Over the weekend, I was trying to catchup on some articles and blog posts that I missed during the week. One thing led to another and I was rereading some articles on a number of the most recent blog debacles that included Sony and Walmart. I had written several articles on Sony’s mess as well as the blogosphere has done a more than adequate job on giving their opinions and thoughts on these matters. We all know what they did with these blogs, but I was interested in exploring a different area and that is why did they do it?

After thinking about it this weekend in detail, I came to really one realistic conclusion on why a major company with a major advertising agency would post a flog or a fake blog. Simply put, it is a question about control. By launching a flog, it gave these companies and their agencies the appearance that they could retain control over the blog and make it say what they wanted it to say.

Based on conversations with a number of my larger clients as well as discussions with other people in the industry, I feel that this is going to be a major stumbling block for larger corporations to embrace Web 2.0 mentality. Since the beginning of advertising, marketers have always been in control. The commercial they create, the ad they build, always said what they want and how they wanted it said. Though today, this is of course not the case.

I thought I would make this easy on everyone and just state the obvious; marketers, you are not in control. You’ve lost it and odds are it will not be coming back anytime soon. So either you can embrace this and jump headfirst into the Terrordome or you can continue to sputter around the edges accomplishing very little. The market is in control in every facet and in every medium, even your old faithful marketing programs like television is now not under your control. How? Well, I would say that first off, users have the power to fast forward your commercials using their DVR and Tivo’s. But even more importantly, they have control to respond to an ad of yours in several different ways; blog posts, video responses, online petitions, etc. And if done well, their messages could get in front of more eyes than your ad every could no matter what your marketing budget was.

We all understand that it is a scary proposition to create something and then allow it to be taken and possibly transformed into something else by the masses. It is an absolute challenge for any one of us in the marketing industry. In the very near future, we will see certain brands embracing the new world order and flourishing while other brands being rigid and unwilling to change and continuing to fail miserably and lose market share.

Technorati Tags: flog, fake blog, control, Web 2.0

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