Meet Stan, the everyman, who'll try to sell you on Vivisimo Velocity enterprise search software.  Stan stars in videos, explaining the wonders of enterprise search, writes a blog, can be friended on Facebook, and followed on Twitter.

While I appreciate attempts at explaining what enterprise search is, or can do, I'm not sure Stan is going to help. It may just be me, but when I hear "Meet Stan", I'm expecting Eminem ("Meet Stan. After meeting a young girl at a rave party, things start getting hot and heavy in an upstairs bedroom"). That must be a different Stan, though; in Vivisimo's world, all men wear mustaches. (And you recognize "hot women," like Anne, because, well... they have no facial hair.)

So interestingly, there isn't really a lesson here about enterprise search.  Rather, this is an example of how hard it is to use social software for marketing purposes. Vivisimo, for one, seems to have confused "viral" with "cheesey."

Stan does reply to Twitter comments, but that has mostly taught me he likes microbreweries. It's not the kind of interactive marketing that will engage an audience; you will need to take the people you're addressing a bit more seriously. Stan is talking to us -- rather than talking with us.

On the upside, at least Stan doesn't speak in Comic Sans. But if you're thinking of interactive marketing, or using social software to reach your customers, you should probably think more about what content would attract visitors, and how you're going to interact with them, rather than having an agency design something that ends up as a rather static brochure avatar.