Sweet piece in yesterday’s NYTimes on unofficial brand blogs – fan blogs for products like Barq’s (It Tastes Good) & services like Netflix. (Hey, didn’t we ask a bit ago where the Blockbuster evangelist blog was?) Lots of chatter in this piece about blogs as really great learning channels — open focus groups that broadcast the good, bad & ugly about products & companies. These are also great brand rally points — e.g. the Vespa projects kicked off by the Micropersuasion team. This, however, was a stunner:

Most of them are written without the consent of the companies that own the brands; a spokesman for Coca-Cola, which owns Barq’s, had not heard of Mr. Marx’s blog. 

Say what? The dude has been running a Barq’s blog since ’04 (with an url like thebarqsman.com) and you, tasked with talking up Coke products, tell the paper of record you have never heard of such? Sounds like the Coca-Coca company could use some blog monitoring services. I have just the team for you.

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