Ginny from the Blog

Now that I’m among the thousands of people who get to creep down Interstate 40 on the commute home from RTP, I have few things to look forward to other than a compelling story on NPR or low-flying planes near RDU.

So when something like The LEGO Experience Tour truck passes me on the Interstate, believe me I take notice.

When the semi truck crept passed me today, my mundane drive was suddenly filled with colorful LEGO pirates, spacemen and every character in between. As the truck passed, my mouth dropped. I was on the phone with my boyfriend and told him I had to go. I had to get a picture of what I was seeing. My geek friends wouldn’t believe it without a photo. There on the back of the truck was the URL for “The LEGO Experience Tour” and it was a Blogger address. Yep, plastered on the rear of the LEGO semi was thelegoexperiencetour.blogspot.com.

Seriously, LEGO? Seriously? You couldn’t drop ten bucks and buy thelegoexperiencetour.com and set up a redirect to your Blogger site? Didn’t someone at LEGO see that long ass blogspot URL and raise a red flag? I mean certainly the graphic designer responsible for designing the semi trailer thought of it and passed along the suggestion, right?

And please don’t take offense to this if you have a Blogger domain of your own. That’s fine. I’m not picking on you.

But LEGO is a 51-year-old brand with sales netting $825.4 million in the first half of 2009. Certainly, LEGO can afford to buy a domain, pay for hosting and customize a blog template to communicate a message to the millions of people who see the semi as it tours the country. The blog itself, actually isn’t that bad. It’s clearly written by the lucky 20-somethings who get to pimp LEGOs around the country. It’s raw, it’s simple and it has cute pictures. But it only has 2,161 visitors as of this writing (according to the visitor counter in the sidebar).

LEGO doesn’t even hold its own Twitter domain. @LEGO belongs to a self-described art nerd in San Francisco who has 62 followers. (Flickr fail whale photo from @tveskov).

Ex-LEGO employee Jack McKee did make major headway for the company during his tenure. He helped integrate LEGO into existing forums and websites where grown-up LEGO fans were already sharing building tips, discussing their love for the plastic toys and more. You can watch McKee discuss his efforts in a presentation here. To hear him tell it, McKee made big breakthroughs in convincing the corporation to lighten up and engage its fans instead of trying to sue them. Cheers to that. But McKee has since moved on, and now LEGO’s online strategy seems lost.

Maybe LEGO doesn’t need to engage its customers in mainstream social media outlets. Maybe the company wouldn’t make a dime from encouraging folks to tweet pictures of their latest LEGO creation. Maybe the LEGO Experience Tour will be just as successful with free web hosting and a generic blog layout. But it sure seems like there’s a helluva lot of potential for a social media consultancy to help the longtime brand engage even more customers online. If not for business, then at least for the fun of it.

BTW, you can see the LEGO Tour semi truck for yourself at the N.C. State Fair, which is hosting the tour from Thursday through Sunday. In the meantime,  thelegoexperiencetour.com was purchased tonight, and not by LEGO.