Etc.

… you give your fans an offer they can’t receive elsewhere.

I’ve published a few articles of late that indicate a few things: Facebook users do not want to be sold to while they are feeding their chickens on Farmville or whacking someone in Mafia Wars. But consumers who become your fan on Facebook do expect something in return.

It looks like woman’s apparel and accessories seller Nine West is going about it the right way. Marketing firm Fluid launched its Fluid Fan Shop app on Nine West’s Facebook page this week , and it allows the merchant’s Facebook fans to shop for select discounted items without leaving the social network. more

When we were looking to “go Web 2.0″ with the Chief Marketer Network’s Websites back in 2008, the topic of article commenting came up. The team that was assembled had asked if there were any vendors who had a plug-in that would work with our site, or if we should look at some sort of a comment aggregation service to facilitate the process.

My advice then: Don’t go with Topix.com. It’s a cesspool for bottom-feeding Internet trolls who have nothing better to do but cowardly hide behind aliases and leave racist, homophobic, libelous, slanderous, tasteless, classless and downright rude comments on every article it attaches itself to. And apparently the publications that use Topix.com do not have the ability to remove those comments, no mater how much its reputation can be damaged.

Topix.com sunk to a new low this week, giving consumers to self-serve privilege to remove racist, homophobic, libelous, slanderous, tasteless, classless and downright rude comments left about them… for a $19.95 fee. That’s just as disgusting as the trolls who have helped spearhead the death of civility on the Internet. more

Hearst runs four daily newspapers in Fairfield County, Connecticut, and its Websites recently went through a redesign to get on the same platform and to look a little more uniform.

Now we all know people hate change. And the readers of the Greenwich Time weren’t happy about their new homepage.

They wanted their clock back. The Greenwich Clock had been a part of the site’s banner - and identity - even before newspapers went digital. more

I wrote this piece yesterday for Multichannel Merchant about updated Federal Trade Commission guidelines that will force bloggers who receive swag or cash in exchange of a blog post to disclose their relationship with product or service.

And after I heard Emilio Amodei, founder of BlogVertise, discuss how his company can get your product blogged about by hundreds of bloggers, I had a red flag go up.

I can see someone with a product or a service wanting to get exposed by bloggers back in 2005 or before. But now we’re in an era of product ratings and recommendations. And consumers are savvy enough to go to, say, Amazon.com and see what people who have used a certain product has to say about it, rather than trusting Joe Blogger who may just say nice things for the payout.

It’s all a matter of trust, and I think Joe Consumer is going to trust sites with ratings and recommendations before a blogger.

What do you think? Is the blogosphere a reputable enough place yet? Or for that matter, are readers smart enough to see a product pitch as a product pitch?

The video below was played yesterday at Shop.org’s annual summit, between keynotes delivered by Terry Lundgren of Macy’s and Sucharita Mulpuru of Forrester Research. It’s a video I’ve seen before - matter of fact a Facebook friend posted it to her newsfeed recently when she got hired in a sales position with a social media consultancy.

Now of course it built some excitement for social media. Just play it and see. The upbeat music, the positive facts about social media usage, and so forth.

The problem is, we’re all missing the boat with social media. And for merchants, social media may not be 100% worth the hype. more

Public Relations people are getting smart… or I should say Google Savvy. Now instead of pitching their press releases, article ideas, and clients for interview to targeted publications, they are pitching ideas via Google search results.

Which, really, is just annoying to this writer/editor.

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