The web sucks.

At four this morning my daughter woke up sick, with an apparent fever. I had a Vicks V971 digital thermometer, but could not get temperature readings that made sense. In between tending to her, I searched online for operating instructions for the thermometer and could not find them, even on vicks.com. (Shame on Vicks. They advertise the thermometer on the site, but they won’t tell you how to use it. Do they really think I would go to vicks.com to make a buying decision on a thermometer? Please.)

One solution? Paid search with micropayments. Charge me a couple of cents for every search and don’t give me any advertising or paid links. Another? Don’t put money above all else. Make the first page of links for any search (except the search with the keyword “buy” in it) non-commercial. It won’t give you a $600 stock price but it might make search useful again.

We live in a small town and there is nowhere nearby to get a new thermometer at this hour. And I can’t leave my seven-year-old here either. I’ll go out in a few hours when the stores open. In the meantime, I’ll curse the lie that is search. The real digital divide is between what the web could be and the piece of crap it has become. That’s what happens when everything has to have a business model.

A friend sent me a link to the Shaping Youth blog on “media and marketing’s influence on our children.” In a recent post, Amy Jussel, Founder and Executive Director for Shaping Youth, takes Target to task for an advertising campaign featuring the Target bullseye logo positioned between the spread legs of a male model, and points to “the tasteless toddler tee Hooters Girl in Training” as examples of overt and inappropriate sexual content in advertising. (It’s unclear from the post, but tThe shirt does not appear to be  is not sold by Target.)

I have a six-year-old daughter, and I am appalled at the cheap tawdriness of the merchandise marketed to her. In the clothing departments of nearly every major retailer, girls can find a wide selection of slutware — tight, low riding, hip hugger pants; skimpy halter tops; Madonna-esque outerwear that looks like lingerie; and so on.

Move over to the toy section and you’ll find Bratz, a collection of slutty dolls deliberately designed to look like they are high and stupid. Nice role models!

The problem for boys is similar, but not sexual. That’s because boys are not supposed to look sexy. They are supposed to look cool. The proliferation of camouflaged clothing in the boy’s department is nauseating. The message: War is good. War is cool. I’ve seen first graders show up at the elementary school in full camouflage with boots. What are parents thinking?

It’s all part of the sexing up of America. It’s good to see articulate, informed voices like Shaping Youth. What can the consumer do?

• Boycott inappropriate products and retailers
• Spend a little more and shop better retailers that don’t contribute to the problem
• Write letters to retailers expressing your distaste for these products
• Start a blog
• Don’t buckle to pressure from your kids
• Recognize that Target, Wal-Mart, Mattel, and the other trash mongers are not good parents. That’s your job.

The alternative is to dress your girls like hookers and your boys like mercenaries and then wonder why we turn out violent and oversexed.

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Hugh MacLeod argues that “public relations is getting social media all wrong,” and “if your ideas have merit, bloggers will talk about them,” and therefore traditional press releases are unnecessary and irrelevant.

The idea that blogs and other social media have replaced the press release is simplistic. I won’t argue that press releases are often laden with corporate crap, and the PR profession needs to take a hard look at this, but the quality of a typical press release, and the relevance of press releases, are two separate discussions. Certainly more and more people in all fields are becoming social media-aware, but there are still plenty of journalists and editors who do not blog or read blogs, but who can be reached with a press release. Anyone who is currently advising clients to stop issuing press releases, whether that person represents a PR agency, an advertising agency, a marketing firm, or a social media consultancy, is negligent. Some day soon we may indeed be ready for the elimination of the conventional press release, but that day is not here.

The theme of MacLeod’s blog is “cartoons drawn on the back of business cards.” Many of them are enlightening and amusing. But I am completely clueless (I admit it) as to the meaning of this cartoon, included in MacLeod’s post:

First of all, I have no idea what the diagram is trying to convey. Second, it is labeled “ad agency biz model,” so I am not sure how it is connected to public relations. The themes of commodification/de-commodficiation (odd words) and “hard sell” are not dealt with in MacLeod’s post.

MacLeod paraphrases Stowe Boyd: “Please, please, please dont talk about audiences when you are theoretically promoting social media.” The idea that corporate communications and marketing people are clueless because they use the word “audience” is a popular red herring among anti-traditional communications jihadists. While the dictionary definition of audience might imply one-way communications to a captive and passive group, the concept, properly applied, is a powerful one that is highly relevant in social media strategy. In the corporate world, segmentation allows a company to enable effective communications with its various audiences. These audiences include customers, prospects, shareholders, business partners, employees, developers, journalists, bloggers, securities analysts, industry analysts and other influential groups that the company needs to reach.

Each of these groups has different interests. Securities analysts, for example, are interested almost exclusively in the company’s financial performance, and generally don’t want to hear about product features or corporate social responsibility. Developers want to know about tools, and the availability of software updates and bug fixes.

By understanding their audience(s), bloggers can engage in more interesting and effective conversations. If I visit the blog of an expert in Service Oriented Architectures and read a post on his experience trying to replace a stolen Blackberry, that might be mildly interesting (OK, it isn’t), but would have no value to me. I’d rather learn about the blogger’s views on the role of open source in SOA adoption. In this case, the first blogger is a narcissist, who has failed to consider his audience, readership, whatever. And I don’t care how articulate, funny or clever a blogger is. If he or she has nothing of interest to say to me, (a disregard for audience), then that blogger and the company are wasting their time and mine.

Finally, it’s totally unnecessary, unkind and uncivil to say that “most PR folk are still pretty clueless.” This kind of posturing trash talk is usually a smokescreen for the lack of a fully formed logical argument. I think the following diagram proves my point unequivocally:

I screwed up! I confused the Everywhere Girl’s blog, http://www.theeverywheregirl.com/ with a skeevy porn site at http://www.everywheregirl.com/ .

SORRY!  

The good news is, the Everywhere Girl (or “eg” as I call her) posted a comment correcting me, and she did a blog post graciously pointing out my stupidity, so I now I can realistically claim we are best friends!

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I started this post after reading an Inquirer report on the Everywhere Girl’s on again/off again entry on Wikipedia. But the more research I did the stranger this story became.

The Everywhere Girl is a model whose stock photos struck a chord with marketers and graphic designers and consequently showed up in hundreds of places all over the web. I blogged on this phenomenon on my old blog, Hyde Park.

Given the attention the Everywhere Girl has received from bloggers, it is only appropriate that she now has her own blog. But is it really “her blog” and what are its sinister underpinnings?

I am sure I am not the first to notice this, but a whois search reveals that the blog’s domain, everywheregirl.com, is owned by Studio for Publications, Inc. aka TheWetlands.com Inc. of Ocean City, Maryland. It’s unclear to me what line of business these two entities are in.

Here the plot thickens. The Educate Yourself site, attempts to implicate Jon David, listed as the administrative and technical contact for everywheregirl.com, Studio for Publications, and WetLandsInc.com, in the July 2005 London bombings! Educate Yourself appears, to me at least, to be a crackpot conspiracy theorist free-for-all. The site describes itself as:

“A free educational forum dedicated to the dissemination of accurate information in the use of natural, non-pharmaceutical medicines and alternative healing therapies in the treatment of disease conditions. Free Energy, Earth Changes, and the growing reality of Big Brother are also explored since survival itself in the very near future may well depend on self acquired skills to face the growing threats of bioterrorism, emerging diseases, and the continuing abridgement of constitutional liberties.”

A primary tool employed by Educate Yourself is what they refer to as “dowsing.” The site’s dowsing on Jon David alleges that he has ties to CIA operatives, is fluent in Arabic, had advance knowledge of the bombings, and posted on the Internet on behalf of [sic] “El-Queada,” (perhaps a Latin American Al Qaeda splinter group?).

That’s where the trail ended for me. Or at least my interest in spending any more of my time ended here. If nothing else, this post demonstrates the uncanny ability of the web to suck up three hours of research that is quite entertaining but ultimately yields nothing conclusive or credible.

Last week I started my new gig at Eastwick Communications. I was recruited into both Hewlett-Packard and Sun Microsystems (it’s nice to have friends in the Valley) before that, so 2006 was the first time since 1998 that I actually “looked” for a new job.

My earliest interaction with Eastwick demonstrated to me that the company wasn’t afraid of creativity, and that it had a sense of humor. I found the position on Craig’s List. I sent a cover letter and resume and heard nothing for a week. Normally, I would have blown it off, but I felt like making some trouble, so I decided to contact Eastwick again.

I forwarded the original cover letter and e-mail with the following note:

Hello,

I recently sent you an awesome, dare I say inspiring cover letter and resume for this position and I have received no reply. For your convenience, I have drafted a reply below, and request that you click “reply,” and “send” so that I know how important my communications are to you.

Best regards,

Joel

Dear Joel,

Thank you for your interest in a career with Eastwick. As you can imagine, we have received many responses to this posting. We are reviewing candidates for the position, and should we determine that there is a basis for further discussion, we will contact you.

Best regards,

The fine folks at Eastwick

You may recall I once wrote the SVP for communications at Campbell Soup and complained about the company’s lousy rejection letters (and offered to rewrite them). It’s not that I can’t take rejection (and I can’t), it’s that I think it’s important, even in the impersonal, autoreply, Taleo webtop world of recruiting, to be nice to candidates.

In any case, Linda Clarke of Eastwick did indeed respond to my second e-mail, which led eventually to my new job. Thank you Linda and Eastwick for having a sense of humor.