What's the ROI of putting your pants on in the morning?

Just like the ROI of social media marketing, it's too high not to do it, as Brian Halligan of HubSpot implies in one of the 10 items on his 2010 Marketing Wish List.

What's on your marketing wish list for the new year?

Advertising on Twitter? Making money by tweeting presents potential ethical dilemma for users

Advertising is making its way into users' tweets on Twitter. This raises ethical questions for many users of the popular micro-blogging service. This weekend in the Sunday New York Times Business . . . more

Social Media ROI: Socialnomics video

Erik Qualman over at Socialnomics has created another excellent video in his Socialnomics series about social media and the impact it's having on marketing, customer interaction, and business. This . . . more

Captain Morgan campaign nixed by NFL

	In accordance with its standard policy, the NFL has prohibited a campaign by Captain Morgan , makers of the popular brand of spiced rum which has been running its "Got a little Captain in you?" campaign . . . more

Targeted Advertising

I went to the Mad Men page over at amctv.com this afternoon and this was the banner at the top - talk about nailing your target audience (click to biggify):



What a great banner ad.

Swear Jar

Comedy:

Adrants Interviews Mad Men Creator Matthew Weiner

Read it here.

Holiday Party Hijinks

A bit of internets fame for your host, courtesy of Adrants. From last week's holiday party.

Mad Men

Are you watching?

This is AMC's original series centered on the creative director of Sterling & Cooper, a Madison Avenue ad agency set in the 1960's. It's smart, it's funny, it's got great characters:

• Uber-asshole partner Sterling
  
• Debonair Don Draper
  
• Erudite-yet-insane Pete Campbell
  
• Girl-next-door-intelligent-and-li'l-bit-sassy-secretary Peggy
• Cadre of overpaid, underworked, soused, chauvanistic copywriters, ad execs, and oh - the blatantly gay Art Director
  
• Draper's beautiful, immature, under-medicated, blondified housewife
• The impossibly curvaceous Joanie, head secretary
  

The costume is incredible; the dialogue, save some absurd lines, is fantastic; the feel of the series is "Sixties" - and all that entails. The main character is a womanizer, a dick to his coworkers, and essentially a gigantic ego who is grossly overpaid and lives life without either moral or social checks and balances (admit it: most of you men want to be Don, and most of you women want to be with Don).

It works. Well. It's great stuff. Check it out.

Talk About Viral Marketing

Go here and click on "How Bodygroom saved the beach" down in the lower right corner. It's...just...brilliance. Bust-a-gut hilarity. The absolute funny.

The Future of Media?

A fascinating faux-documentary on the "history" of media. It's interesting up until the present, and once it gets into the "future" of media it gets a little freaky. Some very compelling stuff in here. Food for thought at any rate. A point to Mean Rachel for posting it; she is a blogette on the cutting edge of the nouveau-internets.

This especially interests me because in my industry (marketing) we are currently talking a lot about this Web 2.0 stuff, the up-and-coming Social Media Optimization (just like Search Engine Optimization has been and still is what everyone wants), and the shift from traditional media to newer forms in general. For example, in our last new business meeting, we were actually discussing "the blogosphere." This is pretty incredible when I think back to even a few years ago, when I first started blogging - when we used to joke about getting paid to blog.

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On a related note, there's an article here which breaks down an experiment contrasting the standard pay-per-click online advertising structure (Google AdWords) with paying someone ($10/hr.) to optimize the social media network for the four sites in the experiment; basically paying someone to blog, follow links, engage in discussions, comment on other blogs, etc. - in essence creating along business lines that which so many of us have already established for mere social/entertainment purposes with our Weblogs, Facebook and MySpace pages, and any number of social networking or personal "online presence" vehicles.

The experiment is of great interest to anyone in marketing (or indeed, anyone who owns a business or wishes to generate increased Web traffic), but I think it's of more general interest considering this exploding "prosumer" network that we now have on the internets. Pretty interesting stuff, and makes one's head spin a bit.

P.S. Can you link me on your blog? Thanks!