Steve McQueen Wouldn’t Blog

I was born on March 24th.  A birthday I share with one of my favorite actors and all around coolest guys who ever lived, Steve McQueen.  However, as much as I hate to say it, if Steve McQueen were alive today, he would never blog.

Unfortunately, blogging is just  not cool.  Uttering the word blog alone may be enough to actually decrease a person’s coolness factor.  Those who are cool and blog (present company excluded, of course), do not enhance their coolness level by blogging.  The cool part of their personality is derived from some other aspect(s) of their life and then they blog about it rather than the other way around.

Often during conversations with my friends and family, who are very interesting,  educated and well traveled folks, the term blog or blogger will surface,  but unfortunately, not in a positive way.  I’ve been smirked at and dismissed on many occasions for just mentioning the idea.  While I would love to read the thoughts and musings these people would post they are basically just “too cool to blog.”  As a result, we blog consumers are being deprived of some vast and fascinating knowledge bases.

So, the dilemma for me is, “how do we convince these people to dive in and participate in the new media without risking perceived damage to their coolness factor?”

I think we could start with the term “blog” itself.  It sounds to me like the description of a side effect attributable to an upper respiratory infection.  The word “blogging” sounds like something you do with a group of buddies in a 4×4 after guzzling a six pack of Busch or a game played on an ice covered pond in a remote area of Canada involving some sort of long handled stick, a frozen badger liver, and six pack of Molson.

Why can’t we as PR and marketing experts exert some influence here and find a better moniker?  How did we get stuck with weblog, blogger, vlog, etc. anyway?  Why can’t the brilliant people who created Sea Bass out of Patagonian Toothfish come up with terminology that would making blogging cool, or at least less un-cool?

What would Mad Men do for a client struggling with finding a name for an online journal that may be accessed by anyone on the planet (with an internet connection) in which a person could write anything they wanted for all to see, at no cost?  Whatever hypothetical options the Mad Men might come up with, I have a strong suspicion blog would not be one of them.

For instance, as a kid I remember my parents purchasing one of the very first microwave ovens available in the US.  It was called an Amana Radar Range.  My father SFC George Adam Riggins (also a Steve McQueen fan) was quite proud of the “Radar Range” he was able to purchase for his family.  I’m not so sure he would have been nearly as proud of a simple microwave oven.  Though no radar was actually involved in the cooking of the food, the name Radar Range was  exciting and something a cool person could own and brag about to his or her neighbors.

The difference may be that in the golden age of Madison Avenue the folks inventing the technology didn’t get to name it.  If so, Amana technicians might have labeled their invention a “table top electromagnetic radiation cooking device” or somehow reduced the name to a goofy one syllable acronym.  However, in the hands of the advertising experts the unit became known as the Radar Range.  Amana’s parent company, Raytheon, accidentally discovered microwave cooking while conducting research on radar technology using magnetrons during WW II.

They knew that in order to sell it, they had to make it sound cooler, and they did.

Why can’t we do the same thing for bloggers?

In the case of Steve McQueen maybe we could call his blog an UOLBKWC or (updateable online list of butts to kick and women to ravish).

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