A Taste Of What’s To Come. Where Steve Rubel completely trashes the idea of character blogs, Rok Hrastnik embraces them…
- It’s about entertainment in its purest form and finding improved ways of relating to the brand and the characters that embody it.
Does a ten year old care about the person or the company behind Mickey Mouse? Does he want to read about how the character was developed, what’s going on behind the scenes and so on?
In most cases, no. He just wants to hear more from that character, even make him part of his daily routine, “watching” how he lives out his life. It’s about entertainment in its purest form and finding improved ways of relating to the brand and the characters that embody it.
Personally, I lean towards Steve’s opinion even if Rob’s got some interesting reflections. But I don’t spend my days worrying about character blogs at all. The way I see it, they’ll probably be tested some more. If they work — fine. If not, well, that’s fine too.
But Steve’s and Rob’s discussion to me illustrates a more profound discussion. Rob says it himself: Blogs “…are now main-stream and most of their readers don’t really know or care about the fact that they’re reading a blog.”
Now that’s a discussion — and development — we will see more of. What happens when the blog geeks becomes dinosaurs instead of gurus? When a blog is just another form of web content that we use if we need to?
I’m certain we will see many of the blog features integrated into corporate web sites. The reverse chronologial order of content, the personal touch, the tone, the comments etc. But we will be indifferent to the term “blog” as such, and as a result of that all the things a blog “should be”. So maybe I do lean towards Rob after all?
Fredrik Wacka is the author and founder of the popular CorporateBlogging.Info blog which is a guide to business and corporate blogging.
Visit Fredrik Wacka’s blog: CorporateBlogging.Info.
