Awesome resource courtesy of Tamar Weinberg.

Takeaway for marketers: Your reading list is right there. Click away.

Gotta give Hyundai credit for seeing opportunity where most are seeing a lack of consumer confidence and wondering what to do next.

Let’s say you’re in the market for a car, but you’re not sure whether your job will be here in a year. But you need that car. Badly. But you’re really concerned. What to do?

Voila! Hyundai Assurance.

What’s it mean? It means if you wind up unemployed after you make that big-ticket purchase, you can return your new car and walk away from a negative-equity situation, cutting your losses by up to $7,500.

But it’s not just for unemployment. It also applies if you wind up declaring self-employed personal bankruptcy, face a physical disability, lose your driver’s license and several other scenarios. Here’s the press release about it.

Hyundai’s taking a negative and turning it into a positive … and, not incidentally, capitalizing on a real PR opportunity (look for plenty of business stories about this plan in the weeks ahead). That’s called smart marketing in a down economy.

Takeaway for marketers: Get into the heads of your potential customers.

“…we’ll give you the world.” That’s the famous slogan of WINS, the all-news radio station in New York City. But when news happens, it’s amazing what you can access in 22 minutes or less with a laptop and an Internet connection.

Huffington Post reports that Israel’s ground assault on Gaza has begun. A quick bit of Googling reveals this Wired story about how YouTube and Twitter are weapons in the info war. Both stories contain comments from readers around the world ranging from the insightful to the insulting.

Another few minutes of searching reveals a slew of interesting real-time Twitter feeds of significance: the Israeli Consulate in New York, the Al Jazeera feed on the events in Gaza, a feed from Jordan under the name tweetsfromgaza and Gazamom, the feed of a Palestinian journalist living in North Carolina who seems to be in regular contact with her father in Gaza. Searching for #gaza on Twitter reveals many more.

As events halfway around the world unfold, it’s worth pausing to consider how incredibly networked we are today. To say that the flow of digital information is instantaneous has become a tired cliche, but spend a few minutes (you don’t even need to take as many as 22) and it’s genuinely mind-boggling how much information one can gather.

It’s equally mind-boggling how we’re starting to take this astonishing level of information access for granted. We shouldn’t. Ever.

This has been an on-again, off-again issue in my email life over the years. When it recently surfaced, it occurred to me that the more people deal with email, the less they ought to care about this sort of thing.

Anyway, here’s the issue:

Let’s say you’re sending an email to five people in Company X and the names in the To: field of the email are listed like so:

manager@compx.com, seniormanager@compx.com, vicepresident@compx.com, marketingdirector@compx.com, assistantmanager@compx.com

Should the vice president in question get his (or her) shorts in a bunch because (s)he is listed “behind” the manager and the senior manager? For that matter, should the senior manager get upset that the manager is listed first?

People worry about this sort of thing. People worry about people worrying about this sort of thing. I tend to add names in hierarchical fashion to a larger cc: list, but I’m not going to get bent out of shape if someone winds up out of order.

Even so, there are people who genuinely do get bent out of shape if their name somehow breaches an arbitrary perceived email etiquette.

For my $.02, anyone who worries about their position in an email cc: list isn’t paying enough attention to what really matters in their business.

“The object of a New Year is not that we should have a new year. It is that we should have a new soul and a new nose; new feet, a new backbone, new ears, and new eyes. Unless a particular man made New Year resolutions, he would make no resolutions. Unless a man starts afresh about things, he will certainly do nothing effective.”
—G.K. Chesterton