Fake can be just as good

That’s the title of a great 1997 album by Blonde Redhead and as it happens, it is also today’s topic - just in a way not related to alternative rock, but to (corporate) blogging.

Here’s the thing: it never ceases to intrigue me how often I come across blogging-related advice. There’s no shortage of suggestions, guidelines and even rules out there - rules that are often considered absolute and inviolable by those who postulate them. Often suggestions from perceived authorities such as Robert Scoble and Debbie Weil on how to blog are interpreted as dogma; for example, the maxims that blogs are personal, that you must be transparent and so forth have all become pervasive*. How often have you read that a blog is a conversation, or that misleading readers about the identity or motives of the blogger is immoral?

I don’t want to challenge any of these ideas, but I do want to make a distinction between the different shades of meaning of the words blog, blogging and blogger, because it is hard to talk about something when you lack a consistent definition. I also want to question the validity of the judgment that certain blogs are “fake”, or at least ask whether that’s really a bad thing.

Blogging is understood alternately understood as

a) the use of a publishing technology

b) the style in which blogs are often written

c) the type of social interaction between the blogger and his readers

and often - but not always - it is the combination of all three of these things. Note that they build upon each other: a bloggy style makes limited sense when you’re writing a letter (using another publishing technology), because even though the two types of text share several common traits they also differ significantly in other regards.

Say you’re a Java developer who likes to write about coding, snowboarding in the Rockies and Frank Miller comic books. You’ve set up an installation of Wordpress on your own webserver and publish your first entry. It could start like this:

Hey everyone! So, guess what, I’ve decided to start a blog too. I’ll post here from time to time to talk about whatever catches my interest [...]

Even with just a handful of words, it can be clearly established that this kind of writing appeared in a blog and not, say, a newspaper, a personal diary, or a speech, even though it contains elements that are also common in these genres (of course it has the word “blog” in it, but even without that keyword I think a classification is possible). Now imagine that you’re a loyal reader of this blog and one day you find out that your snowboarding hacker friend is actually an invention - a fictional character developed by the department of systematic deception (DoSD) of a global PR firm (let’s call it Noble PR).

How would you react to this piece of information?

I think one gets a good idea of how people feel about these things when looking at blogs like this one and reactions such as these (read the first few comments). Blogs like Gourmet Station’s have been widely criticized for “violating the rules” and “being fake”. Where do these sentiments come from? They are the result of a holistic interpretation of blogs as a specific combination of a publishing technology, a style of writing and a kind of social interaction (a + b + c; see above). In other words: if you run a blogging software, write from a first-person viewpoint and directly address your readers, it is assumed that you are a real person, because only real human beings can engage in such an interaction (meaning a + b implicates c).

There are good reasons why you might want to use a blog as a publishing tool without writing in a bloggy style or allowing comments from your readers. Tools such as Wordpress and Movable Type are used for everything from publishing poetry to managing entire websites and their versatility makes “non-traditional” usages plausible. But the Catch 22 appears to be style: if a writer makes frequent use of the first-person pronoun, vocatives, interjections and other stylistic elements that are traditionally frequent in spoken language in what looks like a blog in terms of presentation, it must be assumed that he is communicating with me, because that is how a typical blog works.

Social interactions of even the simplest type represent an investment for the participants. I react to you in a certain way because I have assumptions both about you and about your assumptions about me. If my assumptions turn out to be unfounded, the result is a loss of face. Nobody wants to deal with someone who isn’t honest about their identity.

The special thing about blogs is that the technological frame they live in makes it especially plausible to assume these things. Nobody finds the conversational style described above terribly confusing or irritating in a novel, despite the fact that we usually know the difference between the voice of the author and the voice of his fictional characters**. But the difference is that I can’t interact with the author when reading a novel and thus there is very little likelihood that I’ll mistake what is going on for a real instance of communication that somehow involves me.

So where does that leave us? And why is the title of this post “fake can be just as good”?

Despite the outrage two years ago, the fictional T. Alexander still blogs for Gourmet Station and the blog has a PageRank of 5 out of 10 (this site has a mere 3). It shows up in fourth place if you google for “gourmet blog” and, according to Technorati, almost 400 links poin there. Finally the Northeastern University/Backbone Media Study lists it as an example for successful corporate blogging.

Here’s a (rather long) excerpt that provides an excellent picture of Gourmet Station’s approach to the blog (taken from the study):

Donna described how everything on the blog has to be consistent with the brand. She moderates the comments and makes sure those comments are consistent with the brand. No profanity or unrelated comments are allowed on the blog. Donna explained that “everything has got to be very buttoned up, we have a very buttoned up brand, and we have a very upscale brand, very upscale, well educated customers. So anything that goes out there has to be consistent with that.” The blog also allows the company to discuss their content in a laid back tone. That content has produced higher rankings on search engines and helped to increase traffic to the blog by 10%.

Donna believes it to be important that the people who write on the blog are knowledgeable about food and wine. The blog’s readers are looking for ideas around food, drink, and entertainment.

The blog has helped Donna’s company add content to their website on the topics and products the company is focused on providing. Also, the blog has given Donna the ability to place content that they otherwise would not have been able to put on their website. Donna said it was important that a company covers all of the topics they wish to cover in their blog posts, and to categorize those topics by keyword.

The Gourmet Station blog has achieved a number two ranking on the keyword “gourmet dinners” in Yahoo! The blog has played a big part in helping the company to achieve that ranking. According to Donna, the blog has also helped establish the company’s brand and provide more sales conversions by making a “passionate connection” with readers.

The topic that generates the most conversation and interaction from readers on the blog is romance. Donna said that made sense, as the search volumes for romance and dinner have a great connection.

Donna selects the content of the posts by season. Donna said the blog has 14 categories, and the company always has a recent post in each of the categories.

Donna recommends a company have a strategy before starting to blogging. Her company has two strategies: to fill their categories with content and to increase they’re (sic) ranking on search engines.

The bottom line appears to be: Gourmet Station designed a blog to increase search engine visibility and to publish material that did not fit into the context of a traditional corporate site. Perhaps they felt that this material was too context-dependent (recipes for seasonal gourmet foods, etc), or that a less formal style of writing was needed, but only in a certain limited area and not for the entire site. Whatever their motivation - there is hardly a rational reason to argue against their success. Whether “fake” or “real” (note the quotes), it appears that different strategies can realize different goals for different people.

I’m pretty sure that examples such as the Gourmet Station blog will remain marginal, though. It’s not really because of the outrage “fake” company blogs generate (is there such a thing as bad PR?), but because it seems somewhat contrived and unnecessary to come up with a fictional character to write your blog when you might just as well have a real person do it. It’s not too hard to stick with The Message even when you’re blogging under your own name - numerous product blogs out there prove that. How you measure success is an entirely other question. In that context, note Gourmet Station’s specific goals of increasing visibility and publishing “unconventional” content.

So there it is. You can blog, or you can publish via a blog. Or you can do the latter and hope that people will believe it’s really the former. Not much shame in that, I think.

* The single most important document in this context is probably Scoble’s Corporate Weblog Manifesto, which has seems to have influenced most subsequently formulated blogging guidelines.

** Of course this is systematically exploited in literature, for example in epistolary novels. Playing with the status of a piece of writing as ambiguously real or fictional was also a hallmark of Postmodernism.

(Edit) Here are a few more interesting links I initially forgot to include: one, two, three.