New Media Raging Dragon

As I write this, Dr Pepper’s Raging Cow blog marketing project is number one with a bullet on Blogdex, so chances are you’ve already read about it somewhere.

If not, excellent background can be found here, where Filchyboy/Chronotope masterfully deconstructs the entire campaign, including an interview with Todd Copilevitz, the marketer who created the campaign.
It seems to me that it’s not really the use of the blog format for marketing that’s upsetting everyone. The real sin of the Raging Cow blog is that they’re buying link influence (even though the price – t-shirts and other merchandise – is relatively small).
The collective personality of the blogosphere lends itself to bottom-up marketing - when bloggers start a conversation about a product because they like it, and that conversation leads to more publicity and higher sales for a product. Top-down marketing, when corporations orchestrate a conversation in the blogosphere about their product, is no real conversation at all. Hence, for many bloggers, that's evil. Bottom-up = good.
· Top-down = bad [Corante]