dis-corporation

Every good blogger is involved in marketing. If you ignore scale, all the things that apply to a corporate entity are can be said for a single live human, with two exceptions:

• We're mortal
• We're moral

A blog necessarily involves marketing. You're making a trade. You're offering your words of wisdom, photos, poems, songs, etc... in trade for attention of your readership. The main distinction between a web log and the corporate voice is one of refinement. If you spend way too much time working on getting things just perfect, you remove all of the gritty quality that makes something feel real.

We've been overloaded with the corporate voice for at least 100 years. I've read on the internet about the first real PR campaign used to sell our entry into WWI. They even wrote a book about it called "How we advertised America". We know this voice is toxic, and we've evolved a highly tuned reflex to to filter it out. Its only the inperfections, and the personal quirks that are left in blogging that let us know we're interacting with a person.

I'm trying to find my goals, for my life, and for this and my bitgrid blog. I worry about a lot of things, always mindful of overdoing the polishing... but always finding something I could have said a little better in retrospect. Its a balancing act, but I think I'm improving. I tend to re-write things once now, then let them go. A corporation, on the other hand, would put it back into the polish, and keep lapping.

I suspect that sooner or later, the clumsy astrotufing that has been tried by corporations will become slicker, as they become more responsive to feedback. This of course, is exactly what it takes to turn marketing into a conversation, and shows they've finally gotten on the cluetrain. Is it really astroturfing at that point?

Well, enough rambling, back to work.

--Mike--