Fake Blogs

Interested in Fake Blogs?

Posted by Susannah Gardner on 06/08 at 03:02 PM • Blogging Events -- Fake Blogs

Just a reminder that I’ll be giving a talk in a couple of hours on fake blogs, character blogs, and some of the other “creative” uses of blogs today. It’s not too late to register!

Pushing the Boundaries on Blogs: Do Fake Blogs Work?
Wednesday, June 8, 2005, 8:30 p.m. ET - FREE

http://www.customizednewsletters.com/CE/cesched.htm

Blogging continues to move out of the realm of personal diarists and into the hands of business professionals and marketers. The transition isn’t always smooth, especially as creative marketers use blogs in new ways to promote products, businesses and business strategies. Long-time bloggers often refer to these efforts as “fake” blogs, and the resulting hue and cry generates publicity – of the negative kind. Are there lines that can’t be crossed? What has been tried, and failed? What has been tried, and succeeded? Learn to plan for the reactions you will get as push the boundaries with new and exciting ideas.

Conversations with Experts: How to Build Your Business On and Off-line Hosted by Denise Wakeman and Patsi Krakoff and sponsored by Build a Better Blog System.

You can register for the Conversation with Susannah Gardner at: http://www.customizednewsletters.com/CE/cesched.htm

 
Comments (9) • Permalink

Pushing the Boundaries on Blogs: Do Fake Blogs Work?

Posted by Susannah Gardner on 05/26 at 09:00 AM • Blogging Events -- Fake Blogs

I’ll be talking about fake blogs, spam blogs, and other marketing blog experiments as part of Denise Wakeman and Patsi Krakoff’s “Conversations with Experts: How to Build Your Business On and Off-line” series. If you’d like to participate, it’s free, but you need to register here.

Here’s the official write-up:

Pushing the Boundaries on Blogs: Do Fake Blogs Work?
Wednesday, June 8, 2005, 8:30 p.m. ET
Guest Expert:  Susannah Gardner of Buzz Marketing with Blogs, featured in the Build a Better Blog System

Blogging continues to move out of the realm of personal diarists and into the hands of business
professionals and marketers. The transition isn’t always smooth, especially as creative marketers use blogs in new ways to promote products, businesses and business strategies. Long-time bloggers often refer to these efforts as “fake” blogs, and the resulting hue and cry generates publicity – of the negative kind. Are there lines that can’t be crossed? What has been tried, and failed? What has been tried, and succeeded? Learn to plan for the reactions you will get as push the boundaries with new and exciting ideas.

Susannah Gardner, author of “Buzz Marketing with Blogs for Dummies,” will review recent efforts to create creative blogs. Learn where and why marketers have had problems, and what strategies are succeeding. We’ll talk about the Lincoln Fry blog, the Mazda blog, Moosetopia, Where The Secret Girls Get Real, and others. As well, Susannah will talk about some of the programs and efforts that exist today to recruit popular bloggers as marketers. This session will give you some targeted suggestions for creating a marketing blog that won’t rock the blogosphere with outrage.

Conversations with Experts: How to Build Your Business On and Off-line
Hosted by Denise Wakeman and Patsi Krakoff and sponsored by Build a Better Blog System.

 
Comments (1) • Permalink

Spencer F. Katt is bloggging…why isn’t anyone yelling?

Posted by Tris Hussey on 04/15 at 09:38 AM • Blogs -- Blogging News -- Fake Blogs
Susan Getgood posted  more on the whole character blog issue—Marketing Roadmaps- Personas and fictional blogs—and mentioned Spencer F. Katt and what if he were blogging.  Spencer is clearly a character, a persona.  Well Spencer is blogging.  So why hasn’t everybody jumped on his tail?  Is it because we’ve been reading him since we were still typing DOS commands?  Since a 400K 3.5 inch “floppy” was a big deal?  Think about it.
 
Tris Hussey is the Chief Blogging Officer for Qumana Software and Managing Director of Qumana Services.  He can be reached at tris AT qumana DOT com.
Powered By Qumana

 
Comments (0) • Permalink

Deliciously Fake

Posted by Susannah Gardner on 04/04 at 02:12 PM • Blogs -- Fake Blogs

imageThanks to Hugh at Gaping Void, I’ve discovered Delicious Destinations, the blog of GourmetStation, latest entry in the fake blog field. GourmetStation is a provider of upscale prepared cuisine, the kind of thing that makes sure you have the kind of food on the table that takes all day to make despite the fact that you work 14-hour days.

Delicious Destinations is written by T. Alexander, “a fictitious character created by GourmetStation, it’s creative partner, Blue Marble Media, and marketing partner, Bloomberg Marketing. T. A. is our icon, who through reflections about food, customs and travel, adds a bit of spice to our website and newsletters.”

The blog is written in first person. On March 27, T. Alexander blogged about a brunch thrown by his neighbor Clarissa. On April 1 the topic was garlic. Innocuous stuff, supported by a pretty generic design.

I’m interested to see where GourmetStation takes the blog, and how successful it will be in supporting their business. I’ve said before that I’m not fundamentally opposed to fake blogs, as long as the intention is to be creative—and as long as the intention isn’t to trick readers. But in the case of GourmetStation, I’m curious: Why is a fictitious blog author necessary? T. Alexander isn’t a potholder or a cow. He’s positioned as being a knowledgable foodie—is there really no such person at GourmetStation who could be a more authentic voice sending the same kinds of messages?

As the thinking about fake blogs evolves, my expectation is that appropriate use will revolve around humor and perhaps the ridiculous. Take, for example, the Jack character of Jack in the Box. A blog written by Jack could be entertaining, and of course everyone realizes that a man with a head made of a very large ping-pong ball isn’t meant to be real or taken seriously. But the character of T. Alexander just appears to be a fake person, and though it’s hard to tell in the four posts to be found on the site right now, he doesn’t seem to be exaggerated, ironic, a parody or a stereotype. He seems less a character than just… well… fake.

UPDATE: Found some more discussion of the Delicious Destinations blog from Paul Chaney, Tris Hussey and BLOGthenticity .

 
Comments (8) • Permalink

When Is a Fake Blog OK?

Posted by Susannah Gardner on 02/07 at 07:06 PM • Fake Blogs -- Marketing

So, I’ve been thinking about the reactions to the McDonald’s Lincolnfry blog and about fake or spoof blogs in general. It seems to me that fake doesn’t necessarily equal bad. Here’s what I’m thinking: Blogs written by made-up people are bad. Blogs written by inanimate objects, animals and pets—potentially funny and clever, but tough to do.

The McDonald’s blog smells funny because it purports to be written by a real person, but isn’t. The author doesn’t exist, nor does his spouse? partner? Liz, nor, I can only speculate, are any of the commenters. It isn’t a spoof or satire, it’s a sham. The blogosphere certainly resents the lack of authenticity.

But check out my favorite fake blog of all time: The Lance Armstrong bike blog. This spoof seemed clever to me on a number of levels:

  1. Creative news coverage of yet another Tour de France
  2. An alternative point of view
  3. Entertaining
  4. No chance it could be taken seriously, so no confusion for readers.

Here’s a quick sample:

Three weeks is an awfully long time, folks. The mental strain, the pain, the fatigue, the heartache, the strange swelling down deep in my left fork.

Yes, this blog sure has been tough to keep up.

The race? Oh, yeah, I guess that was tough, too. We won it, you know. Big surprise there. Like I was going to let Lance lose. Hah!

So, now we’re in Paris, and Lance has given me a few days off. This is a great town for a single bike, and I’m certainly going to let my kickstand down and live a little. I might even get my frame pierced.

Oddly enough, it was created by the Austin-American Stateman, a newspaper, and not by a PR or marketing company. But think about how this could be applied to a product launch, or even cleaning up a mistake.

In the early days of the Internet, I worked at the Los Angeles Times, and was part of the team that launched the first version of that Web site, along with one of the first personalized news aggregators out there. We called it Hunter, the news puppy, and used pictures of a puppy all over the site. When we had technical difficulties, Hunter often wrote about them from the point of a view of a dog, and though cutesy, having a character play the part of faceless technology really made a difference in the kind of feedback we got from readers.

 
Comments (1) • Permalink

Fry Blog Fake

Posted by Susannah Gardner on 02/07 at 06:46 PM • Fake Blogs -- Marketing

The Lincoln FryIf you watched the Super Bowl (not me, no way) there were a couple of McDonald’s commercials featuring an Abraham Lincoln French fry—or is that Freedom fry? At any rate, in the spirit of toast with the Virgin Mary’s likeness on it we now have supernatural fast food.

Along with the commercials you can find a Lincoln Fry Web site and blog. The site has a McDonald’s copyright, but the blog… well, the blog is a fake, complete with realistic misspellings, a test first post, and bad photography.

Well, at least it’s probably a fake… haven’t seen a formal confirmation that this is the work of McDonald’s, but come on, folks.

On the upside, somebody at McDonald’s actually gets blogs well enough to create a fake one, even if some don’t appreciate the effort!

UPDATE: Just found the Lincoln Fry auction, which notes that “This Lincoln Fry prop is crafted from polyurethane and stands approximately 4 inches tall. It forms a base at one end and a partial bust of President Abraham Lincoln at the other. “Lincoln Fry” is not edible.” Lame!!!

 
Comments (0) • Permalink