I still have great faith that blogging, podcasting, photocasting and in general personal broadcasting networks can make it out of the garage this year and into true value adding corporate strategies, but you only have to look at Coke’s push for yet another variation of what has been it’s black liquid gold to realise it can all go to hell in a hand basket pretty rapidly.

I like I am sure anyone else who hung around the city over Christmas (it’s the best time to be in the city because everyone else is somewhere else) found it hard to avoid Coke’s teaser outdoor stuff for Coke Zero. It was all those black posters going on about the Zero Movement – yep I have to say I was zero curious – but then in terms of the success of the campaign I wasn’t so curious as to write down URL and check out the site to see what it was all about.

We wrote a possibly slightly unkind article in B&T about the Zero launch (A Big Fat Zero?, January 20, 2006) but more interesting is the Coke Zero backlash being driven by bloggers. I was alerted to it by a mate in the biz who has been following the story.

Not a small number of bloggers have hit out at the “Zero movement” online marketing work as a cynical marketing ploy abusing the high level communication and trust established between bloggers and the communities that gather around them.

There are some wonderful aspects to an age where every consumer has a voice if they have access to blogger.com or typepad but if you are big company like Coke trying desperately to be down with the kids, then a site like The Zero Movement Sucks isn’t one of them. This blog not only features lots of unflattering comments about the whole Zero Movement marketing push, but now includes merchandising like t-shirts which claim “I joined the zero movement and all I got was this lousy brain tumour”.

Then there’s the wags who hijacked the URL thezeromovement.org, this one’s really nasty, it even takes on the black and red look and feel of the real site.

To marketers it no doubt all seems a little harsh on the side of the detractors, but as I have said before in this space, the new comms tools are in the hands of the consumers, if you want to play with them you need to do so cautiously or it could backfire in a massive way.

For Coke's response to the backlash see this week's B&T where John Wardley Coke's division marketing director for Asia Pacific explains the strategy.