The Shlog
If it seems as if every human being and every brand on the face of the earth now has a blog, they do. Technically, a blog is a type of regularly updated, online diary that provides insight into the passions of the writer on topics ranging from engagement and marketing to movies and philately.
I have one called The Keyhole (http://brandkeys.blogspot.com), and on Tuesdays and Thursdays I write comments about consumers, brands, ads, and marketing, all viewed through a predictive customer loyalty lens. I hope that what I write will open a dialogue and suggest real-world solutions and insights that may be of some use to the marketing community. (By the way, the critical word in this paragraph is “write,” and I’ll get back to that in a bit.)
Blogs haven’t been around all that long, but for the life of me I can’t put my finger on the precise date that everybody–especially brands–felt that he absolutely had to have a blog in order to feel complete in the marketing area. I suppose some of that was (and is still) driven by the fact that engaging consumers has become so damn difficult that marketers are willing to try anything to involve/engage/touch consumers, and blogs seem a relatively logical and simple solution, especially given all the attention they seem to have gotten.
Anyway, the desperation to engage consumers–or just to engender some sort (heck, any sort) of return on marketing efforts–has driven some marketers too far. Some brands have been going out and creating "flogs" for their brands, a word now used to describe a fake blog. Wal-Mart and its PR agency, Edelman, were found to have promoted the brand with a fake travel blog. Sony’s viral marketing firm, Zipatoni, created a flog to promote the Sony PSP.
Both got caught out. Users posted angry comments. They accused the perpetrators of the fake blogs of trying to deceive them (which, of course, they were). These (and other) blogging frauds were widely covered in the press. A commentator on gaming Website Penny Arcade noted, "When the agents of the message misrepresent themselves, we call this 'deception.’”
We totally agree. Big-brand marketers who would never ever consider running deceptive advertising campaigns on TV seem to have different standards when it comes to online marketing. They need to realize that flogs are as bad as deceptive advertising. Maybe worse, given the context of the medium and the expectations of the readers.
But here’s a new one for you. Recently CBS News fired a producer of Katie Couric’s video blog for plagiarism. Apparently the producer who ghostwrote the blog entry appropriated significant portions of an essay about the declining use of libraries in the Internet age from a “Wall Street Journal” article by Jeffrey Zaslow. What could the producer been thinking? “Newspapers are sooooo last century! Who’d be reading ‘The Wall Street Journal’?”
In the spirit of honesty, CBS did disclose the plagiarism on its Website with a correction that said, “and we should have acknowledged that at the top of our piece.” Boy, that would have made for compelling television, watching the $15 million-a-year newscaster explain that she actually required a producer to figure out which of her personal feelings and insights she wanted to share with the world at large. Oh, and then write them for her as well.
Anyone who has paid attention to the development of media and the cult-building activities of news personalities has to be aware that it’s pretty much standard practice for news writers and producers to draft– even ghostwrite–essays and commentaries for “the talent.”
But as David Blum wrote in “The New York Sun,” “with the expansion of the blogosphere, where dueling networks routinely parlay the cult of personality into a weapon in the publicity war, it seems that Ms. Couric can’t play the game by the same rules as her NBC counterpart Brian Williams does. Anyone who has ever read Mr. Williams highly personal blog entries. . . knows he wrote them himself.” The same can be said for Charles Gibson’s ABC blog. The trick is to use personal insights and, where necessary, quotation marks.
Which brings me to the title of this column, “The Shlog.” Officially Ms. Couric’s “Notebook“ is a blog, since it gets regularly updated. It’s not a flog, since the agent of the message doesn’t misrepresent who it is, identifying Ms. Couric as the titleholder of the blog. But–and here’s where I bring this back to my remark in the second paragraph–Ms. Couric doesn’t actually write the blog. It’s a sham, hence the term “shlog.” (That was the term I came up with trying to find something that was in the spirit of the “flog” nomenclature, but I welcome more-creative suggestions.)
The real lesson for anyone who wishes to share his intimate or professional thoughts is that the blogosphere is a very open, self-policing, and pretty unforgiving world when you try to trick people. CBS News (and Ms. Couric) has to live up to the same standards as brands. It too needs to protect its “brand’s” equity and image. Perhaps more so, since a news organization’s brand equity is based more on the value “credibility” and less on the image “perky.”
And way less than on descriptions like “poseur” or “sham.”
Robert Passikoff, Ph.D., is founder/president of New York-based marketing firm Brand Keys and is the author of “Predicting Market Success: New Ways to Measure Customer Loyalty and Engage Consumers With Your Brand.”
Other articles by Robert Passikoff:
The Fable of the Misinformed CMO
"Genius May Have Its Limitations…"
The New Four P’s: Promoting Predictive Promotion Planning
Self-Interest Is the Anesthetic That Dulls Innovation
Seven Brand and Marketing Trends for 2007
Consumer-Generated Content: Let Yourself Go
