Wax Tadpoles

It is said that when CocaCola entered the mainland Chinese market, some of the first literal translations of the brandname into Mandarin came out "bite the wax tadpole". Of course, Coke marketing got a grip on the situation pretty quickly.

Blogs.technet.com is almost 6 months old, and I am wondering how blogging and branding play together? In some ways, blogging seems to embody the ultimate narrow-casting and brand-loyalty phenomena. It seems that the majority of blog readers (like me) read the bloggers that appeal to them, for totally individual reasons.

On the other hand, all corporate bloggers seem to start out with a switching cost that is tied to the mother corp's brand. And then there is the "blog smart" versus "don't interact with corp PR" debate.

Lastly, from the verbatims and metics we gather so far, it seems that IT Pro blog writers and readers are somewhat unique - different in significant ways from dev bog writers and readers, for example.

What do you think? Leave comments.