Just read on Adrants about a new double dose of fake blogs, this time for McDonalds. As one reader points out, Edelman should be fired for this (even though they had nothing to do with this particular "campaign"....or did they?)
Even though there was a press release, it appears that there was still insufficient disclosure on the blog, 4Railroads.
To be sure, 4Railroads is quite harmless. It's not like it is being faked by a 10 year old 200-pound girl who insists that her childhood obesity is completely genetic and not influenced by the Big Macs she gorges down every day.
In fact, from a narrative standpoint it is actually quite cute...the "online journal/diary" of a possessed consumer, intent on winning McDonalds Monopoly Game. I get it.
So what's the problem?
The problem is less the lack of transparency (I am torn between jumping on a holier-than-though puritanical binge, which more often than not leads straight to the gates of hypocrisy...can you say Edelman?...and demanding equal low or high standards for all media on the disclosure stakes before I go nutso on a nascent one e.g. product placement on television) and more plain pathos.
It's just kind of harmless really. And by harmless I mean sad and pathetic.
There are no comments. No life. No nothing.
I guess the real questions from my perspective are two-fold:
1) Surely McDonalds could be investing better in blogs and really reaping the full power of conversation, dialogue, consumer generated content and networking? Is the best they can do...and if so, perhaps they should be handing over the reigns to people that know what they're doing?
2) Going back to the first-person narrative account, surely long form content in some kind of episodic form would have been a better execution of this idea (for example)
This is one of those cases where "social media" and "new marketing" are not necessarily one and the same. The former is dominated by PR people and the latter by more advertising/marketing-oriented folk. I find myself somewhere inbetween, longing for the days of good old fashioned storytelling, with a sprinkle of authenticity and a drizzle of ROI to boot.
How about you?
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