Given all the hotel rooms I’ve stayed in for business over the years, seeing this hidden-camera report makes me thankful I never caught ebola. Or worse.

Click the link … if you dare.

Anne Holland at MarketingSherpa makes a salient observation about copywriting for the Web … over here.

TechCrunch alerts us to a new study that finds bloggers are “better adjusted and live healthier, happier social lives.”

In the world of search engine optimization, there are white hat techniques and black hat techniques. As the names imply, you want to stay away from black hat techniques — they might get your site banned from Google.

What techniques should you avoid? This MarketingProfs article spells some of them out. And as is often the case with these sorts of articles, the accompanying comments are at least as good as the article itself.

Takeaway for marketers: Avoid black hat techniques. A possible short-term gain  could cost you in the long run.

Here’s a little thought exercise for a Sunday afternoon.

You’re Hasbro and Mattell. You own the rights to Scrabble. You wake up one morning and something called Scrabulous has nearly three million registered users, about 700,000 of whom play it every day.

Choice A: Call in the lawyers, denounce Scrabulous as piracy and threaten legal action against its creators.

Choice B: Call in the marketers and work with Scrabulous to figure out a smart way to integrate Scrabble into a product that’s become a huge Internet craze.

As this article in today’s New York Times explains, Hasbro and Mattell have opted for choice A.

It’s a mistake. Instead of tapping in to the craze and working to amplify it to their own benefit (and, not incidentally, to the benefit of the three million registered Scrabulous users), they’d prefer to try and shut down the craze, create something of their own and recreate the craze.

Takeaway for marketers: Are you riding the waves or trying to create a wave of your own?