I was on a brief jog around the internet this morning, and ran across a service called Weblogs Work — apparently they are a weblog hosting/consulting company. My first impressions aren’t very good, considering it’s borked in my main browser (Safari) and the sidebar looks strangely similar to Odeo.com, but first impressions aren’t everything. Yeah, they are. Anyway.
The pricing page has a few different levels of service, starting from a beginning “we start it and host it” to the bigtime “we start it, host it, and tell you fancy shit about the weblog world to make it sound like you’re spending money wisely.” Here are some things that bother me about the pricing schemes:
- They turned the word “blog” into a marketing device by capitalizing it wherever it’s used. Go to the other pages on that site, and you’ll see the same thing. Do us a favor and stop trying to sound more self-important by using BLOG®©™ for the sole purpose of making your services sound more flashy.
- They don’t really care about design. I hate when a “weblog consulting firm” puts out cookie-cutter, template-inspired weblog designs and then slaps the company logo at the top and calls it “branded.” I want designers designing my website, not marketing or business people.
- Under “Corporate BLOG” *cringe* they list this as something they do: Consultation period to establish stakeholder criteria and build internal concensus [sic]. Consensus about what? This is probably the worst line of marketing mumbo jumbo I’ve ever heard. Well it was, until I read the rest of the “Corporate BLOG” features. Every single one sounds like they’re just trying to milk money from people who have no idea what RSS or weblogs are.
I don’t normally go off like this, but my professional pet peeve is when companies make weblogs out to be magical silver bullets that will automatically make you more money and appear cooler to your customers. When people who don’t “get” weblogs try to bill them as huge marketing ploys, this happens. Weblogs are a means to make your company more honest and transparent, and if you fake it, then readers will call bullshit on you and let you hear it.
Sorry Weblogs Work, I won’t be shelling out $2,500 a month for you to do any “pro-active coordination of weblog with internal corporate activities” or give me “ongoing monitoring of key issues within blogosphere including ‘early warning’” because I don’t even know what you’re talking about.
