Selling meat to vegetarians

[by Sunni] I was so so happy to read Advergirl's recent post on leveraging blogs/wikis/networks in advertising. I had a tremendous "aHA!" moment. It went something like this:

Yes! There are others who have fought the battles I am fighting every day! There are others who kept hitting their heads on the glass ceiling of corporate desire to control "brand voice." There are others who are veering toward frustration with the mismatched paces of marketers and market: blogs, vlogs, podcasts, wikis, communities -- I barely have time to explain the newest trend before it's obsolete.

Ok, I can fit a lot of thought in a moment.

To add insult to injury, it's not enough to know what these trends are by definition alone. You have to know -- intrinsically -- how and why they work. You have to pick one apart through the code and then rebuild it, piece by piece. You have to post comments, mark tags and ping Technorati. Only then will you understand what the trend really is. Account teams, please don't try to sell me on a MySpace idea if you don't have a profile and at least a dozen "friends."

The thing is, it's great that everyone is getting hip to the catch phrases. Every day I hear phrases like "Web 2.0," "blogosphere," and "social networking." But dig a little deeper, and there's only a very superficial understanding -- sort of reminds me of the scene from Good Will Hunting where Matt Damon yells at the obnoxious Harvard student for reciting textbooks verbatim.

I've heard "Well, we're trying to go after the 13-21 male demo, we'll just build a few blogs." Huh? That's like saying, "Let's whip up a few video games to distribute." What are you going to blog ABOUT? Who's going to write it? Who's going to promote it? Who's going to moderate the comments?

Instead of jumping on the blogwagon by whipping up a few faux blogs, consider sponsoring an existing blog. Or a group of blogs. Companies like Blogads have made it easy for us: Blogs have been hand-selected and pre-packaged into tidy categories. (Henry, I expect commission.)

But once the idea is outlined, there's another aspect that needs to be considered: Free will of the consumer. Remember the annoyingly "cool" kids in high school? The ones that could infer something dirty out of everything you said, no matter how innocuous it was? Remember how aggravating they were, and how you eventually lost your temper and looked even less cool?

That's the Internet. At some point, the brand message will be twisted into something dirty -- not even the revered Apple can stop that. No amount of planning or packaging or glossing will prevent it. The companies and agencies that can laugh at themselves will succeed. The ones that try to retain control and refuse to allow the consumer to have a voice will crash and burn in a fiery ball of flames. But goodness, it will be fun to watch!