High-Five Fridays #7

1) A Dress A Day shows you there IS such a thing as bad publicity, which is so right-on regarding poor email releases & contact that many of you who have been so horridly pitched will find yourself saying, "OMG, yes!"

That link was found at 2) bits and bobbins, where she re-caps the "don't"s for you.

3) While we're at it, check out Pop Tart's rants about bad companies ~ are you guilty of these things?

4) Mark Glaser on the ever-blurring distinctions between bloggers and journalists.

5) This Month In SEO brings you more than SEO ~ readers here know I personally ponder everything but SEO and there's plenty to ponder in this post.

PS I'm still down-for-the-count with a cold; hence my silence here (and elsewhere). I only note this here for those who wondered ~ and literally 'here' at the bottom because I hate posts which start off that way and 'click away' asap. *wink*

Want to give your own high-fives? Find out how to give your High-Five Fridays here!

The purpose of this meme is to give high-fives to 5 people, posts, blogs and/or websites you've admired during the week. I will link to everyone who participates and leaves a link to their 5 high-fives on Friday. Trackbacks, pings, linky widgets, comment links accepted!

Visiting fellow High-Fivers is encouraged! If you participate, leave the link to your High-Fives in others comments (please note if NWS).

Find more High-Five Friday folks here!

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High-Five Fridays #6

1) Astute observations on Asian lingerie marketing by Slip of a Girl.

2) Silent Porn Star talks about (some of the) marketing intangibles (post is OK, but the site is likely deemed NWS).

3) Val Gryphin's post last week contained this relevant marketing high-five:

The article Five Easy Ways to Build Sustainable Word-of-Mouth, which is a response to Joan’s Top 10 Tips for Free Publicity. Both have some great ideas and commentary that can be applicable for writers.

4) Secondhand Rose talks about coming to terms with electronic book readers (post is OK, but the site is likely deemed NWS). I still hold-out for paper, but it's the best argument I've heard yet for the darn ebooks.

5) Church of the Customer gets a general high-five for being interesting.

PS I've been down-for-the-count with a cold; hence my silence here (and elsewhere). I only note this here for those who wondered ~ and literally 'here' at the bottom because I hate posts which start off that way and 'click away' asap. *wink*

Want to give your own high-fives? Find out how to give your High-Five Fridays here!

The purpose of this meme is to give high-fives to 5 people, posts, blogs and/or websites you've admired during the week. I will link to everyone who participates and leaves a link to their 5 high-fives on Friday. Trackbacks, pings, linky widgets, comment links accepted!

Visiting fellow High-Fivers is encouraged! If you participate, leave the link to your High-Fives in others comments (please note if NWS).

Find more High-Five Friday folks here!

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High-Five Fridays #4

#1 Sex Tourism / Sex Travel -- Adventures of an Average Joe (NWS):

I've been a dedicated sex tourist since 2003. In other words, I love fucking foreign hookers, especially in Brazil. Not that I like paying for sex. But the working girls I've met have blown me away. It's a long way from my conservative roots as a yeshiva boy and later an advocate for tougher anti-crime laws. I'd always considered the idea of paying for sex repellent. At least until my first trip to Rio de Janeiro. It turned my world upside down.

(Via Violet Blue (NWS).)

#2 It's stupid and I'm not having it: Sara voices what I've heard from several of you, that declaring your blog 'adult' in blogger (as mentioned here) is horrible.

#3 MSNBC's Chelsea comment angers Clinton: Don't use the phrase "pimped out" regarding anyone's daughter. (Via Spin Thicket.)

#4 PR's Glass Ceiling: "Because approximately 90 percent male leadership seems just wrong." Amen.

#5 Marketing Lessons from School Lunch -- which reminds me a bit of my pudding cups. Maybe I'm just hungry. (Also via Spin Thicket.)

Want to give your own high-fives? Find out how to give your High-Five Fridays here!

The purpose of this meme is to give high-fives to 5 people, posts, blogs and/or websites you've admired during the week. I will link to everyone who participates and leaves a link to their 5 high-fives on Friday. Trackbacks, pings, linky widgets, comment links accepted!

Visiting fellow High-Fivers is encouraged! If you participate, leave the link to your High-Fives in others comments (please note if NWS).

Find more High-Five Friday folks here!

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A Midsleeper's Wet Dream Becomes Marketing Nightmare

'Everyone' is talking about Woolworths pulling the Lolita bed; The Marketing Whore is someone, so she'll talk about it too.

The Lolita Midsleeper beds were designed for six-year-old girls and this unfortunate name ('Lolita', not 'Midsleeper' which I find dreadful ~ but I'm not British, so what do I know) has resulted in upsetting parents.



The main complaint seems to be that the name 'Lolita' on a bed implies that the youth which sleeps upon it is of little virtue ~ or will be perceived as such by others. This due to, in case you didn't know, "Lolita", the 1955 novel by Vladimir Nabokov, in which the narrator becomes sexually obsessed and then sexually involved with his 12-year-old stepdaughter when she seduces him. The icing on the cake is Lolita is not a virgin at that time either.

While the beds of ill repute were shown on the Woolworths' site, they were not an actual Woolworths product; this apparently caused part of the confusion in the handling of the complaints, as one of the upset parents received the following reply from Woolworths:

- they say they will 'pass my letter onto the buying dept' but also state
"Our aim is to attract a broad customer base of all ages and we make every effort to stock items, which appeal to the whole family. However, we also have to respond to customer demands and follow current trends. "

That one customer service kid hadn't heard of the book, or the two films, is a bit surprising... But it only gets worse as eventually that complaint, or another like it, was passed along and higher-ups confessed:

"What seems to have happened is the staff who run the website had never heard of Lolita, and to be honest no one else here had either," a spokesman told newspapers.

"We had to look it up on (online encyclopaedia) Wikipedia. But we certainly know who she is now."

It seems to me that someone should have known... I mean eBay and plenty of other sites actually forbid the word 'Lolita' from appearing in listings & profiles (at least for specific categories) and also police word combinations and content, just in case it would appear that you are trying to market to and profit from pedophiles.

Anyway, the product's been pulled and the world is safe from tramp-making beds.

The bad news is that selling Bratz dolls and thongs to little girls is just fine. As a culture we've decided that marketing to and profiting from turning girls (and boys) into sexually active preteens is fine and dandy. Not only do parents buy into it, they actually buy this stuff.

I just don't get that.

The good news is that there finally is a marketing horror story to put in textbooks ~ even if it's not based on literal translation.

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Nag Nag Nag

I'm hoping that a Tuesday post about a Friday meme will prompt you all to be prepared to post this week. *wink*

General tips, for this or any other meme, are:

1) Follow the meme rules. In this case, please remember to do the following:

a) Post a comment in the current High-Five Fridays blog post so that other participants and readers can find you

b) Please use the whole code as noted here ~ links back are nice, as are those to Technorati, but as this is a very new meme the text explanation helps others to know what's going on (and hopefully join us!) Other memes require such stuff, so it's not out of the ordinary to ask.

2) Go around and comment at other meme participants posts. Meeting people is half the fun! And, in this case, we're all finding other neat websites too.

Oh, and thanks to Pop Tart, there are some cool new images to use in your High-Five Fridays posts. (Pop Tart, consider yourself high-fived early *wink*)

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High-Five Fridays #3 (Givin' Props Where I Can)

Props to my girl Pop Tart (aka DeeDee at SK ~ and endless others) for two things:

#1 Creating a cool award. The Get Out! Kitschy Kitschy Coo Award isn't just another random "I like you" blogging award; this one is for excellence amusement in comments. What a great way to increase participation at your blog! (May Will have to 'borrow' this idea.)

#2 For said award, Pop Tart used PikiStrips to make the award image or badge. I know lots of you can use PhotoShop (and excel at it); but I'm not like you. I'm also on Linux which can greatly limit the number of other online image editing sites (due to flash) & downloads (Windows or Apple only) ~ but PikiStrips I can use! (Yeah, look forward to lots of my works to appear here ~ I've got some free time this weekend lol)

#3 Slip of a Girl has a great post on the changing size of the fashion market and how smart manufacturers can profit from it.

#4 Greg dishes on the new era in media ~ which poses some chewy questions I'll likely masticate at length later.

#5 Mister Linky That's the widget you see at the bottom of these (and other) meme posts. I love that it allows participants to add their linkage to the post (rather than me having to do it, or having them only seen by those who read the comments).

Today, however, their server had a issue and it caused any site with Mister Linky code to be unloadable ~ it was a short time (though a sneeze seems eternal in length while waiting), but those of us scrambling to find contact were thwarted by the use of contactprivacy.com (used to cloak WhoIs etc.). Since the bugs I note tend to get beaucoup search results, I will list a contact addy here for those who need to find/note it: super dot linky at gmail dot com. (And note the gmail addy ~ that means even if the site servers itch again, the email can still be received!)

Mister Linky still gets a high-five because when I thought of what I'd have to do without it, I about puked :p Oh, and pay for the Gold membership. At $10 a year, you can use it across multiple sites with just a few tweaks.

Want to give your own high-fives? Find out how to give your High-Five Fridays here!

The purpose of this meme is to give high-fives to 5 people, posts, blogs and/or websites you've admired during the week. I will link to everyone who participates and leaves a link to their 5 high-fives on Friday. Trackbacks, pings, linky widgets, comment links accepted!

Visiting fellow High-Fivers is encouraged! If you participate, leave the link to your High-Fives in others comments (please note if NWS).

Find more High-Five Friday folks here!

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