Spurred somewhat by the widely panned Coke Zero "blog," Shannon Bain over at Armchair Media has a thoughtful rant
about the practice of companies creating a fake blog in order to generate interest in their product. Bain isn't talking
about blogs that were obviously created by the company, but blogs which actually claim to be from regular individuals.
Why do they do it? I think Bain has the right idea:
"Well, one reason seems to be that blogs are a genre. Like most genres, they have easy to mimic tropes and stylistic peculiarities that we all recognize and that collectively say 'blog.'"
It's a very good point, and it makes a lot of sense. Companies know the blogosphere is huge and they want to tap into it, but what they don't always understand is the rules the blogosphere lives by, one of which is that unseemly acts of blogging will be exposed with as much vitriol as possible. If a company doesn't understand the inner machinations of the blog world, than it appears about as hip and relevant as an old man in golf pants hanging out near the punch bowl at a junior prom.
