Buzz Marketing with Blogs: When Is a Fake Blog OK?

When Is a Fake Blog OK?

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:

Creative news coverage of yet another Tour de France
An alternative point of view
Entertaining
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.

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

Comments

The problem is that fake blogs go against the beauty of blog technology.

It is designed to create an honest dialogue between you and others. Fake blogs miss that point altogether.

Posted by kevin dugan on 02/07/05 at 08:22 PM