And now, the American Marketing Association's version of "missing the point"

Just read Monday's sizzlin' email notification on the next smokin, way-bleeding-edgy...

AMA Hot Topic Series
Blogs: Marketing Beyond the Website

New York, NY - January 21
Chicago, IL - February 18

Overview

Weblogs, commonly know as blogs, are rapidly gaining momentum and acceptance as credible marketing strategies. Companies are using blogs as customer relationship tools, branding reinforcement, product ideology testing and for creating public relations buzz. However, as blogs enter the mainstream business world, marketers are faced with how to impose a formal structure on blogs including format/strategy, metrics/goals and ROI. If blogging is a legitimate strategy for your company, do you know how to leverage this new media to complement your existing online and offline marketing strategies? What will success mean to your organization?

Blogs: Marketing Beyond the Website is an important one-day workshop designed to help marketers answer these questions and more. Industry leaders will share their experiences with you on what makes a successful blog. You'll leave with a wealth of information and specific techniques that will help you cross the chasm in incorporating this innovative internet-based strategy into your organization's marketing plan.

Who should attend? [blah-yadda-blah-blah-blah...]

Where do you begin? Hey, this is "marketing" - with bullets, of course!

• 3 words into the overview and we get a typo. (Okay, they get the vernacular. Next...)

• Blogs are a channel, a tactic, not a strategy. Kinda like a blank VHS tape is not content, creativity or a concept whereas "The Princess Bride" is. Now, what subversive urge blogging serves, one with huge implications for mature industries and their "strategies"....well, now there's a workshop and a half.

• "how to impose a formal structure on blogs including format/strategy, metrics/goals and ROI"

Oyy.

Impose. Formal. Structure. Metrics. ROI.

If you have Comcast On-Demand, check out The History Channel's "The Internet." It drags out Metcalfe, Vint Cerf and all the Bolt, Beranek & Newman and Arpanet heroes and pioneers for a chat. You get the challenge and story of packeting information and the miraculous, anarchic-seeming routing structure that made the original 4-computer ARPAnet actually work: Detail on "To?" Detail on "From?" And, then, "Off you go. Find your way, look for bridges, call us when you get there in one piece." Trust in electrons the same way an ant colony trusts the referential instincts of its far-ranging members. One quote stuck with me, from Dr. Robert Kahn, co-creator of TCP/IP. To paraphrase:

"That's the thing about the most monumental and meaningful changes: nobody's officially "in-charge."

Deafness to tone. The illusion of control. The semblance of feeling. The kabuki of powerpoint. The dragon of ROI. Versus the self-organizing nature of useful, meaningful, sustainable things. Versus the self-organizing nature of, well, of our nature.

Wax on, wax off, AMA.