raving lunacy - oxymorons for the 21st century

Recycle, Reuse, Reduce. Noble stirring words for a planet on the brink of the latest castastrophe. And fodder for PR sausage machines.

“now made with 100% post-consumer recycled HDPE.
HDPE is non-toxic and Bisphenol A and Phthalate free.”

I don’t know which annoys me more, the quacking of companies who offer you green guilt free products, or the folks who describe them.

Fast food has a long and expensive history in marketing. They also provide some of the dumbest moments in marketing.
Here is one.

Ya gotta wonder who the genius was who thought this was a good idea, and who the morons were that signed off on this.

Here are some interesting things to show up on the internet lately.
VRM
Is VRM a ‘phenomenon’? Alan Mitchell looks at VRM from a different perspective. Still missing the point that for VRM to succeed requires us to make companies beg for information after a full disclosure. The default position is that they are stealing it with every click and visit.

WordPress
WordPress Tips + Things You Can Do After Installing Wordpress Interesting things to do if you are running WordPress yourself.

Social Media
The Media & Social Media: Follow Up With Cincinnati Enquirer A story selling the Social Media/PR Rebranding/User Generated Content model to the Social Media thermos bottle. It is worth the read as there are a large quantity of numbers tied to this post. It should also be noted that as the Social Media Missionaries show up at your door, you should probably think about how much work this is.

Kindle.
the Amazon electronic book continues to elicit reviews. Shelley Powers has an Interesting look at her’s and pricing.
Grumbles in Kindletown

From BL Ochman comes this;
Don’t whine about how expensive it is to hire humans to answer customer emails. If it weren’t for customers, you wouldn’t need to come to work.
Source: BL Ochman

Having spent 10 years building simple websites for small businesses like auto junkyards, I can tell you that the successful ones answer their emails as soon as possible. I have mentioned this before, like in the last century.

The PR flacks/marketing gurus and the Social Media Cheerleaders forget this. Most folks don’t want discussions, they want to swap money for stuff.

Peer to Peer
A lot of companies never got the memo that the Internet is a Peer to Peer medium, meaning that anybody with a keyboard, internet access, and a bad attitude has just as much power as a multi million dollar, multi national organization out here. Our cost to publish is less than a round of Golf, and is a hell of a lot faster. Even News organizations haven’t figured out that the 24 hour news cycle has been replaced by the 24 second news cycle.
Strictly Commercial
How and what we buy today, is not the result of multi million dollar ad campaigns, or clown suit marketing on street corners, but is more likely to be decided by somebody on the web, who posts their opinions about stuff they bought. Just see what happened to the Kryptonite Lock folks.

5 Monkeys
Ken Camp has re posted a bit he did back in 05 about Institutional Memory. It illustrates very well the problem of conditioning and ‘We do it this way because we’ve “always done it this way.” ‘, sinkhole of current commercial presentation on the web. This sinkhole is lined with the desperate PR Firms, clutching at the carcass of diminishing ad budgets, re branding themselves as Social Media Life Coaches, Conversational Marketing Guru’s and my personal Favorite, the Social Media Release.

Asumming that you have more brains than a gerbil, understand the difference between Evangelism and Fundamentalism, and haven’t swallowed the Blue Pill, a caveat. Before you pat yourselves on the back so hard you require surgery to repair a torn labrum, remember that we are monkeys too. Think Feldman vs Israel, AP vs Bloggers. What’s a internaut to do?

Fight Back with Doc Searls!

VRM aka Vendor Relationship Management is the latest attempt by Doc Searls to bitchslap companies into realizing what Peer to Peer means. Rather than telling you what I think he is saying, and what I think about it (this will require much more time than I have today) here is Doc his ownself.