March 15, 2003
A little group pressure please?
So let's this straight, a company is pretending to make a weblog. And other people are making light of if on their weblogs. So of course the company wants to sue them to shut them up.
Wake up, corporate drones, if you want to have your people weblog it's one thing. If you want to pretend you're doing it just to pimp some more sneakers then you've gotta expect to get some grief for it.
Go now, read ClueTrain. Then go pick up Gonzo Marketing.
The public relations pros will tell you how expensive it is to recover from bad PR. What's this gonna cost? Not all PR is good PR when the web has an infinite and searchable memory.
The amazing thing about the web is people (real people) can find the truth. Instead of being misled by media flaks, the people can just search for it. This must be terrifying to some of the marketing folks out there.
Guess what? You're going to have to actually work to sell us those products. We're not just gonna sit here anymore and be all impressed by who you get to shill them for you. If they're shitty shoes and you treat the factory workers like crap AND you fake it on a weblog guess what? We won't buy your stuff. Please, we're not that stupid. AND we tell our friends.
Don't piss on us, tell us it's raining AND try to then turn around to try and sell us umbrellas. We outnumber you and we're delighted to expose your hypocrisy. We're the public, FEAR lying to us.
Put the effort instead into actually making a product that works, at prices we want to pay using management styles we can support.
It's called work for a reason folks.
