Just when I thought I would have nothing of interest to blog on, (I am working on stuff, but nothing I can write about), I somehow come across Completely Pointless Movie Reviews which included a review about Utah Opera’s Romeo and Juliet.
Apparently, in an attempt to reach a younger audience, they asked Juliet to blog about how much she loves Romeo, how much she doesn’t want to marry Paris. The attempt to write like a teenager isn’t authentic enough to fool anyone I think. And the top 5 reasons to see the show that they emailed the Completely Pointless reviewer are pretty weak.
But I gotta think that it was probably the best attempt anyone had made to make a younger audience aware of the opera than had been made in the recent past. Though I suspect that plenty of young people would just see it as another example of adults trying to be cool and completely failing. Don’t know if they will make any converts out of good intentions.
Just today I saw a blog entry about an upcoming conference that is going to teach businesses to exploit blogging. The author is pretty upset that businesses are trying to co-opt blogging for their own purposes and cites a McDonald’s attempt that backfired.
Elisa at Worker Bee’s Blog touched upon a similar situationabout six months ago in relation to the arts. (Granted, it was in relation to one of my entries, but she deals with some segments of the issue better than I had.)
You gotta be careful about trying to harvest blogging for your own purposes because there are a lot of eyes watching and anything that smacks of insincerity, once detected, is loathed.