Flog you! No, as good it feels saying it, flog is not a verb but a noun meaning “fake blog” (as in a sales or marketing gimmick site masquerading as a fan site or genuine consumer blog, and authored by a PR or marketing hack).
Perhaps the most famous flog is the disastrous Walmarting Across America hack job, written by two Walmart “fans” who drove across America in an RV blogging about the Walmarts they visited. While two people did in fact leap from Walmart to Walmart, they were paid very well to do so (and this was not disclosed in the blog). It was a PR stunt allegedly cooked-up by Walmart’s PR firm Edelman PR (see Wal-Mart's Jim and Laura: The Real Story in Business Week).
I personally would have chosen the Trailer Park Boys and been upfront in paying them. You can’t RV across America without some quality trailer park time and some good old Jerry Springer-inspired fun (I know they’re Canadian, but all Canadians love driving across the U.S. because we don’t have Jack-In-The-Box nor Carl’s Jr.).
Walmart isn’t the only one who’s done it (though they’ve been busted twice). There is a nauseatingly sick flog (and nauseatingly hilarious) for Tom Cruise: "I'm Tom Cruise, and I'm in Love." I laughed; I cried; I puked. Utterly exhausted, I took a nap.
The latest to get stung is Debbie Weil, who is popularly known as “the Mona Lisa of Blogging." Now I don’t know Weil, though we’ve spoken for some of the same conferences (and I'm sure she's a fine person), but she was recently called to task by the Enterprise 2.0 blog for her work establishing alliConnect. alliConnect is supposed to be a blog... a “Place to connect about weight loss and alli,” the new weight loss drug by GlaxoSmithKline.
Enterprise 2.0 claims however that alliConnect bans “personal anecdotes and negative comments” and “the few comments that are left are so obviously scripted and uninspiring.”
You mean the weight loss industry is not run by the sincere, cuddly, caring folks Kirsty Alley and Richard Simmons would have us believe?!?! Dammit, I’m never watching “Sweating To the Oldies” ever again. Except on holidays.
Enterprise 2.0 skewered Weil for her “dishonest, insincere attempt to cash in on the social media craze and that the parameters set for it doomed it to failure.”
Other bloggers have since piled on including another aficionado, Lee Hopkins, who responded to the Enterprise 2.0 article in saying, “The largest reason I got riled up over Ms Weil’s faux pax (and I’ve blogged about it a couple of times these last few days) was that she asked her un-named email list to hide the fact that they knew her. To me this is PR shilling of the worst order.”
Ouch.
The bottom line: if you lie, cheat or steal, you will be caught. In the highly scrutinized world of Web 2.0, you likely will be caught very quickly. If you’re going to blog, be brutally honest about the purpose, and brutally honest and forthright in your writing.
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Toby Ward is a consultant, writer and speaker and did not actually puke when he read the Tom Cruise blog. There were a few ‘dry heaves’ and a tear, but no chunks were projected. He wrote this himself and was not paid to write this column nor promote any of the names, companies or individuals involved. He does not know the Trailer Park Boys, but would like to. For more flogs, visit Fake-Blogs.com.
