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.
