• by Wendy Davis  @wendyndavis, July 13, 2005

CHICAGO -- Marketers at Ad:Tech Tuesday indicated a deep ambivalence towards blogs, saying that their companies urgently want a blog presence but, at the same time, fear the consequences of letting consumers freely express their opinions.

Steve Pinetti, senior vice president of marketing at Kimpton Hotels, expressed a sentiment seemingly shared by many when he told the audience that, "the blog, as a form of word of mouth marketing, is something we're very, very focused on, and we're doing our homework right now."

Yet, he added, with 60 percent of the hotels' business coming from word of mouth referrals, unflattering comments can be devastating. When consumers start bad-mouthing his hotels on the Web, he doesn't respond well. "I have a heart attack," he said during a panel discussion on the online marketing issues that most concern chief marketing officers.

Catherine Muriel, chief marketing officer of E-Loan, countered that the free publicity conferred by bloggers outweighs any potential negative comments. "If you have a heart attack every time someone writes something that's not nice about you, you're going to be ... spending a lot of time at the cardiologist," she said.

That tension between, on one hand, wanting to increase visibility and consumer engagement, and, on the other, fearing bad publicity, appeared repeatedly at Ad:Tech Tuesday.

Speakers agreed that many companies want a presence in the blogosphere. For one thing, blogs tend to rise to the top of search results. Shawn Gold, president of Weblogs Inc., quipped that the word "blog" stands for "better listings on Google."

Blogs also are seen as the wave of the future -- much the same as the Internet itself several years ago. "People look at blogs today and they say... I have to be in this space. How do I do it?" said Steve Curtin, vice president of e-marketing and search at Digital Grit, at a panel discussion on what blogs teach about marketing. But, while businesses might think they want blogs, some simply aren't thick-skinned enough to deal with the fallout. "If you're taking every negative comment down as soon as they go up, no one's going to go to [the blog]," said David Rubin, senior brand development manager for Axe at Unilever.

Sprint Business Services' online marketing manager Makaela Meadows added that her company's blog initially was met with fierce resistance. "There's legal concerns, human resources concerns, corporate communications concerns," she said. "You name it. It runs the gamut."

At Sprint, the public relations and branding departments were particularly wary of consumer complaints, Meadows said. "One of their largest fears was, 'What if someone says something bad? What are we going to do?'"

Despite such concerns, some companies have started corporate blogs - and allow unflattering comments to go live on the site. Unilever, for instance, launched Axe deodorant with a corporate blog featuring the dating adventures of two real-life comics, known as Evan and Gareth. The blog, which showed their exploits reality-TV style, drew more than 1 million visitors, said Rubin, senior brand development manager for Axe at Unilever. "Some say good things, some say bad things," Rubin said. "We keep it all up there, warts and all."

Still, it's not clear that the Evan and Gareth project involved a huge risk on Unilever's part, because the blog wasn't about the product. Weblogs President Shawn Gold, speaking at a separate panel, said that a blog devoted to "trying to pick up girls," doesn't leave Unilever all that vulnerable to consumer comments about Axe deodorant's strengths and weaknesses.