It’s been highly public for at least a decade on message boards and the early blogs — think DemocraticUnderground, FreeRepublic, DailyKos, sports message boards, Kuro5hin, Slashdot, etc. etc. Sockpuppets, flame wars, and the lot have been around for years, and in internet years it is history.

Politicians have been paying attention for at least 5 years now and interacting. PR and marketing have pushed it further into the mainstream, but the archive is still there. These battles have all been fought before and if you were in the tech or political space it certainly could impact your reputation.

My point is exactly that Amanda Chapel and such characters are not new to the *Internet* but are new to the *PR* portion of the online world.

Lewis: You are the man. Real marketers don’t spend without true opportunity.

Liz: That is the most appropo comment I’ve read in a long time.

Tamera: This is highly public now, in a way that history has never seen.

I worked in the music industry for eight years and it makes me laugh out loud every time I hear a blogger referred to as a “rockstar” and to his readers as “fans”…what hubris! The only quality I can see that musicians and some (the most read) bloggers have is a high degree of self-absorption. And they both travel excessively, musicians on tour and bloggers on an endless series of tech and marketing conferences. They both live in for half of the year in hotels. But that is where any similarity ends.

This whole universe makes for a fascinating case study…before the pendulum swings in the other direction and people are too depressed or broke to want to talk about it all.

I agree with the prospect that we may be returning to a more balanced state of things. Everything–from overheated economies to overpriced housing markets–wants to reach an equilibrium.

Jen

Wonderful post and well-written. Thanks! Since I know marketing and communications best, let me address that one area. The vast majority of businesses have not rushed to embrace social media because they are well aware of the effects you describe using pendulum as metaphor. They await the balance of which you speak. Because the smart and experienced executives, marketers and communicators understand that conversation, information and knowledge are not shared via any single medium but instead require the integration of media. Some social media tools will (and already are to some extent) become on of business’s communications/conversation tools to create customer experiences that cannot be duplicated through the use of many of the tools currently most in use.

Whether we acknoledge it or not, bloggers often depend on the news gathering operations of large organizations for content. However, we’ve seen some changes with things like the Fowler/Huffington Post story. Will that be an exception or the rule?