“Every good act is charity. A man’s true wealth hereafter is the good that he does in this world to his fellows.”
—Moliere

Bruce Springsteen has a new album coming out March 6, and the way it’s being marketed is really smart.

Starting February 20 and continuing through March 2, 10 of the album’s 11 songs will be streaming daily, one song per day, on partner sites like Rolling Stone, Spin and Paste. The 11th song and the opening track, “We Take Care of Our Own,” was released January 19.

For a complete rundown of sites and links–and more Springsteen news than you can handle–check out Backstreets. The sites and links rundown, including which song is streaming on which day, is in the February 20 post.

It’s a smart strategy for a number of reasons, mainly because it’s tapping into the online audiences of 10 major music sites. Sure, the entire album is being offered essentially for free, but to get it all you have to be pretty tech-savvy in order to capture the streams. (Plus it would be a lot easier to just tap into the leak of the album that happened earlier this week.)

Meanwhile, awareness and word of mouth is growing significantly on a record that is, from what I’ve heard so far, is as powerful and thematically cohesive a set of songs, both lyrically and musically, as anything he’s ever done.

So yeah, Springsteen’s giving away the whole deal. So what? My prediction is that Wrecking Ball will get a ton of five-star reviews and will be one of the top-sellers of 2012, in no small part because of this marketing strategy.

Bruuuuuuuuce!

What happens to your digital life when you die? Here’s 3:53 of info and insight.

This is anything but a comics blog, but Archie, Betty, Veronica, Jughead, Reggie and the rest of the good folks of Riverdale have been noted by LOHAD on occasion. After all, Archie is undeniably one of America’s best-known pop culture brands, and the way that brand is being marketed and handled should be of interest to anyone who deals with marketing generally and pop culture marketing specifically.

So when TMZ and the Wall Street Journal are writing about turmoil in the 73-year-old publishing company, it’s worth taking notice … especially when the WSJ is writing about the turmoil thusly:

The suits portray her as an erratic figure riding roughshod through Archie Comic’s 25-person office in Mamaroneck, N.Y., launching into expensive and ill-advised business ventures while alienating and harassing the staff.

She said a female employee owed her job to her physical endowments, pressed for firing staffers she said were too old or too fat, repeatedly referred to men by an anatomical term for their sexual organs and asked some to pull down their pants in the office, according to sworn statements from Goldwater and other staffers.

You wanna go back and click those article links now, don’t you?

(Hat tip to Mark Evanier’s blog for the heads up on the WSJ piece.)

If you’re one of the lucky few who gets the day off, you might want to spend some of that extra time catching up on your reading. Here are a few links you may find worth exploring:

15 Ways to Use Facebook Pages for Business

13 Tools to Simplify Your Social Media Marketing

9 Facebook Pages To Watch On President’s Day

6 Allies Every Corporate Social Media Effort Needs to Succeed

4 Ideas On Social Media For B2B Marketing

3 Reasons Prospects Ignore Your Emails

By the way: I have the feeds in my Google Reader categorized so that one set of feeds flows into “Business,” another into “Tech and Internet” and another into “Marketing, Advertising and PR.” When it comes to chunking information into some number of ways, tool, allies, ideas, reasons or other such list, “Marketing, Advertising and PR” is far and away the champ.

The lesson, I suppose, is something most people have known for quite some time: There’s a general tendency for businessmen and techies to want to dig deeper into a single subject so they can understand all the minutiae from all the angles, while marketers and publicists tend to want their information quick, digestible and prioritized so they can move on to the next thing. Or at least that’s what headline writers on the internet believe.