Know Your Web Trends: Marketing

October 19, 2009

The mystery of acquiring free beer eludes me. The weblog is highly touted as a vehicle of social media advertising: viral campaigns, word of mouth, mentionings. In the age of media, we live in the age of the ad. Google Adsense. Product placement. Facebook side sponsors. On Facebook, I was asked this morning to become a “friend” of Honda. I declined.

As highbrow culture turns its nose up to the ad, I welcome it. I would gladly hawk a beer or two in this space in exchange for a bomber and a fancy glass. I’m cheap that way. I’m an academic. Our income potential is limited. Once,  I made some decent beer money reviewing writing textbooks for publishers. That money dried up after I trashed just about every textbook sent to me to review. I’m not a fan of textbooks. I find them too simplistic. Almost every textbook is the same. They borrow and repeat each other’s useless strategies, strategies that I, a writer, would never use. Thus, I urge the authors away from the pedagogies that they repeat. Eventually, the publishers wanted a different response. They stopped sending me books to review. They had their own strategy to uphold (secure the market).

What is the beer blog, after all, if not a continuing advertisement? We drink; we publicize what we drink. The beer blog is the beer t-shirt designed for Web 2.0 logics. Instead of merely wearing our favorite drink, we write it. We write about it. We write about it in a way that others will want to drink the beer too. We market for the consumer market. The invisible hand (writing) is always at work. Such writing differs from textbook writing as each (or almost each) beer differs. Taste. Style. Delivery. A writing textbook would benefit from studying the craft beer industry.

And I have no problem with allowing my blog to be such an advertisement. Each week, I share my drinking and thoughts about drinking with the three of you reading my consumption. This photographic and textual sharing echoes what Mailer called “Advertisements for Myself.” I’m advertising my ego. Not the beer. You are reading more of me than of the beer. I want to invent a new type of review. No more “good” or “bad” taxonomies of consumption. Ours is the area of the folksonomy. I am a part of every definitional moment. My consumption about beer is really a narrative about me. New media is the age of the ego (and the alter ego).

And maybe that is why I never receive free beer in the mail to write about. Still, I urge the breweries to consider me, too. If you send me a box with a bomber and a fancy glass, I will advertise your beer through a review. Only, I will do it through the meaning that is me. The review is me. I will write about your beer by writing about myself.

Posted in advertisement, beer