Christian Toto reached out to me last week wanting to speak to me as a blogger about Julie & Julia, a movie I am going to take my mum to this week (she is chomping at the bit to see this film). He wanted to ask me how Hollywood has dealt with blogs and bloggers in the past and what we bloggers though of the portrayals.  We chatted and this my excerpt of the article, Hollywood Enters the Blogosphere, which is awesome (how do these folks find me, how awesome is this?)

Chris Abraham, president and COO of the social media marketing firm Abraham Harrison in D.C., points to an even earlier film to showcase the struggles directors have in visualizing the world of computers.

The 1983 film War Games actively relied on computers to tell the story of a teen trying to prevent thermonuclear war.

“They didn’t understand how transparent the Internet was. Every time they tried to convey something, they’d voice over their own typing,“ Abraham says.

By comparison, the using of blogging as a plot point makes the director’s job a little easier.

“Many blogs are a ship’s log of what’s happening it the real world,” Abraham says. “It’s easier to convey a blogger’s story than a writer’s story.”

Abraham, who also blogs, says the very act of blogging can be a personal affair. Many bloggers work alone, late at night or perhaps in a café, which makes capturing them at the keyboard even tougher for a film director.

In a way, it’s not too different than trying to capture a traditional writer’s work on screen. It typically involves a hunched over figure pounding away at a typewriter, occasionally crumpling up a sheet of paper and hurling it toward the nearest garbage can.

He says it’s almost impossible to avoid cliched images like the typewriter In movies like Adaptation.”

Had Julie & Julia been set in 2009, the blog home page itself might have supplied some effective visuals.

Today’s “foodie” blogs are high tech and feature beautiful photographs utilizing narrow depths of field to make the meals pop off the screen, he says.

I didn’t get this paragraph to Mr. Toto in time before the article needed to be files, but here’s what I wrote, for what it’s worth:

The only thing I can really think of is that Sex and the City is the closest thing to an effective portrayal of “blogging,” even though she was writing a column.  Also, David Duchovny is an author/novelist (in Californication) who is relegated to blogging for his ex-girlfriends/baby mamma’s new fiance who runs the company he’s blogging for – -they never show him blogging but they talk about it and there’s talk about it and his fans reference the blog and it is a big to-do, despite the fact that he bloody resents it and considers it without artistic merit.

However, my guru, Mr. Scott Burns, told me that the best portrayal of blogging is on Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog, “basically NPH (Neal Patrick Harris) blogs by reciting his post straight to the camera (as if it was the computer screen), it’s great. So, there you go — sounds like the best way to me, too!

Via Marketing Conversation

I’ve been having a running conversation with Chris Kieff about the ideas of authenticity, transparency, and flogging. We agree on most things, disagree on some others.

I have a problem with something he says. Not because I disagree, but because I think he may, in the end, be correct. And there’s not much we can do about it.

Until last week, he was one of the purists. Someone who would be upset at flogging and want to point it out. Then he had a conversation with his favorite focus group. It was a focus group of one. His wife.

A couple of years ago I was talking to a friend of mine. She’s the head of a decent sized ad/PR agency here in the DC area. She had someone that had been doing SEO work for her for just a short period move away. It was more project work and he’d no longer be avialble. Now no one else at the agency knew SEO or even SEM.

That’s typical of this area. So I mentioned to her that she had a great opportunity to hire someone to provide the service as it is becoming increasingly important in the marketing world. Her agency would stand out.

I accidentally clicked on an expandable banner while I was reading my email on Yahoo! and went to DoMoreForPets.com.  It’s got two overall versions.  One for dogs and one for cats.

I love cats, but I’m a devoted dog over.  So I figured I’d check it out.  It’s sponsored by Purina ProPlan

Overall, I like the way it’s done.  The masthead ad is a bit too big, and you can’t register for it because you’re already signed in via email.  So you can’t “join” it.  Ergo, Purina is missing out an opportunity to develop a direct relationship with those that get involved with it.

I’m in the process of pitching a potential client. From what I see, if this works out, it will be an excellent opportunity. They’re a marketing service provider that offers the traditional services to their client base. The methods they use are still very much needed, they aren’t out of date, and they won’t be out of date any time soon. But in this era of digital marketing, those methodologies clearly aren’t enough. Not when the users of their clients products are more likely to look online for those very products.

I woke up to an amazing article written by Jonathan Trenn, The fallacy of community, and I responded in a comment to a pretty passionate article and a passionate comment string, and here’s what I wrote — and I have expanded the argument below, so it is an expansion:

I am really proud of the work we at Abraham Harrison are doing on behalf of Jerry White's new book, I Will Not Be Broken: Five Steps to Overcoming a Life Crisis, and new organization, SurvivorCorps. So excited am I that we really created a gorgeous Social Media News Release (SMNR) for the project, for both I Will Not Be Broken and SurvivorCorps -- and I wrote about it over on Marketing Conversation. Via Chris Abraham - Because the Medium is the Message

I have been spending lots of time these last few days trying to track my experiences in Berlin thus far using my Blackberry, connected to Twitter via Google Talk IM, because all my of my friends want me to journal my first experiences. So, you can read about my experience in reverse-chronological order below of stalk me real-time over at http://twitter.com/chrisabraham

Blogging about your company is an important way to engage in the conversation surrounding your brand. You should seriously consider producing a separate corporate blog that would focus on exposing the cast and crew behind who, what, when, and where to go regarding your company.

Doing online advocacy requires commitment, inclusion, attachment, and perseverance. If you participate online, you had better not be a one-night-stand. Be sure to engage in the long term conversation and always be available to answer questions.

While exploring the blog search engines for relevant company-related content, take note of particularly friendly blogs and bloggers. Also take note of any blog and bloggers who are actively embedding Your Company code into their blogs.

The internet is neither a place nor a One cannot broadcast to the internet and there is very little correlation between throwing money at advertising and building brand equity.

While exploring the blog search engines for relevant company-related content, take note of particularly friendly blogs and bloggers. Also take note of any blog and bloggers who are actively embedding your company code into their blogs.

Once a list of friendly and like-minded bloggers has been assembled, organize them in an Outlook Contacts folder.

Don’t hesitate to reach out to individual bloggers and friendlies informally in order to build a connection and a conversation. It is important to make sure any formal outreach is carefully considered before moving forward.

A powerful technique for building ommunity on blogs is to find a compelling item about your industry, products, and services, then search for blogs that are already talking about it on Technorati.

It is much easier to message on blogs that are already having friendly conversation.