The other night I noticed certain Mommy bloggers / tweeters hawking a brand of children’s lunch foods owned by a company not known for promoting eating this is – shall we say – healthy. This particular product (rhymes with “unchables”) has more sodium in a single serving than my driveway after a snowstorm and has about as much nutritional value as a cheesecake and a can of soda. And  you wonder why Johnny can’t even get out of his chair, let alone read.

The company behind all of this is owned by a conglomerate better known for pushing cigarettes to minors in any country that will let it get away with it.

The promotion itself was quite slick. They even asked respondents to put the appropriate hashtags in their responses. I’m sure it was all very well thought out by very smart and social media-savvy people and it will win scads of awards and be written up in all the social media marketing books that seem to arrive on the bookshelves with alarming regularity ….

But….

Are we really doing ourselves any favors when we stoop to this level? Giving crap away for free to mommy bloggers doesn’t make it any less crappy. And putting the veneer of social media hipness over it just makes the whole thing seem sleety.

At least to me.

But don’t let me rain on your parade by being so sanctimonious.

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Image by karen horton via Flickr

On New Years Day, Sue discovered (to her shock and horror) that Food Network and HGTV had been dropped from the Cablevision lineup.

Now my bride is a confirmed Food Network junkie. She’s even priming Twin Princess Number Two to be the Next Food Network Star. So this lineup change was not going to go over well.

A bit of investigation turned up this site, which as far as I can tell is Cablevision’s only statement on the subject. Read it and try to stay awake, I dare you. It reads like something written by the PR agency and run over by the lawyers. In other words, CYA and bland bland bland.

On the other hand, Scripps, the owners of Food Network and HGTV are not rolling over and playing dead. To communicate with Cablevision viewers, they’ve set up two web sites. They’ve been active on Twitter and Facebook. And their fans have been whipped up into a social media frenzy.

Now I’m not one to beat the ‘every company should be on Twitter’ drum but do you think Cablevision, who has set up and left unused several Twitter accounts, might want to be out there to intercept comments like these? I guess the same lawyers and PR bots who wrote the copy on that web page feel that they’ve done enough.

Unfortunately, in today’s media environment, “enough” isn’t good enough.

As for us, we’re voting with our wallets. Verizon will be at our doorstep on Monday morning to switch us over to FiOS. And finally I’ll get BBC America.

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If turning the site green would help, then perhaps, but it’d merely feed that narcissistic desire some people have to “do” something. Hackers creating proxies for Iranians to bypass their nation’s internet censors? THAT’S doing something tangible and of great value.

Link

Now go do something important, for a change.

/rant over

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Take, for example, the website for the Bedford Central Schools, which my daughters attend. It’s very pretty and all but it’s not actually very useful. Where can I sign up for email alerts? Where are the RSS feeds? Where can I find an email address?

This site is actually built off of a template sold to the district by School World, a company that has a chokehold on the school district web site market. The site is designed to look pretty and throw a lot of content at parents but not really say much of anything.

When the site was in its planning stages, a note went out to all the parents in the district directing us to a web site with three or four sample designs and asking us which one we liked best. No one ever asked what we would actually want from a web site. Like maybe all the forms we might need for our children linked right on the main page. Or an online system for us to report absences so we don’t clog up the school’s phone and take up the office staff’s time in the morning. Or a direct link to the school principals’ email addresses so we don’t have to dig through four different pages to find it.

And because the site is based on a template that the district paid (handsomely, I’m sure) for, there’s no way for the district to add functionality or otherwise customize the site down the road. I’m sure they sold the district on things like ‘your staff won’t have to learn complicated HTML.’ I’m also sure it’s based on proprietary technology. The site itself doesn’t use doctypes and buries the content in a nest of tables and other noodley code. Honestly, the district is lucky there isn’t anyone else around here with any Google juice.

O’Reilly’s Vannessa Fox has a list of practical tips for local government web sites that make a lot of sense. Things like crawlability and extensive use of alt tags would help. Unfortunately, as long as companies like School World are selling crappy web sites to local school districts, her advice will probably fall on deaf ears.

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Wrong., originally uploaded by david parmet.

We spent the weekend in Boston and while touring the Boston Museum of Science spotted this egregious crime against Einstein.

See if you can figure it out.

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The three police officers are accused of posting sexually explicit photos and comments about the 74-year-old Walsh, as well as racist jokes about President Barack Obama on their Facebook pages.

If you are a police officer and want to spread racist, sexist jokes about your boss (the Town Supervisor of Harrison, NY) and the President of the United States, don’t do it on Facebook. You might get caught.

Just a tip.

Full story here.

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I must admit I missed the whole Rick Santelli rant on CNBC this week. Most of my neighbors are Wall Street types who probably agree with Santelli. However I’ll go with John Amato of Crooks and Liars,

Santelli needs to own that he is the loser and if it wasn’t for the gasbag insider crowd that gives his words a modicum of respect, crowds would gather outside his home with torches and pitchforks.

Link

I’m sick of these clowns on CNBC daring to lecture the rest of us on responsibility. They were the ones who put us in this mess to begin with. In any decent, self-respecting country, we’d be lining these chucklebutts up against a wall right about now.

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Just finished watching the season premier of Battlestar Galactica and my mind is totally fraked .

Speaking of four letter words, someone at KFC is either the gutsiest marketing genius of all time, or the dumbest.

Update: I’m currently the number one hit on Google for KFC Frak Pack. That can’t be good.

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Chris Brogan points to one of my biggest social media pet peeves of 2008. It’s those annoying ‘thanks for following me’ auto-responders on Twitter.

You don’t need to use robots to thank me and click on your stupid website. If you’re too busy to be an actual human on a social network, don’t join another social network. It’s okay. We understand. Lots of people think Twitter is stupid.

Link

Agreed. I’m following you because I figured I’d return the courtesy. Not because I’m interested in finding success, losing weight, buying real estate, finding Jesus or sharing Fantasy Football picks. If that’s all you see in social media – a transaction – then please move on.

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Considering the news, and considering it happened right next door to one of their stores, do you think the brain trust at JC Penny could come up with a better way of hyping their pre-Christmas sales than to refer to them as ‘Doorbusters?’

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