Okay, so I’m really tempted to name names in this post, but I’m going to take the high road and talk about principles, not specifics.

I’ve worked with bloggers for many, many years to get the word out about my clients’ products and services. I don’t clog up the tubes of the interwebs with mass mailings of press releases; I much prefer to work one-on-one with the most relevant blogs for the specific product.

Recently, I offered a blogger more than $300 worth of free tickets to a specific event that was perfect for the blog’s audience. The response:

“I charge an administrative fee for hosting a giveaway. The fee for a giveaway with review is $50 payable via Paypal. Said fee covers my time creating the post, promoting [the event] via Twitter and Facebook, contacting and collecting the winners’ information and forwarding the same to you. In addition to the above, I would also tweet about the event as I attend it; thereby, creating a media buzz during and after the giveaway.”

Really? I’m going to give you more than $300 worth of stuff, and you’re going to charge me $50? Ummmm … no thanks, there are plenty of other blogs in the sea.

Seriously: In the world of online marketing and media relations, bloggers I deal with (almost) universally love getting stuff to give away. Contests draw readers, increase reader involvement, give the blogger something fun to talk about. It’s a win-win. It’s all good.

So don’t be getting all greedy and asking for an “administrative fee.” You’re already getting something of significant value. I’m giving away something of significant value. Asking me to pay you for the privilege of giving you something? Well, that’s just plain rude, crude, and socially unacceptable.

There. I feel better having gotten that off my chest.

Takeaway for marketers: If you’re thinking about paying someone to give your stuff away, think again. If you have to pay, it really isn’t all that valuable, then, is it?

If I were a different type of person, or maybe if I had more spare time, I’d illustrate this post with a graph or some SmartArt or a chart with circles and arrows and a paragraph explaining what it was. But the post title will have to do, and the Gilda Radner shot will make sense in a moment.

I’m sensing something in the social media ether that makes me wonder. It goes like this:

It takes time to participate properly in social media networks. I’ve blogged about this before, mainly around the notion of Social Media Fatigue (SNF).

But for a lot of business professionals, even those of us who participate regularly in social media, the level of participation waxes and wanes and ebbs and flows based on our own personal triage level.

So, for example: I might spend an hour on a given day commenting on articles I’ve read on industry sites, tweeting links to those articles, creating LinkedIn discussions about the topics in those articles, posting material to Facebook about the articles, adding the article links to my Delicious account … well, you get the idea.

All good social media stuff.

But then work gets in the way: Three potential clients need to receive presentations next week, a current client has a marketing fire drill that needs to be addressed, that hour-long conference call runs two hours and created a 12-item ToDo list … well, again you get the idea.

So what happens to the social media hour? It gets pushed to the back burner while the work issues get addressed.

Thinking about this dynamic in aggregate terms raises a lot of questions, foremost among them being this:

If the quantitative value of social media participation by the smartest and most in-demand professionals decreases, does the qualitative value of the social media network in question necessarily decrease?

It would seem obvious to say yes. But that leads to a whole host of other questions, such as:

Are the most active participants in social media those people who aren’t necessarily the most in-demand professionals? Is it that the most in-demand professionals simply don’t have time to participate in social media? Or don’t need to anyway? What does this dynamic say about all the self-proclaimed social media “experts”? Or about the nature of heavy users of social media? What implications does this dynamic have for B2B social media marketing? Does this dynamic help explain why mom bloggers have become so influential in social media? Does a down economy necessarily mean increased social media participation?

To paraphrase Roseanne Rosannadanna: Yep, I gotta lotta questions.

I don’t have many answers, though, but it feels like there’s some there there. I’ll leave it to greater minds than mine to figure it all out; I gotta get back to work.

It’s old news that the Olympics is going to lose money for NBC, but do they have to be so obnoxious in the process?

Yesterday, something new started popping up on my teevee screen: an NBC Olympics Interactive widget. What was particularly interesting really obnoxious about this widget was that it kept appearing at random times during actual programming, like a power up in a video game.

Once you click into the widget you can get news, medal counts, information about Team USA, and ads for Parenthood. But if you want this information, you need to wait for the power up to appear; it’s not part of the FiOS widget directory, at least not as I type this.

I can just imagine some genius in the interactive marketing department of NBC selling the idea: “It’s going to be great! We’ll push content right to the viewer! They’ll be able to choose whatever kind of Olympics information they want! And we can work with the cable operators to push content not just on NBC itself, but on all the networks of NBC. Plus, we can tag the widget with promos for our shows — it’s a win-win!”

Except that it’s not, genius. It’s interruption marketing at its worst, and it sucks. I’m trying to hear what Rachel is saying about Newt’s Daily Show gaffe and you’re trying to suck me into reading a bio of Tanith Belbin. Really?

Okay, deep breath. To be fair, this is probably a beta test gone wrong. The few news stories I checked were all incomplete and the medal count was showing the U.S. as having 25 medals two days before the Games have yet to begin. And maybe NBC isn’t even to blame; maybe the dear people at Verizon FiOS are responsible for this wretched customer experience.

Either way, it sucks.

Oh, and by the way: Those animated program ads on the bottom of the screen? They suck, too; USA Network is a particularly heinous offender. You all need to just stop it, already.

Takeaway for marketers: It’s not all the snow making me cranky. Interruption marketing sucks. Period.

Paying bills is never a particularly enjoyable process, but it’s even worse when you believe that some scumbag company has latched on to your personal information and started charging you for a service you know with absolute certainty you never requested.

This happened to me yesterday, and it’s not the first time: My Verizon bill included a $20 charge “billed on behalf of Headwind Media” ostensibly for “Cmi xclusivemo.” You can see the charge from Headwind Media in the scan above.

It’s probably no coincidence that a Google search for “cmi xclusivemo” returns as its first result this Ripoff Report page.

Here’s another one worth viewing; search for “Headwind” on that page and look at the comments.

Do a search for “Headwind Media” on Google and look at all the complaints that turn up.

My guess is that Headwind Media is doing some sort of data mining to add customers to their books: When I called to have them remove the charge from my phone bill (which, to their dubious credit, the Headwind Media representative said they would), I was told that the account was activated using an email address I haven’t used in years (and barely used when I did).

Plus, the woman on the phone who was looking into the account referenced the name of my wife, who never had access to that email address to begin with.

About five seconds of Googling will demonstrate how the Internet is lousy with complaints about this sort of practice.

It needs to stop.

Immediately.

Oh, by the way: If someone from Headwind Media should actually get back in touch with me, I will be more than happy to print their response unedited. I sent emails to several addresses I found online (two of them returned delivery errors as I write this) saying, among other things, that I “would appreciate  your perspective on how my phone bill could get charged by your company using information that is both erroneous and outdated.” One response from this address was simply: “What can we do for you?” Ummmmm … for starters, show that you actually read my email?

Takeaway for everyone: Take a very close look at your phone bill before you pay it.

JANUARY 26 UPDATE: Everyone in the world of customer service should be half as helpful and as nice as the Lisa from Verizon I just spoke with. A few takeaways:

(1) You can call your phone company and put an automatic block on miscellaneous charges like these, though it’s not 100 percent foolproof (Lisa said she was obligated to say that, but she also added that for all intents and purposes it really is).

(2) Lisa told me that I was the fourth person today calling her about Headwind Media. Multiply Lisa by however many customer service representatives Verizon has, and the magnitude of whatever they’re up to becomes clear.

(3) Lisa told me that in addition to Headwind Media, the two other companies people complain most about for similar practices are OAN and ESBI. Search for either of those along with “telephone” and “bill” and you’ll see all the complaints out there.

Another takeaway for everyone: Call your phone company immediately and block the charges now — before they get added to your phone bill without your knowledge.

Yesterday’s New York Times carried an op-ed piece entitled, Search, But You May Not Find. I’m always interested by op-eds that focus on marketing and tech issues rather than political and social issues, and this one was no exception.

The piece, written by Adam Raff, co-founder of U.K. price comparison site Foundem, proposes the notion of “search neutrality.”

What is search neutrality? Well, according to Adam, it’s “the principle that search engines should have no editorial policies other than that their results be comprehensive, impartial and based solely on relevance.”

I’m more of a veteran generalist, not a hardcore search guy, and I realize that the question of Google’s search results being less than 100 percent objective is old news, but that principle struck me as something worth examining.

Comprehensive — Well, according to Internet Systems Consortium, the number of active domains is increasing at a staggering rate, nearly 100 million annually. Does the notion of “search neutrality” suggest some sort of legislation mandating that any given search engine, whether Google or Bing or Yahoo!, absolutely keep up with this explosive growth? And if not absolute, if only 99 percent of those 100 million domains get indexed, well, that’s a million domains slipping through the cracks. Does indexing 99 percent of available domains constitute “comprehensive”? Does not indexing one million available domains constitute “comprehensive”?

Impartial and based solely on relevance — This is where the idea that a search engine should have “no editorial policies” falls apart. Just what constitutes “relevance”? What’s relevant to one person may be entirely irrelevant to another. And isn’t that what all search engines struggle with all the time, trying to produce results that are highly relevant to the greatest number of people? Search engines display results based on complex algorithms, but those very algorithms constitute an editorial judgment, a decision to weigh this factor a little more heavily than that factor. By their very nature and existence, they are editorial policies.

So what’s Adam’s op-ed really all about? Well, a bit of searching (ironically?) produces an eConsultancy piece titled, A Study In SEO Fail. If you found yesterday’s op-ed interesting, it’s a must-read that indicates the Times was punk’d into printing a tech exec’s petulant rant. Paul Kedrosky over on InfectiousGreed seems to agree.

It’s hard not to, though, when, on the one hand, the op-ed is complaining that Foundem “was effectively ‘disappeared’ from the Internet” by Google, but on the other hand, a Google search indicates about 54,700 Foundem pages.

If you want to learn more about search neutrality (at least the way Foundem sees it) check out the Foundem’s Google Story page on searchneutrality.org — self-described as “a Foundem initiative.”

Meanwhile, even as newspapers are dying left and right, the Times op-ed page remains an important piece of press real estate. When they run a piece like this, though, the message seems clear: Stick to political and social issues and leave the tech and Web opining to others.