If you’re thinking about getting your company listed on Wikipedia, MarketingSherpa has a pretty good article over here you ought to read. It’s part one of a two-parter; part two should be posted later this week.

In the full panoply of business buzzwords, “viral” continues to hold and lengthen its lead as the most misused word in marketing today.

When a big-ticket agency presents a six-figure recommendation for online advertising and labels ads on blogs as “viral,” I just want to spend a few hours doing primal screams.

It bears frequent repeating: An ad on a blog is not “viral.” Posting a video on YouTube is not “viral.” Creating an interactive element is not “viral.”

Kevin Glennon explained it well a while ago. You can find a link to his must-read article, “Understanding Viral,” over here.

Takeaway for marketers: If you’ve been at the online game more than six months, you should know better than to try passing off a conventional online tactic by calling it a “viral” tactic. And if an agency is trying to pass something off to you as “viral,” know enough to call them on it.

Engadget alerts us to this odd development for telecommuters. Clearly this photo was taken on a casual Friday, otherwise that cardboard box would be more suitably attired.

“Authentic marketing is not the art of selling what you make but knowing what to make. It is the art of identifying and understanding customer needs and creating solutions that deliver satisfaction to the customers, profits to the producers and benefits for the stakeholders.”
—Philip Kotler

Well, this is an interesting piece of comment spam: Amidst the junk comments sent to this blog yesterday came this one (presented here unedited) sent from an Atlanta-area IP and tagged with an email address from a Russian domain. I wonder how many people fall for this sort of thing … and what happens when they do.

hello , my name is Richard and I know you get a lot of spammy comments , I can help you with this problem . I know a lot of spammers and I will ask them not to post on your site. It will reduce the volume of spam by 30-50% .In return Id like to ask you to put a link to my site on the index page of your site. The link will be small and your visitors will hardly notice it , its just done for higher rankings in search engines. Contact me icq 454528835 or write me tedirectory(at)yahoo.com , i will give you my site url and you will give me yours if you are interested. thank you

Uh huh. Or you can just install something like Akismet.