Teemu Arina :: Blog :: Fake blog award: millanblogi.fi

http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Tarina/~3/175068697/

This had to happen. Fake blogs have landed to Finland. Millan blogi is the worst case I have seen so far and it has FAKE written all over it with invisible ink. I can almost imagine how the marketing department of PICNIC (a cafe francise) and some clueless ad agency got together to envision a new format to reach their 20-30 year old demographic:

Café PICNIC:
Our marketing is not effective enough. We are not reaching the 20-30 year olds through traditional means. We have heard that 20-30 year olds use the web a lot and find their news online.

Clueless ad-agency:
We have a revolutionary idea: lets use the web as a medium and blogs as a platform to create an effective marketing campaign!

Café PICNIC:
Hooray! How come we didn’t come up with that ourselves, it’s so obvious! Thank you, thank you, thank you… Let’s get right down to details…

Clueless ad-agency:
Hold on, we will send you an exp…eerr innovative offer with all the details by monday. We look forward to work with you on the best viral campaign the world has seen so far!

The end result is a blog, run by an imaginary 25 year old Milla, an easy going woman living in a buzzling city. She is once in a while dropping by at Café PICNIC for a sandwitch or two to fatten the bottom line of the company. She has a blog and you can get addicted to her stories by following her for months. That’s where the whole plan starts to go horribly wrong. A huge marketing budget with high production values meets authentic low-cost social media… a combination that has no taste, nor future.

Let me go through a few of the disgraceful mistakes in this “blog”: 

• On the front page you can’t say right away if the site is written by some girl called Milla, or just a cheesy commercial crafted by PICNIC: this is unforgivingly misguiding for readers
• The front page features 9 fake pictures taken by professional photographers with pro-cameras. The photos already scream “fake” right at you
  
• A commercial starts to play without any intervention right on the front page to scare you to death
  
• Technically this site misuses the whole concept of a blog:

• There is no permalink to refer to each blog post separately
• There is no RSS feed to subscribe to new posts
  
• There is no commenting feature, the site is talking right-at-you rather than with you
• There is no “About Milla” page telling who she is, who she represents, what she will write about and how to contact her

The content is written in first person but the whole story is childish, cheesy and hard to believe. The story and language of Milla looks so crafted. It shines through it’s not written by a real person called Milla, but some cheap part-time trainee at the clueless ad-agency

The posts appear in a strict schedule every monday (sometimes tuesday because the trainee was lazy), drifting the story totally out of context

The site is nothing but authentic. It is a shame for the whole finnish blogging community that sites like this exist with the name “blog” written on it. Some companies do it right, some listen to ad-agencies that don’t know what the hell they are doing. For a better example, see blogger Veloena sponsored by Suomen Kuvalehti, she is doing a great job and probably costs less than this shameful campaign.

I feel sorry for the owners of this campaign. In fact I feel so sorry that I volunteer to lend my copy of “Naked Conversations” (or give a signed copy of the translation “Blogit ja bisnes” with my foreword when it comes out) and provide FREE consultation for the creators of this nonsense to educate them what went wrong and how to fix it with a fraction of the original budget. If you know anyone responsible for this, please ask them to contact me.