Tom Hespos discuss another member of the Coalition of the Clueless:

One of the challenges I face in pitching Conversational Marketing to clients is the notion of finding bloggers who will take up the task of blogging about the client’s business. Paramount is lucky to find not one, but several. And what does it do? Piss one off to the point of getting two key ones (and probably more to follow) to boycott coverage of Paramount’s upcoming (Name of Movie Removed by SB) flick.

Its ironic that they didn’t learn from LOTR (including some of their mistakes).

When you engage a community, especially a leader in a community, you strengthen the ties between yourself and that tribe/culture/group/pod/whatever. Would it hurt to seed this guy with some behind the scenes stuff (photos, maybe a visit to the set, a frickin tshirt?). Those photos were going to get out there anyway. So instead of someone who thinks enough of your crap to write about it and drive FREE PR, you piss off a whole bunch of people.

I disagree with Tom that the marketers at Paramount dont get it. I have had, lots of clients who get-it. I bet the guys and gals at Paramount who are responsible for promoting this movie (which I will not mention to avoid giving them any google-love) got up this morning, saw the news and vomited all over their Wheaties.

I have a theory that every big organization (corporation, non-profit, federal agency) has a guy I call Oscar. Sometimes he is in legal, sometimes marketing, sometimes PR. Oscar is the guy who kills good ideas from the internal and agency folks. He is the guy who sends an email with one line “this wont work – lets go with what we know”. Oscar gets paid to make sure things happen, not innovate. Oscar is the champion of the status quo. He is dismissive of the ‘kids’ (referring to the 20-something to 80-somethings who blog, visit these sites, proudly call themselves fan-boys, etc). Oscar sucks.

Paramount (thanks to Oscar) is taking us for granted because, even if they shut him down, his audience will see the movie anyway.

Maybe even grab a bittorrent of it. 🙂

Exxxxccccceeeeleent

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