It’s not as well-known or as cleverly named as the Darwin Awards, but the Bad Boss Contest, which announced its second-annual winner yesterday, is at least as entertaining … and, in some cases, all-too familiar.

Omgili is a specialized search engine you might want to add to your Web toolkit. As they explain on their about us page (where they don’t address the phallic nature of that second "i" in their logo design), Omgili "focuses on ‘many to many’ user-generated content platforms such as forums, discussion groups, mailing lists, answer boards and others."

Takeaway for marketers: Omgili isn’t the only place to go to see what people are saying online about your brand, but it’s not a bad place to start.

Maybe. Maybe not. Mahalo poohbah Jason Calacanis says to do exactly that in this Silicon Alley Insider article (thanks to Wil Reynolds over at Seer Interactive for the heads up on this one).

I agree with a lot of what Jason says in the piece … up to a point. Of course, part of his PR strategy is to be provocative, so to say “fire your PR agency” makes sense for him … but probably not for most companies.

There aren’t many execs out there like Jason, meaning there aren’t many execs out there who are able to speak to the media with infectious enthusiasm while thinking on their feet.

That’s where a good PR company comes in — and I hasten to add (having done a lot of PR work over the years) that PR is a subset of marketing, not something that acts apart from the rest of the company’s marketing efforts.

PR gets a bad rap, mainly because most people misunderstand what it is. “Public relations” would be better termed “media relations” to reflect the fact that PR is that component of the overall marketing communications effort to express the company’s DNA to business and the public online, in print, on the radio and on television in ways other than pure advertising.

I have seen and heard about a lot of situations over the past two years or so in which companies dump a lot of dollars down a black hole because they want to go with a big PR firm that will land them the New York Times or Wall Street Journal. Wrong! Here’s a corollary to Jason’s point #10 in his article:

Embrace the small boutique PR firms — they’re the ones who will absorb the DNA of your company and be able to communicate it to the outside world. The big firms? Not that there aren’t good ones out there, but more often than not you’re a small fish in a big pond, they write up a few standard releases, send something out over BusinessWire and they’re done with it.

That’s not PR, that’s not media relations, that’s not marketing communications … that’s just feeding the workflow and covering their overhead.

Takeaway for marketers: Any PR/media relations professional worth your dollars will (1) marinate themselves in what your company does, (2) look at your company as a genuine partner, not a client, (3) look at themselves as an extension of your company, not a disconnected agency, (4) help shape the stories and the news that will achieve maximum exposure in the media and (5) tell those stories — and enable your company spokesmen to tell those stories — with passion and humor and expertise that stands apart from the pack.

Because the experience of watching news anchors try to say something about Barack Obama’s VP pick when they have absolutely nothing to say about Obama’s VP pick has driven me nearly insane, I decided to Google each letter of the alphabet. Here’s what I found.

Capital letters and lower-case letters deliver different results. Googling "A" delivered 19,950,000,000 results while Googling "a" delivered 20,010,000,000 results.

For eight letters, the top result was a well-known company or brand: C (Citigroup), E (E! network), F (Ford Motor Company), O (Cirque du Soleil), Q (Qwest Communications), V (Visa), W (W Hotels) and Y (Yahoo).

For five letters — I, J, K, U and Z — the top result was their respective Wikipedia entries.

Two letters returned a single AdWords result: K (K Stock Information / Check Stock Quotes, Tips and Blogs / Get Your Portfolio In Shape / Money.AOL.com) and R (100% R …and more / High performance optimized R / Full commercially supported RPro /www.Revolution-Computing.com)

G and U both sent me over to the Google calculator after displaying a gravitational constant and a rack unit, respectively.

The top result for M was the well-known Fritz Lang movie, of course, but the top result for S was craigslist. Huh?

A delivered the most results, while Q delivered the fewest. Here’s the complete ranking:

A = 19,950,000,000
I = 10,020,000,000
S = 8,770,000,000
T = 7,710,000,000
E = 6,720,000,000
D = 6,630,000,000
M = 6,060,000,000
C = 5,400,000,000
O = 5,330,000,000
L = 4,830,000,000
P = 4,790,000,000
N = 4,540,000,000
X = 4,190,000,000
V = 4,060,000,000
W = 3,740,000,000
Y = 3,460,000,000
F = 3,370,000,000
B = 2,890,000,000
U = 2,870,000,000
K = 2,770,000,000
R = 2,700,000,000
G = 2,630,000,000
Z = 2,610,000,000
H = 2,420,000,000
J = 2,270,000,000
Q = 2,080,000,000

I have no idea what, if anything, any of this proves, but it all started when I saw Jeffrey Ross on Comedy Central make a joke about googling "Google" (which returned 2,710,000,000 results) and things just sorta got out of control from there.

Has Obama’s text message been delivered yet?

"Commonplaces never become tiresome. It is we who become tired when we cease to be curious and appreciative."
—Norman Rockwell