Blogs: They Just Don't Integrate

Besides being considered rude by some attendees, something else happened at BlogOn which disturbed me and that was the number of times I heard traditional marketing executives talk about how they want to use blogs to extend their intergrated marketing solutions, thus extending the brand.

This just won't work, and hopefully it never will.  Let me tell you why. Integrated Marketing Solutions, are an attempt to take a series of messages and push them out to a company's constituency.  They are devised and polished by committees, then the work is divvied up by ad and PR vendors as well as internal folk. The key to it is to puish the message out and this is supposed to improve brand awareness.  We'll get to that latter thought in just a minute.

Blogs are an example of from one-to-many communications. They fail when they push. They are downright assaulted by a great number of blogosphere denizens when they appear crammed with the marketing jargon of yore. Hugh McLeod finds such blogs and gives them Lame Awards, which is as damaging as a bad review of a Broadway play in the New York Times.

Back when I was taking Marketing 101 courses in college, I was told that brand is about how people feel about your company. To an increasing degree, Integrated Marketing Solutions, make people feel distrustful of companies and corporate messages.

Conversely, the success of blogs comes from the concept that people respond best to quiet speaking that informs audiences and triusts them to make wise decisions. They help brands in ways you cannot imagine by letting people see real, fallible humans doing real jobs. They build trust. 

My advice: don't try to integrate your blogs.  Trust your employees to talk and they will most likely behave in trustworthy ways.  Trust your target audiences to be intelligent and they will become your champions and that is a powerful way to build your brands.

Comments

[Niti Bhan]

Shel,

As a sometime "integrated marketing communications" professional in the mid nineties and current blogger, your post today best articulates the authentic power of the medium (blogs) and why it cannot be 'integrated' into traditional marcom channels.

While I can see how marcom professionals can perceive it be an enhancement on existing DRM, DM and 'relationship building' tools, unlike creating a "user group", or "frequent flyers club" etc blogs require a dedicated individual/group to write about topics they care about rather than just "push" messages.

The bottomline is "control", blogs are not about controlling the message to the masses and that's why they don't work for marcom. And your advice is right on the button: It's a matter of trust.

Best,

Niti

[Heidi Miller]

I think the most relevant part of your post is your reference to "trust." In my opinion, what Americans tend to dislike about big-biz marketing is that they don't know the source and so don't trust it. But with individual bloggers with real opinions and real personalities encouraging two-wy conversation, companies have a chance to get a real, authentic message out there.

That is, if they can decide to trust their employees to do it.

[Dave Taylor]

Not sure I agree with you on this one, Shel. I think that there are some companies that are well served by having their employees blog - with appropriate constraints about approach, presentation, content, etc - but other companies really do need to control their message more (or at least try to control their message more).

Boeing is a fine example of this: they don't just "trust their employees to blog", they have a very carefully managed communications vehicle that lets them communicate with a specific market segment and gain visibility in a community where Boeing has historically been invisible.

In general, I believe that most bloggers - you and Robert included - tend to be skewed towards approaches that work best for smaller, more agile companies rather than Fortune 500 corporations. The "let the staff blog" approach can work sometimes for some companies, but for most firms I believe it is *not* the best strategy for achieving their business goal with adding a weblog to their channels of communication with their marketplace.

[shel Israel]

So Dave,

Then are you asserting that the way Microsoft handles his blog is inappropriate for Microsoft? Or ae you calling Microsoft a small business?

[Dave Taylor]

I'm saying that Robert Scoble is an anomaly and that it's very very rare for a large company to have the corporate culture to allow someone to be a "loose canon" as Robert is. Don't get me wrong, I think it's the right move for Microsoft, but would it be the right move for Pfizer or Ford Motor Company? I don't believe so.

[Seun Osewa]

And why not?