Social Media and PR 2.0 require a different approach – honesty and tranparency are paramount.
Another ‘flog’ or fake blog was unmasked this week – Sony and viral marketing firm Zipatoni were shown to be behind the supposedly cool hip-hop blog, alliwantforxmasisapsp.com.
Coming hard on the heels of the Wal-Mart/Edelman fiasco it’s no wonder that corporate executives in the US and the UK polled for the Bulldog Reporter/Peppercom business blog survey said blogs are not a credible source of information!
Yet the public lists “more honesty” as one of the top three reasons they read blogs. And the Golin Harris survey showed that consumers are more supportive of corporations that are transparent and authentic in their messaging-and are more willing to do business with those companies that embrace “corporate citizenship.”
It’s a case of blogger beware. Other bloggers and blog readers can sniff out a scam in a blog in a heartbeat.
According to the article in MediaPost today, Zipatoni did not respond to their calls, but a commenter claiming to be a Zipatoni executive replied to criticism in the fake blog’s comments. “Please know that we approached the client initially with this scenario and they said ‘who cares if people find out? As long as it is funny, we do this stuff all of the time,”
And I wonder where he’ll be working next week?
“The blog world is a very open, self-policing and pretty unforgiving world when you try to trick them with things like this,” commented Cymfony’s Jim Naill. “I don’t understand why marketers, after all the different examples of this, don’t get the message that you can’t get away with faking these kinds of blogs.”
Exactly!
It is vital that PR and marketing agencies, and in house PR staff, learn the rules of PR 2.0 and social media.
If you insist on keeping your head in the sand, and doing same old, same old, you are going to pay the price.
Sally is the author of Website Content Strategy blog: Information about the shifts in media consumption and the use of
technology in marketing and PR so business can stay in touch with
their rapidly moving audiences.
