I know I've been in the industry for way too long, when slowly I start noticing that all the articles on several of the major interactive advertising publications are starting to look the same. If you’ve followed any my writing for the last 10 years, you’ll know that I am not a huge fan of most interactive publications anyway and have a great disdain for the whole idea of having as many people write as much crap as they can, regardless if they know anything about the topic, or worse, are overweight high-school drop-outs who are smart enough to attend Masha Gellers great marketing events and pass out enough free vista-print cards to make them look somewhat knowledgeable.

  As one editor explained to me, they do really damn well with any article that says anything similar to “10 Things that Every Marketing Person Must Know” and then seemingly have any type of explanation, even if it doesn’t make sense whatsoever. For some reason, there is a belief amongst the editors of many of these publications, that if they put enough random thoughts together, and then label it with any number and points that sound half-decent, that makes content in the interactive advertising community. If I wrote an article that said “Three Points I Thought of While on the Toilet” and somehow claimed it was relevant to online advertising, it would probably be the top article on ClickZ.

For example, Heidi Cohen, who has written for ClickZ for quite some time, seems to only write articles that have those titles. Most recently, there was “9 Insights to Help Guide Your Social Media Marketing Program” which exclaimed that social media marketing was similar to training for the Olympics. She basically restated the goals for almost any marketing campaign, including “Having Long Term Goals”, “Have Team Behind You,” and “Learn from Past Mistakes.”If anyone has been in marketing for more than a few minutes, they know that most major brand marketing should always have long term goals, and that you must have a team behind you.. otherwise it’d be a small, and really lonely project.  Her points could have been applied to almost anything. (Ok, the photo on the right isn't Heidi Cohen, but wouldn't that have been cool if it was, right?)

So out of complete boredom, lack of sleep from my newborn keeping me up all night, I’ve decided to expand on her article in order to show how you can write almost anything and then apply it to almost anything. Here are “Three More Ways To Guide Social Media based on the Olympics.”

1)  Hide Illegal Drug Use. I don’t care if you are Michael Phelps or SnoopDog, when you are in the Olympics or running a brand marketing campaign on Facebook, you need to make sure your weed ain’t coming up on photos. So, if your employees have access to the facebook page, it’s a really bad idea to let them post photos of themselves next to a 10 foot stalk of ganja.  It’s bad for branding and illegal in 47 or so states.  

2)  Don’t overbrand your Webpage. If you didn’t hear, some members of the Olympic Hockey team were told they had to remove political and commercial references from their helmet. Similarly, if you are running a facebook fan page, it’s better to make the branding subtle and light. Having logos all over the page, and 100 photos of the logo in your album doesn’t help. One logo is all you need, and let your “fans” do the rest of the world.

3) Don’t let your fanbase ruin your fanpage. Scotty Lago, the 22 year old Bronze winner, got in trouble for doing what 22 year old guys usually do: take photos of themselves with slutty-gals doing sleazy things. Similarly, make sure that if you have a fanpage, that you have controls that prevent your fans from ruining your brand. For example, Walmart might have negative press if a 1,000 neo-nazi’s joined and started posting links and comments. People might start to think that Walmart is a haven for white-trash or something.

I wrote those in about 10 minutes, off the top of my head, and frankly, they aren’t half bad if you ask me. Still, please don’t take them seriously – they aren’t meant to mean anything, but at least I’m admitting that I’m writing complete junk, for the purpose of getting attention. Still, many publications out there are putting this crap out and hoping that someone will take it seriously. I’d ask you to stop, but then how would I get fodder for my writing?

Next Week: “Advertising Parties Gone Wild: Ten Ways You can Learn from a Hangover.”
Previous Week: "One thing Ad Industry Can Learn from Purim: Don't Screw with the Jews."