be something they are not. A fake blog is trying to deceive you. It doesn’t acknowledge its sponsorship by a company or let you know that the author isn’t a real person.

A fictional, or character, blog is simply using the form of the blog, but is upfront that the characters are fictional.

Shel nails it here:

“Ultimately, though, a blog is a lightweight content management system that allows people to comment. If someone wants to use that for traditional marketing, what’s wrong with that? It can fall into the category of “lame marketing blogs.” They may be lame. They may also work.”

And that is, of course, the key. One person’s trash is another person’s treasure. Just because I may think something is lame doesn’t mean that the intended reader of the “thing” doesn’t get into it, get something out of it, enjoy it, whatever.

Potato. Poe-Tah-Toe.

When is a blog a “fake blog?”

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Lots of conversation today about fake blogs, which got me thinking, just what is a "fake blog?"

The McDonalds fake french fry (FFF, also stands for fake fast food) blog is a creation from McDonald’s ad people, but it was supposed to be poking fun at the "whole food that looks like dead people phenomenon." So is it really "fake?" Or should we criticize it not for being fake, but simply for being lame.

Pepsi Girl blog wasn’t covertly sponsored by Pepsi, so not "fake" in that sense. According to the latest info from AdRants, Pepsi apparently had nothing to do with it, but it was developed as a joke. So it wasn’t authentic, or "real" as we have come to expect of blogs. But does that make it fake?

Here’s a round-up of the fake blog opinions I read today:

Jim Logan ; Matthew Oliphant/BusinessLogs (you’ll find the links to the mentioned blogs in this post); BL Ochman’s original post on the Pepsi Girl blog ; InsideBlogging ; Dan Gillmor ; courtesy Dan, I found Kevin Dugan’s Strategic Public Relations blog and his review of the FFF blog as well as a later post Fake Blogs Should Sponsor Real Blogs ;  Andy Lark

So what’s a fake blog?

On one hand,  I agree with Andy Lark — these were jokes, and perhaps we should lighten up a bit, like ’em/love ’em/hate ’em, have a laugh and get back to something more interesting than a styrofoam french fry that is supposed to look like Abe Lincoln.

On the other hand…. we need to figure out how to tell a blog that has the reporting or opinions of a true live person (whether we think they are a wing nut or not) from a blog that is an invented piece of fiction (funny or sad, effective or lame, it doesn’t matter). Why? Because we rely on blogs to be the voices of real people, people like us with whom we will agree some of the time, and disagree others. People we can respect and trust.

So I’ll make a suggestion… if you want to write a fictional blog, go ahead. Just tell the readers somewhere … like in the "about this blog" link … That’s what we do with books, right. We tell the reader whether they are reading Fiction or Non-fiction 🙂

Now, the big brand marketers are definitely going to continue to try and manipulate blogs. By creating fake/covert ones, or by trying to pull the wool over our eyes about the "buzz" something has (example: the recent Ogilvy-Mather stunt for client American Express. For details, BL Ochman summarizes it here.) And it will probably get more subtle, even as we get better at sniffing out fakes. They just won’t be able to help themselves. In the end, they probably won’t do much damage to their brands.

But, of course, they won’t do them any real good either, and that’s the point that they miss: done right, real blogs can actually help build the brand.

Of more concern to me is the smaller firms who follow in the fake blogger’s footsteps. Their brands likely won’t be strong enough to survive a serious mis-step in the blogosphere. They have to get it right the first time.

Which is why I was so pleased by the news out of NY PR firm CooperKatz today. As covered in MarketingVox: Congratulations Steve Rubel: CooperKatz Makes Blog PR Practice Out of Exec’s Blog.

Steve’s own post at Micro Persuasion provides more detail. CooperKatz’s approach, and public commitment to "doing it right" is a much better example for companies trying to figure out the blogosphere than some of the other examples we’ve been reading about this week.

Do you want fries with that?