Words To Prove That We Truly Are “Mad As Hell”

The current Time magazine features the very rude Glenn Beck sticking his tongue out at all of us.

If you've seen the British indie In the Loop, you've been subjected to (and fabulously entertained by) the best rants, roils, and creative obscenities ever put to screen (Alert: this clip is not for those who faint at the f-word).

And then there’s the Racketeer Serena Williams, who’s promised to continue grunting and arguing no matter what it costs her; the Rapper Kanye West, whose mic grabber performance has resulted in a a slew of knock-off rants; not to mention The Republican Joe Wilson who either embarrassed or delighted you, depending on where you stand on the rudeometer.

Going forward, Marketing Brillo is expecting an exploding pack of mad dogs to seek the noon day sun. To help us along the way, here are some annoying, infuriating, exasperating, galling, irritating, maddening, mortifying, pestilential, pernicious, provoking, vexatious, charged, disquieting, disturbing, inflammatory, mind-blowing, perturbing, piquant, ravishing, unsettling, ranting, blustering, bombastic, diatribal, fustian, philippic, vociferous, wicked words for your next tirade, harangue, rant, spurt, or claptrap. Have fun!

p.s. The good news is that maybe we’re too angry ourselves to pay for celebrity venom. Glen Beck has been bleeding advertising bucks.

Reminder to Marketers: Teen Life Happens at the Mobile Level

What do text messaging, encyclopedias, working from home, and marketing have in common. Everything, according to Susan Marshall, vice president of marketing at ChaCha (aka, “ur mobile BFF").

ChaChees — as the company’s users are called – can text a query to any one of ChaCha’s 55,000 “guides” – all of whom work at home and are on-call to answer questions. Marshall reports that teens have asked 150 million questions over the last 18 months.

For marketers “..The result is a comprehensive view into the psyche of a teen. They will be honest about what they want and marketers get a sense of how to direct some services towards them and direct the right kind of advertisements to them.” [Note: Teens ask most about sex, kissing, relationships, video game info, and -- the top "must-know" category -- humor.]

For the statistically inclined, consider these numbers from Marshall’s Media Post blog: Working on a baseline index of 100, teens use the Internet at a time-spent index of 82. Time spent using their mobile device for phone calls indexes at 67. Text usage goes off the charts at 338. There’s no end in sight. Marshall says, “We have found that 83% of the entire teen population texts, which is up 13% in the past year.”

Marketing Brillo sees a sub-text to all this: More work-from-home income opportunities. We like.

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Saturday Workout: I Defy Any Editor To Make Sense of This Article

I struggled with how to bring this example of supremely BAD writing up for scrutiny. I don't like to point public fingers, but really... I mean really. Am I the only one who thinks this writing is totally unintelligible? And doesn't this stand as the perfect example of what not to do?

If you're afraid to click through, here are a few selected sentences (they can't do the full effort justice, though):

• By combining physical Delivery Preparation solutions in automation and robotics with virtual IT solutions up and downstream in the ADF, this organization has closed the ADF physical/virtual loop.

• Key is an optimal physical workflow providing efficiency and tangible metrics while also encompassing the entire ADF and especially the Delivery Preparation physical element.

• As tray-based physical workflow is examined in Delivery Preparation, it becomes evident that movement of trays through the factory can become truly automated.

Sadly, the process being described probably has real value. But who can get to it? Truly, I defy any editor to turn this article into plain English.

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Alert for Copywriters, Marketers, and PR Folks: Top 10 Things Customers Are Thinking About Right Now

Experian’s Hitwise Data Center features a Retail component that discloses which Internet search terms get the greatest boost each week. A quick look at the list gives marketers insight into what’s top of mind among customers right now.

So what was the Zeitgeist of the planet as people entered the first week of September?

1. More than any other term, people that week were searching about “unexplained phenomenon.” Frankly, this one baffles me. Maybe the interest was driven by something reported on the Live Science website. Whatever the impetus, people expressed growing interest in stuff that can’t be explained -- which probably includes just about everything that's happening in their lives.

2. Women’s clothing got a closer look, particularly plus size clothing for special occasions. Yes, the holiday season is coming up, and, yes, women are struggling into their size 18s.

3. Laptop deals and cheap notebooks are big, which would seem to reflect a consumer fascination with all things portable, as well as the success of Bill Curtis’ omniscient ads for AT&T’s netbook.

4. Interest in Walgreen’s flu shot program jumped, boosted no doubt by new and stricter "sick" policies adopted by many schools this fall, coupled with vast TV advertising about -- guess what? -- Walgreen's $24.99 flu shots.

5. Proving that holidays drive public interest and confirming that people don't want to be caught in last year's trend, halloweencostumes.com got heavy hits.

6. Winter is coming and concern about energy costs seems to have driven Internet search, too. Briggs and Stratton, manufacturer of home generator systems, got lots of website visits, which was more good news for the Milwaukee firm that has been enjoying record profits. Meanwhile, folks also were searching the terms “robe” and “television stands,” forecasting a lot of cozy hunkering down in front of the TV.

As an aside, the research holds terrific clues for TV advertisers looking to gauge the impact of their ads. This research may not match the quid-pro-quo of direct mail measurement, but it's probably the best guide media buyers have had.

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I’m Really Big and I’m Here To Help You

Banks and Big-Time Internet Service Providers are powerful entities. Thank heavens they’re here to help us.

The New York Times reports that banks are protecting us from ourselves by charging large fees when we inadvertently over-draft our debit cards. One poor guy paid $238 in extra charges -- $34 per transaction -- when he mistakenly charged mini-amounts on seven transactions. The banks and credit unions call their helpful fees overdraft “protection” … you know, because it’s good for us.

Comcast and Verizon have both rolled out DNS redirect “service,” a process that takes us to one of their own search engine pages (with advertising, of course) when we mistype a url into our browser. Presumably, we are all too busy to deal with the standard Internet 404-error message, so the practices are for our own benefit. Comcast modestly calls their program Domain Helper. Verizon has tagged their browser hi-jacking practice “DNS Assistance.”

Cell phone companies also are part of the helpful crowd. Need to add a line? They make it super easy by almost giving away expensive devices like the Blackberry or the Google Phone. All you have to do is promise to stay with them for another two years. There’s more! Next year, big phone makers will start selling phones with universal cell phone chargers. Hurray! … Wait… the standardized chargers will be compatible only with data-enabled European phones. But I’m sure there’s a helpful reason why Americans can't have this service yet. Maybe it's to protect our "cell phone charger choice options."

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This Guy Tweeted Right And Got More Followers

The central question of much blogging activity is this: “What dynamic strategies drive readership?” An obvious tactic to upping readership is getting your blog in front of a large number of people. But how?

On Wednesday, Kyle Judkins did just that. He devoted an entire blog to Big Blogger and Techno Influencer, Louis Gray. The post made an excellent point about using some Tweeple as canaries in the Tweetmine. Gray graciously -- and truly, he is both a brilliant and a gracious guy -- retweeted Judkins post to his own 13,449 followers. That had to bump up Judkin’s blog readership and build his 2,125 followers.

My guess is that Kyle is looking beyond numbers, to serious followers. This morning his count had bumped to 2,132. At least one of those emanated from the Louis Gray post – mine.

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How Itsy-Bitsy Did Your World Become This Year?

I’m not a sociologist, but if I were, I’m pretty sure the Internet would be my dream come true.

MIT has an amazing display at the MIT Museum called Metropath(ologies). Part of the display is the “Personas,” a system that lets people see how the Internet sees them. When you enter your name in the designated slot, the program develops a multi-colored bar that displays your “aggregated online identity” in a bunch of areas (fame, management, education, movies, news, illegal (say what?), politics, religion, aggression, politics, media professional, medicine, musical, etc.

According to the write-up, Personas is fallible because it isn’t able to separate data from multiple owners of the same name. My color bar for Nancy Rathbun Scott is pretty simple (actually, it’s distressingly simple, but never mind that).

Nancy Scott, on the other hand is infinitely complex (probably because there are millions of Nancy Scotts, including somebody who was executed for murder).

I’m sure the MIT folks are aggregating all the profiles and – should they want to – will be able to take that data and find people with identical profiles (or any other data-mining mix and match that captures the fancy).

And then there’s Twitter! When I contemplate the sociological possibilities of Twitter, I get so worked up that I have to walk around the room. Actually, Twitter is The World of People and there has never been anything remotely like it. (No, Dorothy, Facebook doesn’t count because Facebook connections are predominantly defined and confined by the people we already know. That’s what Facebook was designed to be and that’s what it is.)

I don’t think the people who developed Twitter had -- or do have -- any idea what it would/will be when it's all grown up. Therein lies its magic. It's open-ended and dynamic. Which means that if I want to connect with people all over the world doing brain research, I can do that. Or, if I want to find the 150 people in the world most fascinating to me, I can do that (yes, it would take some time, but the possibility is there).

Where will projects like Personas and Twitter take us? Nobody knows. Never before in human history have people had the ability to connect so broadly and deeply, for so many reasons. Only SciFi can creatively contemplate the implications of our new itsy-bitsy world.

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