Nov 29th, 2007 | Corporate Blogging, Fake Blogs, Research | 1 Comment
This morning over coffee, I discussed my thesis project with a colleague. At some point I described last year’s Wal-Mart flog incident to him and I came up with several plausible reasons why certain criteria have to be met in order for a blog to be accepted as “authentic” by the blogosphere, especially if it’s a company blog. Alex, who does incredibly interesting research on the semantics of Web 2.0 metaphors, had a very sensible suggestion in spite of my ideas: I could just ask people for their opinion.
So that’s what I’ll do. Whether you’re a company blogger, PR pro, consultant, or just someone who reads company blogs, I would be grateful for your response to the following question:
Under what circumstances would you describe a corporate blog as fake?
This is not just a random opinion poll. I am writing a research article at the moment and one of my central questions is what expectations people have towards blogs, why companies find blogs attractive for public-facing communication and what exactly happens when a company is accused of “faking” a blog. So your responses have a very real chance of benefiting my research and being cited.
You can either post a comment here, ping me through your own blog or send me an email - whatever works best for you.
Thanks a lot in advance and do pass this on!
Sep 1st, 2007 | Anjo Anjewierden, Corporate Blogging, Elmine Wijnia, Fake Blogs, Lilia Efimova, Presentation, Research, Ton Zijlstra | 2 Comments
Excuse the rather long silence - as ends-of-the-month go, August was a busy one. I’m still in the process of finishing two papers and fighting a rather annoying cold, but with the great research input I got over the last two days I am certainly not complaining.
To recap: Lilia Efimova invited me to hold a talk on corporate blogging at the Telematica Instituut in Enschede, which is only about 2.5 hours from where I do my work. We got in touch through our blogs and given that we both research corporate blogging it felt totally natural to get together and pick each other’s brains. I keep finding again and again that few things really connect people quite the same way that nerdy research interests do.
Lilia introduced me to Anjo Anjewierden, who (among many other thing) works on ways of visualizing blog data and has developed the very nifty text analysis package tOKo. I also met bloggers Ton Zijlstra and Elmine Wijnia with whom I had the chance to chat after the talk. I’m always vastly impressed by people who have been blogging for several years. Me, I tend to feel proud that I’ve managed to post in more or less regular intervals for roughly a year now, but a year seems so little compared with all the writing that many of the “veterans” have under their belts.
Check out the slides for the talk:
Anjo made an excellent point after the presentation by asking what a flog is (I use the word in the title of the presentation). Note to self: it’s a good idea to occasionally explain the neologisms that you carelessly throw about.There’s quite a bit of trip-associated homework that I need to do today, but I promise to post more on some of the things I have been pondering lately very soon. Thanks once more to Lilia, Robert and Alexander for letting me stay at their place and for wining and dining me! I’m looking forward to hosting you (ideally all of you, but for that I need a bigger apartment) in the future. 
Aug 20th, 2007 | Corporate Blogging, Fake Blogs, PR, Style, Wal-Mart | No Comments
I’ve been working on a research paper dealing with the language and style of corporate blogs, specifically Life at Wal-Mart, for a few weeks now. My suspicion - that I think I can express with a good deal of certainty now - is that Life at Wal-Mart is a fake blog (or flog) in the sense that it would not be described as genuine by most people who know what a blog is.
How do I know?
Well, there are several indicators. In the 52 entries that I have analyzed there is not a single hyperlink, nor is there any instance where an external source (another blog, news website etc) is quoted.
Not once.
Of course it isn’t impossible for a blog to not link or quote, but it is a severe deviation from the norm. Another thing that struck me (and there are many more indicators that are listed in detail in the paper) is something mind-numbingly simply but quite salient:
Blogs contain the word blog. Life at Wal-Mart doesn’t.
Certainly newspaper editorials and scientific papers are bound to have a higher frequency of the terms editorial and paper than other types of texts, but the number of blogs without the word blog in them beats the statistical significance of that by a huge leap. It’s rather impossible, it seems, to blog without talking about it and when people talk about it they have no choice but to use that term, because it’s the only one we currently have. The New York Times is unlikely to be full of references to the Washington Post for obvious reason, but in blogs mentioning other sources, quoting and linking them is the standard practice. And even if you don’t do it, any sort of reflection on what you’re doing will practically force you to use the word. Blogs that don’t either A) link to or quote other blogs or B) contain some kind of meta-language can be described as virtually impossible and my corpus data reflects that.
So, what does that mean? Well, obviously a blog can be fake and still use the term blog in every single post. But if ad copy, testimonials or other textual building blocks from commercial genres are simply stuffed into Wordpress and the result is called a blog, this method should pick it up.
Aug 6th, 2007 | Apple, CEO Blogging, Corporate Blogging, Fake Blogs | No Comments
It seems that the already small group of blogging CEOs has just lost a prominent member. Except that the blog of Apple’s legendary founder Steve Jobs was a hoax to begin with. If you’re a rock star tech executive, perhaps it’s a wise decision to start a blog before someone else does it for you…
Edit: Forbes is really milking this for all it’s worth. And it has a certain post-modern quality to it: you can watch an interview with Dan Lyons about the news he has himself created (of course on the Forbes website). When citizen journalists do the reporting, the real journalists just make their own news.
Jul 19th, 2007 | Blogging Legal Issues, CEO Blogging, Corporate Blogging, Fake Blogs, John Mackey, Whole Foods Inc | 3 Comments
Whole Foods CEO John Mackey must have been thinking something along those lines when he invented an on-line alter ego that praised him and his company and bashed rival Wild Oats. BusinessWeek, CNNMoney and the PRSA have read-worthy commentary and Valleywag’s Owen Thomas shares an entertaining tidbit related to the fiasco.
Mackey’s actions are now the subject of an SEC investigation and after it was announced that the Whole Foods Board is also looking at it, he today reacted by publishing an apology - interestingly enough not through his blog (which is “temporarily closed”) but through the PR section of the company site (link).
The way the apology is worded demonstrates that there is pressure mounting. Some are calling for Mackey’s head and there is a considerable amount of confusion as to why he chose to anonymously bad-mouth the competition on a Yahoo! finance forum in the first place.
I’m still looking both at the entries in Mackey’s blog and at the Yahoo! board - it seems like a fascinating case, certainly worth a little linguistic investigation. Here is a list of all postings Mackey wrote under his pseudonym, if you care to do a little detective work. What’s strange is that the responses to his final post in August 2006 suggest that the other board users were quite aware of his identity (one participant responds with “Goodbye JM!” to his farewell message). Has this incident taken almost a year to show up on the media’s radar? It seems so, which makes me wonder who or what made it show up right now…
A close reading of some of the Yahoo! postings provides an interesting insight into the psyche of an executive who is truly “mission-driven” (see below) and has apparent trouble dealing with criticism.
Here’s a sample:
unibomber999, radmok is interested in neither facts nor logic. He or she, like so many other shorts on this Board, love to spin their fantasies about the future while completely ignoring the facts of both the past and the present. radmok (hubris, liberfar and many other shorts & bashers) choose to focus on Whole Foods competition improving, while completely ignoring the reality that Whole Foods is improving & evolving far faster. They don’t seem to realize that Whole Foods isn’t sitting still, but learning and growing as an organization at a very rapid rate. They wrongly believe that Whole Foods competitive advantage is all about organic foods and that once Whole Foods competitors are all selling it (which has already been the case for nearly a decade now) Whole Foods will fade into the sunset. They refuse to recognize that Whole Foods is a mission driven retailer that has evolved numerous competitive advantages including a superior business model of optimizing stakeholder relationships, a unique company culture based on empowerment, service and innovation that cannot be duplicated by a command and control supermarket company, a happy and motivated work force, and highly motivated, skilled, and knowledgable leadership throughout the company. The shorts and bashers keep waiting for the whole thing to collapse, not understanding that Whole Foods has been continuously growing and evolving for 26 years now. This ain’t no overnight success story. One thing I’ve enjoyed about this Board is watching the shorts come and go every year. They come on to this Board making highly arrogant and “original” proclamations that this is just a stupid grocery store which is ridiculously overvalued and is going to get its comeuppance very, very soon. How many shorts have the long-term participants on this Board watched disappear every year with large losses on their shorts? Several hundreds now. Surely we must be getting close to a thousand or so by now. This current batch of shorts (with one or two exceptions) won’t be here a year from now. They will have disappeared. However, new shorts will take their place (for the shorts we will always have with us) and they will say the same stupid and unoriginal things that their predecessors said before them, believing themselves to be both original and brilliant. There is nothing we can do, but regularly flush out the old shorts from the ignore button and replace them with the current crop. Meanwhile, Whole Foods will keep doing its thing–producing unmatched same store sales growth and continue its irresistable growth, driving the stock price up and the shorts off of the Board.
(link)
This, I believe is not what happens when you drink your own Kool-Aid. It’s what happens when you bathe in it, drink it and then bake a cake with it.
I’ll be posting more on the matter as it “evolves and grows”.
Edit: Eddy Elfenbein also has some nice Mackey quotes.
Jun 11th, 2007 | Corporate Blogging, Fake Blogs, Presentation, Wal-Mart | No Comments
After spending the last week touring several places in Germany (first for a presentation at the University of Osnabrück and then for a friend’s birthday party in Bavaria) I am now back on the ground in Düsseldorf, ready to pick up the blogging reins again.
I’ll start by sharing the slides for a presentation I held earlier at our local colloquium. I focused on Life at Wal-Mart, the public-facing blog described on WalMartFacts.com as “our associate blog”. I believe that LaWM represents what you could call a “pseudo blog” - something that uses the form of a blog, but is really a very tightly controlled and restricted form of one-way advertising that has little to do with a real blog. Anyway, let me know what you think.
May 2nd, 2007 | Corporate Blogging, Fake Blogs, Ghostblogging, Gourmet Station, Scuderi Group, Thompson Holidays, TiVo, Wal-Mart | No Comments
Have a look at this bit on alleged ghostblogging, recently posted by Bryan Person and at the comments by Eric Eggertson and Michael O’Connor Clarke. A discussion has unfolded around the status of a blog maintained by engine maker Scuderi Group, after Person pointed out that the blog in question is written by Scuderi’s PR firm Topaz Partners. Quote Person:
I question 1) whether it’s PR’s place to do the actual blogging for a client in the first place (my take: it’s not) 2) why the ghostblogging isn’t at least disclosed. On this blog, none of the posts includes an author’s name, so we really don’t know who’s doing the writing. The About page, which hasn’t yet been updated, also doesn’t offer any clues.
After reading this I headed over to airhybridblog.com to inspect the object of scorn. What I found left me fairly underwhelmed though, because it’s simply ad copy published via a blogging software. Not only is it safe to say that there is quite a bit of for-client blogging going on in the corporate world, but the practice of not identifying the author is fairly common as well. A good example that I can produce off the top of my head is the Thompson Holiday Blog, others are RESCUE bugBlog and Inside Nike Basketball. Note that these are not necessarily written by PR companies (I doubt the Thompson Blog is) but that the material published in them is clearly product-related ad copy with no identifiable author that could just as well be printed in a brochure.
In these cases and in that of airhybridblog.com the author is simply left unidentified. However, the consensus seems to be that the term ghostblogging describes cases where someone is identified as the author but someone else actually does the writing (as in ghostwriting, the parent term). A different variant (used by TiVo and Gourmet Station, among others) is to name a fictional character as the author of your blog. Again it makes sense to regard this as a distinct approach - fiction blogging if you may - and not lump it together with ghostblogging, as the goals behind these different approaches are all markedly different. It is hard to see anon-blogging, as in the case of airhybridblog.com, as a very deceptive practice, because the authorship of someone at the company is implied but not made explicit in any way. Of course companies utilize the status of blogs as a genre of personal writing with absolute clarity about the associations that most people have: that blogs are personal, involved, honest etc. If you have a look at Cox Communications’ Digital Straight Talk, you’ll find that it cites exactly these qualities (my favorite quote from their about page is still [w]hile we provide a Cox point of view, we also shoot for a balanced discussion that’s light on bull and heavy on substance) while providing no author for the bulk of posts, most of which are instead simply attributed to ‘DST’ (=Digital Straight Talk). The deceptive element lies in how frequently opinions are expressed in Digital Straight Talk, because when someone tells us that satellite TV sucks we expect to know who is making the claim and for what reason. In contrast to this, airhybridblog.com is ad copy so prototypical and stale that it is hard to imagine anyone could mistake it for a bloggy blog (i.e. a blog in accord with the genre criteria that most of us apply).
A few linguistic observations:
1. Syntactically The Scuderi Group and other inanimate or abstract subjects dominate in posts on airhybridblog.com. In bloggy blogs the personal pronoun I is usually chosen and even in anonymous blogs we (as in “we, the company”) is normally used to imply some kind of human involvement. Using the company name as frequently as done in airhybridblog.com is as overtly non-bloggish as I can imagine.
2. Sentences are long and have a high noun density that translates into a high information load. Complex sentences full of fluff typical PR poetry are very frequent:
But the sunny weather outside isn’t preventing a steady stream of automotive engineers, executives, and interested onlookers from stopping by Booth 1502 inside the 2.4 million square foot Cobo Center, where it’s a constant 70 degrees and a virtual world unto itself.
If I’ve ever seen a highly planned and carefully crafted sentence that seeks to cram a maximum of digestible information into an appealing linguistic wrapper it’s this one. Who’d confuse that for a personal blog?
3. The bulk of entries in airhybridblog.com seem to report events or refer to news item, with very little commentary. Where there’s no personal involvement there’s no voice and thus little need to identify an author, since we’re not too likely to care who produced such a text.
What it boils down to is the difference between a genre and a publishing technology - and the ability of blogs to function as either of these things. A press release is still a press release, whether it’s printed in a company brochure or etched into a stone tablet in cuniform. As noted above, companies know what associations people have with blogs as a genre and PR agencies seek to exploit these expectations (and why shouldn’t they). But there really isn’t a lot of deception here once one actually reads any of the texts - you know at once that you’re not having a conversation with another person and quite possibly you won’t even mind.
An example that I find much more deceptive - so deceptive, in fact, that I doubt there is any other function than to mislead the reader about who is doing the writing - is this gem. Read carefully and you will find that Edelman employs very creative individuals (more so than Topaz Partners, I would argue) and that the term editing is quite broad semantically.
Apr 10th, 2007 | Corporate Blogging, Debbie Weil, Fake Blogs, Gourmet Station, PR, ROI of Blogging, Robert Scoble | 1 Comment
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.
