Are you a Meatball Sundae?

For any business planning to start using web 2.0 tools, including blogging, I recommend a visit to Seth Godin or read his latest book "Meatball Sundae". Seth is one of the most experienced marketers who has worked with the web since the earliest days and a guy who knows what he's talking about.

Here's a short excerpt from the introduction:

What's a meatball sundae?

Maybe this is familiar. It is to me, anyway:

You go to a marketing meeting. There's a presentation from the new Internet marketing guy. He's brought a fancy (and expensive) blogging consultant with him. She starts talking about how blogs and the 'Web 2.0 social media infrastructure' are just waiting for your company to dive in. 'Try this stuff,' she seems to be saying, 'and the rest of your competitive/structural/profit issues will disappear.'"

Just grafting these new tools onto your organization is a recipe for disaster. The risk of cognitive dissonance by your customers is great. .

This is not really new, the same was true when websites first appeared on the scene about over a decade ago and most executives - after first ignoring the web - thought that having a site would be a panacea for all their marketing problems. After huge amounts wasted, we now know how wrong that assumption was.

The corporate culture and the brand have to be consistent to be believable and communications need to be consistent across all channels and touchpoints to be credible. There are no shortcuts to success.