GM discovers the corporate marketing blog
According to this New York Times story (registration required), corporate consumer marketing/advertising blogs are being seen increasingly...and while it makes sense that a brand like Nike would be using blogs to reach their market, even the less hip General Motors has gotten into the act:
Blogs are known for their brutal honesty, independence of spirit and genuine emotional conviction. None of these attributes play much of a role in corporate advertising, of course, but they are values that corporate advertisers strive to imitate -- and, where possible, co-opt.
...The G.M. blog, which Wiley describes as a cautious experiment, focuses on the 50th anniversary of the G.M. small-block V-8 engine -- a touchstone for hot-rod enthusiasts. Entries feature some legendary small-block-powered sports cars of the past and are sprinkled with posts from G.M. engineers touting horsepower and torque levels. Readers chime in with their own small-block stories and post questions on the future of small-block technology. It's clearly blogging by car geeks, for car geeks. But it turns out that geek to geek, informal and honest, is a pretty good model for the blogo ad.
From a marketing perspective, blogs make perfect sense. They are cheap to produce, immersive and interactive. It's easy to measure their readership and response rates. For small companies, blogs are a quick and dirty promotional tool that cuts out the middleman; for big companies, blogs are a tool of humanization -- an informal, chatty, down-to-earth voice amid the din of bland corporate-speak.