I have been off the grid for a few days, which is not unusual for bloggers.  My absence, however, it a little more, um, detailed.  It’s full of good and bad, righteousness and frustration.

Intrigued yet?

It begins with me making a trek to New Jersey the day after Christmas and then heading for my beloved Pinewood, my cabin in the mountains.  Except things did not go according to plan.

In what is every parents’ “ugh” story, somewhere on I-78 West in Northeastern Pennsylvania around Hamburg, the dreaded “service engine soon” came on while my Explorer (I should change one letter to make it an “Exploder”) died.  On the side of a busy highway.  In the middle of nowhere.

About the worst day of the week to have your car break down is Sunday.  This was on a Sunday.  About the worst time of the year is the week between Christmas and New Year’s.  Two for two.

If this has happened to you, you know that with your whole family (and dog) in the car, you need time to think and use the old cell phone to find out about road service, rental cars and hotels.  It’s a confusing time, and no less so with two kids in the back who are justified in continually asking what’s going on.

So after about 20 minutes of trying to regroup, I thought I would at least raise the hood of the car as a sort of distress signal;  maybe a cop would stop or something.  Within 30 seconds, a guy stopped just ahead of me.

Where the Good Comes In

The guy’s name who stopped was Dustin.  Dustin is a Marine home from Afghanistan. I grew to learn that Dustin is a Recon Marine, pretty much the toughest of a very tough bunch.  With one tour in Iraq and going back for his third in Afghanistan today, he is used to tricky situations.  So he took a look at the engine, we got the owner’s manual out, and we tried troubleshooting the car for about 30 minutes (and by the way, on a highway with a blind downhill slope where he told me a friend was killed in the same situation in almost the same spot).

What happened next?  After figuring out that we could not fix the car there and coinciding with the arrival of the tow truck, I entrusted my new friend Dustin with taking my family to the next exit/truck stop where we could, in his marine vernacular, “regroup.”  My gut gave me no hesitation whatsoever after meeting this guy.

At the truck stop, true to his word, Dustin met me there after delivering my family in a McDonalds — where it was a lot warmer.  He texted a friend of his who is a Ford mechanic, explained our troubleshooting and basically told me that his mechanic friend said that we had done everything we could – it was time to turn it over to the professionals.  Dustin recommended a Ford dealership (that did not show up on my iPhone, by the way), I called a second tow truck, and me and Prince the Dog stayed behind while I sent my family off in a “taxi” (a Lincoln Town Car was the only transportation for miles around).  While I waited an hour and a half in the increasingly dropping temperatures for the second tow truck, Dustin even stopped back to check on me and make sure that everything was ok.  Here’s what you need to know about Dustin:

• First, he stopped to help complete strangers on a road where he watched a friend die in a similar situation.
• He is a decorated Marine with tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan; he has been wounded in battle twice.  And he is going back.
• Once, shot in the shoulder and femur with no radio, he told me that he walked 30 miles back to base.  When I asked him how he could do this, he simply pointed to the picture of his children on his car dashboard.
• Most importantly, every moment with your family is precious when you are home on leave from a combat zone.  Dustin spent at least three hours trying to help a complete stranger when he could have been spending that time with his family.

An Incomplete Ending

When we parted ways, I gave Dustin my word that I would keep in touch with him, both via text and email.  In my state of confusion, I got BOTH his cell phone and email address wrong.  I never even got his last name. I don’t know the name of his platoon.  In short, I have little chance of contacting him and I want desperately to keep my promise.

About the only thing that I can think of today is to call the local newspaper, push the “Good Samaritan Marine Helps Family at Christmas” angle in the hopes that they will publish the story and his family or friends will see it, enabling me to get in contact with someone who can get me in contact with him.  I hope and this will work – for the first time in my life, I am grateful for having to do all that media pitching when I was a young buck in the agency world.

And the truck?  It’s still somewhere in Northeastern Pennsylvania and may or may not be ready before 2014 at a cost of a small used car.  But what’s more important is that I can keep my word to a stranger who kept his to me.

Mark

P.S. – If any of you have any other ideas on how to locate someone in the military, please comment on this and let me know.

P.P.S.  – Could you please use the “Share/Save” icon at the bottom of this page?  The more people who see this, the greater chance I have for getting in touch with Dustin.

I am steamed like I have not been steamed in a long time. I learned of this story while listening to the latest edition for “For Immediate Release,” but an article in Ad Age states,

“The Huffington Post has started offering marketers the ability to inject their own paid comments among reader comments and place paid Tweets among the live Twitter feeds the site assembles around news subjects and events.”

That’s right.  It appears that they want to parlay their 70 million monthly visitors into an opportunity to “double their revenue stream,” a stated goal.  Moreover, the Ad Age article quotes Ian Schafer, CEO of interactive agency Deep Focus as saying:

In theory, there’s more upside in doing it that way than in buying a banner ad. With those the default behavior is to ignore them. With this the default behavior may be to pay attention.”

So, Ian.  It’s better to deceive readers than to put an ad where people will know it’s paid ad? Nice.

WTF?

Let’s face it.  The Huffington Post leans pretty far to the left, which, as demonstrated by their popularity, clearly resonates with readers.  But there so many things wrong with this that I don’t know where to begin.  It’s at best, stupid, and at worst, deceptive.

Reason #1: Paid editorial content gone awry.

In the olden days, we called this paid media.  Sure, if you picked up a newspaper and saw a paid editorial that had the same typeface and font as the article surrounding it, you could figure out that it was paid.  Oh – and it was clearly marked as an advertisement, not an opinion endorsed by the paper.

Greg Coleman, HuffPo’s Chief Revenue Officer (note the title) states:

“An advertiser sponsoring a Twitter subject page around the World Series might interject with relevant baseball statistics — just to earn a little good will and brand halo, he suggested. Or a health-care company sponsoring a Twitter page around health-care policy might post a paid Tweet ‘to bring to fore the facts’ but in a neutral way.“

Greg, you are either being disingenuous or you are an idiot.  What pharma company is going to PAY for “neutral facts?”  I can’t imagine a person in a marketing capacity for a company saying “Hey boss, I have a great idea for how we can put out our information — and pay for it — but that waters down our point of view.”  That’s a steaming load of bullshit that I am not swallowing.

Reason #2: Leaders should set the pace.

There was justifiable annoyance and even outrage when the FTC announced that bloggers would need to begin to disclose paid relationships on their blogs.  I blogged about this before, stating that I sincerely wish that the FTC had better things to do than to mandate common sense, but what precedent does this set when one of the leading news sites on the Web is now blurring the lines between content, marketing and public relations?  Bad, bad, bad.

Reason #3: Hypocrisy, plain and simple.

HuffPo built its name and considerable audience by leaning left, and often attacking essentially any corporation or entity that they view as overly greedy or disingenuous.  If you want to taint an opponent, put the word “big” in front of the industry.  “Big oil.”  “Big tobacco.”  “Big pharma.”  Read:  it’s wrong to make obscene profits when the little guy suffers.

Get ready to spit out your coffee.  HuffPo does not compensate its bloggers.  The Wall Street Journal noted:

“The initiative is already generating discussion, not surprisingly, on Twitter, where some users wondered if the extra revenue would go toward compensating the site’s unpaid bloggers.”

So HuffPo is not paying their bloggers while attacking:

• “Big Oil”:  MoveOn v. “Big Oil” McCain: Spend Our $39 Billion on Clean Energy
• “Big Pharma”: White House Confirms: Deal With Big Pharma Bars Price Negotiations
• Capitalism: “Will Obama Reboot Capitalism Anew?“

Go ahead and read these articles — they describe corporate  greed and deception, profiting while the little guy gets the shaft.

So if you:

• Blur the line for “paid tweets” as part of your revenue goal to double your profit this year;
• Do so in a way that is highly suspect and disingenuous;
• Do not compensate your bloggers, presumably the “little guys”; and
• Still rail against “BIG [INSERT INDUSTRY HERE]?

it’s ok?  Just so long as the rules apply to others and NOT YOU?

Remember what happened when the Washington Post, in a fit of stupidity and greed,

“…intended to sell sponsorships to lobbyists, corporations and industry associations for dinners at Ms. Weymouth’s [the paper's publisher]  home, attended by Mr. Brauchli [the executive editor] and journalists covering the evening’s topic, along with government officials.”???  Pay for play in journalism.

They got busted.  Hard.

At what point does the HuffPo become “Big Online?”

Shame on you, Arianna Huffington.  You and your editors have wrapped yourself in the cloth of journalism while practicing the worst form of deception and hypocrisy.

Shame on you.

Mark

Facebook in Everywhere! – Except Guam.

Despite what the title says (and there are plenty of non-English Facebook versions out there), what caught my attention was:

1. Social networks that I had never heard of;
2. The complete lack of any sort of social networking site in Iran (I am not sure why I am surprised by this).  It’s a big-ass hole in the map in the middle of the Middle East.  But despite what the autocratic, bloodthirsty mullahs of that country think, there is something called “a cell phone”; and
3. MySpace, which a few years ago tried to jack up the agency that I was working for by charging us $60,000 for a site, is now #1 in..GUAM.  I suppose that this is the social media equivalent of the loser’s lunchroom table.

Interesting read.

Mark

Snowmageddon 2009. So what do you do? Go outside, play with your children and dog — and watch another dog walk yours!

Mark

I applaud the spirit of entrepreneurialism.  An aspiring genius sees a void, produces a product or service that fills that void and profits from it.  That’s the free market, right?

Oh – except when something annoys the living hell out of you, like spam.

Sure, I hate the offers from Nigerian royalty and people offering to enlarge my various body parts, but I could tolerate it when it came via email.  When Verizon (my ISP) lost a class-action suit AGAINST SPAMMERS – who was your lawyer on that one? — I began filtering all of my email through Gmail.  Their spam filter is a lot better than the sieve that is Verizon.  So I got that pesky email spam under control.

Then I created the blog that preceded this one – with an email address.  Whammo-bammo, hello Viagra and Cialis – AND FOR FREE!

So I created a CAPTCHA form.  More comment spam.  For this blog, Mr. Akismet tells me that he has kept me from 51,973 spam message.  Hey, thanks!

Then I got a Twitter account. When I started getting some  followers, pictures of scantily clad females with one post, following 12,000 people and with 200 (apparently stupid and desperate) followers showed up, I figured out how to block people.  And Amanda Chapel.  Twice.

Then I started testing on Twitter and would use the word “porn” in my Tweet just to see what happens.  Suddenly, I would gain 50 college coeds looking for a good time.  More spam.  W00T!

Now I use Posterous, and I am just waiting for these evil geniuses to catch up with me. But I have a solution:  HIRE THEM.

International Hire a Spammer Day

As an employer, you often seek those people who are most creative, profit-driven and willing to do what it takes to get your message out.  Hello, spammer job description!  U.S. lawmakers cracking down?  No problemo.  We’ll take our server and head offshore to somewhere where they don’t even know that have the Internet.  THAT’S the spirit of entreprenuerialism.

C’mon. It’s the holidays.  These poor guys living overseas want to come home from their villas and mansions and start helping the millions of idiots who click on these links every day.  Remember the movie “Catch Me If You Can,” when Tom Hanks hired Matt Damon to help catch forgers?   Same deal.  Hire the people you are chasing.

So if we make tomorrow International Hire a Spammer Day, we can take all of these poor, lost souls and show them the way of the righteous path.   Or, according to Robert Scoble, we could just have them do pitching for public relations agencies.

C’mon. Forget the widow and orphans.  Hire a spammer.

Mark

P.S. – Dear FTC:  this is satire.