Okay, well, not November … September, actually, is when I begin see holiday items in the stores. Christmas creep is profoundly infuriating. But today, three days before Black Friday, I received two emails with the following subject lines:

Subject: Black Friday starts today! Reveal your exclusive Mystery eCoupon savings now!

Subject: Black Friday Starts Now – Shop Unique Gifts for Everyone

Bite me, marketers.

That Black Friday is a cancer on the American soul is bad enough, but you’re going to try and extend Black Friday into the rest of the week? Really?

Bite me twice.

Takeaway for marketers: Ask yourselves: Are you providing something of real value to customers, or are you just pissing them/us off?

The New York Post was one of about a zillion outlets that reported the other day about Ashton Kutcher’s Twitter gaffe, in which he wondered to his 8.2 million followers why Joe Paterno was fired as Penn State coach.

Assuming that Paterno was fired without knowing the circumstances of arguably the biggest sports story of the century was stupid enough. I mean, if you’re a big enough sports fan to care about Paterno, how can you not know about the Penn State story?

But let’s focus on the followup to the foolishness. According to the Post story, Kutcher wrote on his blog:

“Up until today, I have posted virtually every one of my tweets on my own, but clearly the platform has become too big to be managed by a single individual.”

Ummmm … what? The size of Twitter itself has absolutely nothing to do with whether you’re able to tweet for yourself or not. Zero. Less than zero. Yet, as the Post reported:

An embarrassed Kutcher announced yesterday he would be handing his Twitter feed over to people at his production company.

Hey, guess what: That’s exactly what people using Twitter don’t want to see: celebrity handlers tweeting for celebrities. That undercuts the whole notion of openness and authenticity and transparency that helps drive Twitter in the first place.

Back to Kutcher’s blog:

“When I started using Twitter, it was a communication platform that people could say what they were thinking in real time and if their facts were wrong the community would quickly and helpfully reframe an opinion. It was a conversation, a community driven education tool, and opinion center that encouraged healthy debate.

“It seems that today that Twitter has grown into a mass publishing platform, where ones tweets quickly become news that is broadcast around the world and misinformation becomes volatile fodder for critics.”

Hey, Kutcher: The conditions haven’t changed, the size of your audience has changed. Twitter is still a platform that allows people to say what they think in real time.

Tweeting about Paterno the way Kutcher did? It was dumb, but the tweet itself was nothing close to, say, what Imus said about the Rutgers women’s basketball team.

What’s really beyond dumb is Kutcher’s overreacting, his absurd explanations and the handing off of his personal Twitter account to others. He’d have been far better off with some apologetic tweets followed by some self-deprecating tweets and keeping his feed his own.

Sorry, Ashton: You and Rick Perry both stepped in it pretty good last week, but Perry did a far, far better job of scraping his boots clean.

Today is a confessional blog post.

Confession: I’m an idiot.

Okay, that’s being a little harsh on myself. But I sure felt like an idiot when I sent a note about I’m Dickens, He’s Fenster to my good friend Joe Bua, a superlative teevee blogger …

… and he responded by telling me he hasn’t blogged since July. To be exact, July 13. Wrote Joe (in part):

Has absolutely no one noticed that I haven’t written anything on my blog since July? Seriously. I even sent out emails to ppl (not you, you’re not on that email list) and no one, NO ONE has figured it out. Yet. Still. I just got tired of it. I get inquiries every day. Many of them. Anyway, sorry … not your fault. I am kinda pissed that there wasn’t any negative reaction to my not blogging anymore.

So here’s why I’m an idiot. Well, two reasons. Number one, I wasn’t checking Joe’s blog every day. It was great. Joe’s a terrific writer. He should be working for — well, for whoever he wants to. Number two, I didn’t check Joe’s blog before I sent my suggestion to him.

All of which says a coupla things about the worlds of blogging, outreach to bloggers and online communications in general.

First of all, if you’re a blogger you should probably assume that once a blogger, always a blogger, so get used to it … at least where your email is concerned. Joe gets inquiries every day because his hard work got him on all sorts of mailing lists for teevee people. It’s a lot easier to delete those emails than it is to delete one’s name from all sorts of mailing lists.

Also, you might want to think about maximizing your push marketing. Sure, people will find you blog, but are you making your feed available via RSS? Are you sending out a regular newsletter? Are you pushing links to particularly notable content out to relevant audiences? If audience really matters to you, you need to keep reaching out to that audience on an ongoing basis, otherwise when you disappear they won’t notice … because they haven’t really been noticing all along.

Now, a word for you people who, like me, do this thing called media relations: Are you even paying attention to the lists you use?

As a blogger, I get all kinds of email from all kinds of people. I’ve even gotten spammed by Tea Party organizations. (Yes, spammed, in the very legal sense, too: I never signed up for their lists, they just added me and started mailing to me. When I asked them how I got onto their lists, they couldn’t tell me. But that’s another rant for another time.) But like once a blogger, always a blogger: It’s easiest to simply delete the email I don’t want to read.

The problem is, we’re all rushing through the day and the week at hyper-internet speeds. Corners get cut all the time, and when corners get cut mistakes get made and people look stupid and people get annoyed.

I don’t know how to slow down this runaway train, but I do know this: We all need to take a deep breath and slow it down and take a little more care with the email we send. Let’s make sure it’s sent to the right people for the right reasons at the right times.

Oh, and while we’re at it, let’s make sure it’s not riddled with typos, either.

Happy Monday.

I mean, really … it’s not that difficult to provide the most basic customer service, is it?

Dumb question.

So here’s the thing: I’m looking to get a new battery for my Galaxy S that I purchased at a T-Mobile store.

Except T-Mobile stores evidently don’t carry batteries for the phones they sell. At least not the ones I tried in Manhattan and here in the suburbs north of Philly.

“Sorry, we don’t carry batteries” has to be in the top five most absurd things any cell phone retail store worker says.

The T-Mobile retail stores are beautiful. They’re stylish, bright and roomy. There’s plenty of room as far as I can tell for some sort of free-standing carousel of batteries. But hey, if it’s gonna mess up your feng shui, just keep ’em behind the counter or in the back somewhere.

But do you really have to put a customer looking for a battery through such a wringer? Instead of aggravating someone by sending them from store to store to face negative response after negative response, why not just stock the damn things? You’re looking for new revenue streams all the time, aren’t you? Why not service desperate phone customers who need a battery now, not when some online retailer can ship it to them.

Oh, and by the way: Your 611 service sucks even harder. I tried calling to register a complaint, and the voice prompt delivers nothing but absolute and total frustration. You’re better off shutting this “customer service” channel down entirely: The absence of creating anger among your customers has to be viewed as a net plus against any miniscule satisfaction collectively gained by telling customers who dial 611 how much they owe and then giving us a series of barely useful voice prompts.

I’ve been blogging once a day, every day without missing a day since mid-2005. Sometimes I get off on a rant, lots of times I’m just linking to something I think you’ll like, but I’ve never repeated a post … till now. I first posted this back in December 2008 and, unfortunately, it still holds true today, albeit with a few minor edits to remove the New Year’s Eve references. Hang in there and stay positive, gang.

The economy sucks. Duh. Maybe you’ve lost a client. Or three. Or your enthusiasm for your job. Or your job. It’s not easy out there.

Here’s the good news: It’s never been easy. What’s good about that? Well, simply that the hard work we all have ahead of ourselves has always been hard, so nothing’s really changed all that much … at least not in the sense that there’s hard work ahead.

It’s more an issue of reminding ourselves (and each other) of some evergreen truths that will help us all get through the financial and personal whitewater that lies ahead.

Here are some things I intend to keep in mind:

1. Stay positive. This is crucial. Everything else flows from a positive attitude. Just as a huge part of the economy’s health is derived from consumer confidence, a huge part of your own mental and professional health is derived from your personal confidence. No one wants to work with anyone who has a negative outlook on things. (Do you?)

2. Remember the golden rule. Treat others the way you want to be treated. If you don’t want to be treated like crap, don’t treat others like crap. You’d think that’s a no-brainer, but don’t we all know people in business who treat others like crap?

3. Minimize your intake of bad news. We’re in for a long haul of stories about this company laying off 10% of their workforce and that company closing their doors and this other company filing for chapter 11. Okay, you already know the economy sucks. What are you gonna do about it, wallow in the details? Or are you going to wake up, stay positive and do what you need to do?

4. Another Great Depression? So? Not every industry tanked during the ’30s. The radio industry did very well. So did print media. Films. Advertising. Take a look at this entry over on Google Answers or this article over on iMedia Connection or this blog post from Ravit Lichtenberg and you’ll see why numbers one and three above, in particular, are so important.

5. Stay busy. The more down time you have, the more opportunity you have to sink into a negative frame of mind that will erode your positive frame of mind. To that end …

6. Network. In real estate it’s “location, location, location.” In business it’s “network, network, network.” Put aside an hour a day to catch up with former coworkers, start actual discussions on LinkedIn (they desperately need some), rekindle friendships from years ago, respond to job ads, talk with recruiters and so on. Or, if not an hour, decide to do three things each day that fall into the networking category. It requires discipline, like going to the gym; you may not see immediate results, but you’ll be a lot healthier for it over the long haul.

7. Remember Sturgeon’s Law. The second portion of Sturgeon’s Law, actually, which states that 90 percent of everything is crap. Everything. That includes 90 percent of everyone out there going after the same job or client as you, 90 percent of your competitors in any given industry and so on down the line. Are you in that 90 percent, or are you a 10-percenter?

8. Remember Col. Sanders. You can read his story over here, but here’s the upshot: When he was trying to sell his famous chicken recipe, he was rejected more than 1,000 times before making the sale. Put yourself in his place: Would you give up after 100 rejections? Or 200? Or 500? Or 783? Or 926? I gotta think the over/under for most people on this one is in the double-digits. So: Keep on keepin’ on.

9. Embrace serenity as you cultivate courage and wisdom. Serenity is accepting the things you can’t change, having the courage to change the things you can and cultivating the wisdom to know the difference. Serenity is a good thing.

10. Remember that every hardship also brings opportunity. Those articles in number four above have a lot of good stuff in them, but here a more practical way of looking at things. Yes, the economy is sucking wind. Yes, a lot of companies are freezing their marketing department hiring or maybe even doing layoffs. But guess what? Tons of work still needs to get done. So if you’re an independent contractor or consultant, you’re in pretty good shape. If you’re an independent contractor or consultant who isn’t part of the 90 percent that’s crap, you’re in very good shape.

11. Remember where your real job security lies. It’s not in any company with whom you work … or used to work. The days of working for a large company for 40 years and retiring on your pension are gone. Your job security lies within you: It’s in your willingness to do a great job (not just a good job) no matter what it takes.

Takeaway for marketers: And for everyone else, for that matter. Relax. Take a deep breath. Stay positive. Keep focused. And may the days ahead bring you all the health, happiness, serenity, courage, wisdom and success you want and deserve.