Cooper Matthews

I found the juxtaposition between the two readings for this week to be quite interesting. One one hand, Naked Conversations by Scoble and Israel extolled the blogosphere as a great new low cost way for companies to market themselves to the public. The second, and slightly more sinister Secret Strategies… blog posting from Dan Greenberg was more of a how-to manual on the best ways to exploit it. Of course, any semi-savvy corporation in the world today would be foolish to exclude either technique from their marketing strategy, but that doesn’t make it right.

Honest, honey. I love you for what's on the inside.

In his piece, Scoble gives examples of ways companies use blogging to make them more personable. A company can use a blog to give itself a face, rather than the nameless, shapeless “borg” that most large companies (Microsoft, GM, Sun Microsystems) are perceived to be. He also goes into detail about how blogging came to be, as well as background in instant messenger software and RSS feeds. He quotes Yossi Vardi as saying “Blogging is word of mouth on steroids.”

But for every silver lining there’s a dark cloud (or something like that), and in this case that dark cloud is Greenberg’s Secret Strategies…. If blogging is, in fact, word of mouth on steroids, then what Greenberg outlines is word of mouth on a cocaine bender. His blog post exposed the fact that a lot of viral videos aren’t really viral at all, at least not in the sense one would think. His company is paid by corporations to ensure their videos go viral. He goes into detail on how he does this by the use of YouTube keyword tagging to manipulate search results and “fake” blogging back and forth by people within the organization to artificially bump their Google juice. He even tells us that “Content is NOT king”, so a video can be crap but as long as it is kept short, simple, and is given a saucy title.

(Blatant push for Google juice)

Granted, there’s nothing illegal about this, but for me it takes away some of the magic of interactive communications. There is something of a thrill in a viral video, one that truly spreads by word-of-mouth. In a way, it makes us feel closer to an increasingly physically-disconnected society. It’s as though, all of a sudden, seemingly out of nowhere, there’s this “thing” that we all share, that’s being passed from person to person that makes us feel like we’re part of something, as though we took this great video from it’s infancy and nurtured it into adulthood. “I was a part of that!” That magic was all but shattered when Greenberg tells how his company deletes response comments that are not entirely positive, because they “can’t let one user’s negativity taint everyone else’s opinions.” Ahhh….Democracy.

(As an aside, I especially like the follow up post Greenberg submitted two days later that basically denounces the ideas he laid forth in his original post, following the severe bashing he took from readers.)

Yes, the corporate blogger and the viral marketed are both working towards the same ends of selling the reader/viewer a product of some kind, but the way Greenberg et al. do it is much more disingenuous. The corporate blogger, at the very least, is putting him or herself out there, leaving the consumer to decide what to make of it. The Dan Greenbergs of the world on the other hand, take the good will created by the corporate blogger and turn it on its ear. They manipulate the democratic ideals that make the Internet great – everyone’s voice can be heard, content is king, and user ratings to ensure good (or at least interesting) content flows to the top – and obliterate them for their personal gain.

Money: 1, Humanity: 0.