We've all had those ideas that seemed like good one at the time and then perhaps didn't seem so good the following morning. Or when the police got involved.
But a marketing agency in Australia reportedly decided to skip straight to the part involving the police.
Mentally Friendly (because mental friends really are the best) decided to set up a Twitter account in the name of the New South Wales police. Which was an interesting thing to do, save for the fact that an increasingly large number of people thought it really was written by the New South Wales police.
Well, it did feature the real police shield.
Strangely, the New South Wales police decided to investigate this Twitter page. According to the Australian ABC News, the police contacted Twitter to ask about its impersonation policy. Which prompted Mentally Friendly to reveal itself in a blog post on the company's site.
The company explained it "wondered what the social reaction would be if a law enforcement agency or figure of authority joined the conversation." And it discovered that "users responded positively to the concept of an authorities (sic) presence in social media."
Mentally Friendly added that "the intent was never to misrepresent the NSW Police Force, but to create a simple and genuine dialog with which to gauge the public's response."
You might wonder why Mentally Friendly didn't become mental friends with the police first before trying its experiment.
Especially if you read a tweet from May 4th that informed the public: "Our newest police pups have been named. Meet: Darcy, Dax, Demon, Dexter, Diego, Digger, Dingo, Dozer and Dragon, and Delta."
I have no idea if this information is true or not. But I would have wondered a little as to why they all began with a "D." I would have wondered significantly that, if Dingo got a little hungry, we might soon have read the headline: "A Dingo ate my suspect."
I would, however, have wondered hugely about the site's very first tweet on March 5th: "Enjoying new secret search powers."
Wouldn't we all if we had them?
Still, it appears that the New South Wales police, once they discovered what was going on, decided simply to confiscate the site and use it themselves.
On May 20th, the site tweeted: "All tweets prior to today were not official NSW Police messages. Go to www.police.gov.nsw.au for our latest media releases in full."
Perhaps, therefore, it is unsurprising that Mentally Friendly added in its blog post: "Big thanks to the NSW Police Force for having an outstanding sense of humor."
Oh, if only all bodies of authority had an outstanding sense of humor.
As Domino's Pizza proved last week, it is not easy to find youth of today who will perform their jobs without putting cheese up their nose and then down onto a sandwich.
So how can one not admire rival restaurant chain Pizza Hut? Unbowed and uncowed by the social media difficulties Domino's experienced with their booger video, Pizza Hut is looking for a Twittering intern.
Yes, someone who can take those 140 characters and turn them into a positive pizza life force.
If you wander with purpose to the Pizza Hut home page, you will discover these magic words of hope: "Apply to be the first Pizza Hut Twintern."
Will we soon be reading tweets telling of Pizza Hut delivery boys and desperate housewives? One can only hope.
(Credit: CC Tracy Hunter/Flickr)What will this exalted position demand? Well, according to Bob Kraut, Pizza Hut's vice president for marketing communications, this is not a position for the sour of heart.
The job, he told The New York Times, will mean that the chosen Twitterer will be: "Our social media journalist, chronicling in 140 characters or less what's going on at Pizza Hut."
All of it? Even if the Twintern discovers indeterminate, possibly human, droppings adorning the Hawaiian toppings in Chattanooga? Even if the Twintern happens upon extra-marital exercises, brought on by the pressures of crusty excellence, in the fridges of Fargo?
If you want to aspire to this extraordinarily happening position, applications are being taken from this morning. Mr. Kraut expects the finest candidates to use their social media ingenuity.
And he is an optimistic sort. "I guess if we melt the servers on this kind of thing, it'll be a good thing."
May I bid a hearty good morning to the IT department at Pizza Hut? Ladies and gentlemen, I hope you have fine overtime rates.
The nice chaps at Google seem to be attracting much bad publicity.
While they march on in their desperate quest to copy every book in the world, photograph every home and hamlet, and store every last detail of our preferences and entrails, the world is having its doubts.
On Saturday, for example, the Daily Mail declared that Google was "too slow to take down street snoop photos."
The company has, allegedly, been inundated with demands from Brits to take down their particulars and has not moved quickly to respond. Google replied that there were only a few cases and that these could be put down to confusion of one sort of another.
Still, it must be quite annoying when you think you're at the forefront of the technological futurama and people just don't appreciate you.
It must be slightly galling when artists in Canada are preparing for the influx of Street View cars by creating T-shirts reading "We're watching you," which they hope will be repeatedly featured on Street View footage as the cars stare their way around Ontario and beyond.
Ryan Ringer, a Canadian street performer, told UPI: "We want to say to Google and the rest of the world that we're aware of the somewhat creepy nature of this."
And that's the thing Google seems not to realize. People don't recoil against its supposed evil intentions. They recoil against its creepiness.
It's like the bloke you meet at a party whose first question to you isn't: "Hello, how are you?" It's "I'm thinking of living next door to you and building a rocket in the garden. Isn't that cool?"
You might have hoped, for example, that Google would make a slightly more velvety fist of introducing Street View into the U.K.--a country that has just announced its intention to store every cell phone call, e-mail, and even Website visit made by its citizens for a year.
Surely, in the face of this sort of blanket surveillance (and Britain already has more cameras per square foot than perhaps any country in the world), Google might have come across as quite a decent bunch.
Instead, at the first signs of local unrest, a Google person displayed a particularly inhuman spoke: "Householders are entitled to request their property is removed from the site, but only after the picture has appeared."
This attitude enjoyed a worrying echo when Google's Marissa Mayer, following the departure of designer Douglas Bowman, declared that only data mattered, not seeming to wonder, for a moment, if her data (or her judgment of humanity) might be a little flawed.
All too often, the tone that Google takes is cold, impersonal, even robotic. Perhaps it was entirely surprising and consistent that, in reply to the latest poorly argued criticisms of Google by newspapers, Google's first retort wasn't delivered with charm and a human touch.
It was delivered with the furiously typing fingers of a lawyer.
I'm sure he's a very nice lawyer. But when your first response is a legalese one, I'm afraid real, ordinary folks begin to have suspicions. It's only human.
Google needs a little marketing. A strange thing to say about one of the biggest, most famous companies in the world. But I suspect it's true.
I don't mean ad campaigns touting the glory that is Google. No, I mean a little more thought put into the human consequences of launching whatever all-encompassing cleverdom the company dreams up.
Yes, the bigger you get, the more criticism you might have to endure.
But it isn't always necessary to encourage that criticism by blindly declaring what you're going to do, doing it without seeming to think through the human consequences (even if they seem illogical) and then expecting everyone to be frightfully impressed.
One of Google's greatest moves was not a technological one. It was the marketing masterstroke (some might say, fortunate marketing masterstroke) of calling itself Google. You're prepared to forgive a Google far more than, say, a Search Incorporated.
But just a little less engineered preening and a touch more human aforethought might make Google's life slightly easier.
I've always been a little suspicious of the Scout movement.
The uniforms. The slightly too correct and frightfully ancient hairstyles of some of the senior members. The Scout Promise that gets boys to promise: "To keep myself physically strong, mentally awake, and morally straight." And gets every girl to declare she will: "respect myself and others, respect authority, use resources wisely, make the world a better place, and be a sister to every Girl Scout."
Now these strangely clothed beings have gone a little too far. They have trampled upon Wild Freeborn.
Wild Freeborn is not some secluded territory in the depths of North Carolina. Wild Freeborn is an 8-year-old Girl Scout from the depths of North Carolina.
Her task in these economically difficult times was to sell 12,000 boxes of Girl Scout cookies. Enough, surely, to cause a significant depletion in the population of North Carolina. But let's not inflate that.
Because Wild Freeborn decided to use a little wild, free enterprise. She went to her Dad--no, not Axl, but Bryan--and asked him to help her achieve this monstrous goal. Bryan is a Web designer. Bryan loves his daughter.
So her helped her make a YouTube video in which she coined the memorable line: "Buy cookies--they're yummy."
She sold 700 boxes (at $3.50 each, in case you were wondering).
Of course, there was just one tiny, strangely dressed problem: The Girl Scouts of the USA. Specifically, the fact that the group bans Internet sales.
A representative for the Girl Scouts, Denise Pesich, told NBC's "Today" show: "We want to make sure that whatever the girl is doing is integrated into the program that she's studying. We want to make sure we are in the development stages of a technological platform that will integrate it and be fair and equitable for all girls. But more importantly, it's girl safety at its core."
Pesich acknowledged that she had no fears for Wild's safety because her father was overseeing her effort but insisted she couldn't guarantee it would be the same with all children.
Haven't you ever seen little girls selling cookies with no adults in sight? I certainly have.
Bryan Freeborn believes he and Wild were doing nothing wrong as they were limiting their orders to buyers in their immediate area, so that they could deliver them personally.
"The whole intent was to help my daughter meet her goals, utilizing up-to-date marketing principles," he told the morally straight Matt Lauer of NBC.
But up-to-date is surely not a phrase one could readily attach to all of these scouty people. So now Wild Freeborn is faced with having to sell 12,000 boxes of cookies the old-fashioned way: standing outside supermarkets, staying physically strong, remaining mentally awake, and annoying people into submission. Can this really be "using resources wisely"?
Suddenly, I have decided to give up cookies for Lent. Except Google's, of course. Everyone loves Google's.
"Steve Jobs is not dying! That means I can still make some money out of his ass!"
Jerque Rathbone, 10 years in Wall Street and perhaps another 10 in emotional years, expressed his feelings a little louder than a normal person might have.
Mike Johnson, Jerque's lunch companion, knew how to handle situations like this. A web designer fallen on penal times, Mike had once known the good side of Jerque and these days he pretended it was still there.
"But Jerque," he said, "isn't that a little, um, harsh? I mean the guy's a human being. Don't you feel bad about squeezing the last dollar out of a sick man?"
"Feel bad?! Feel bad?! You kidding me?!" said Jerque with a shriek that threatened the wine glasses. "Apple lied through their teeth about his health! What was it they said?! He had a bug?! Bug, my ass! Jobs had to tell the truth in the end because Wall Street made him!"
"So you think Apple is nothing without Steve Jobs?" asked Mike, as innocently as he could muster.
"Apple is Steve Jobs! Steve Jobs is Apple! He's the whole damn Granny Smith! He goes down, it all goes down!" decibeled Jerque.
"Because you'll decide Apple stock will be worth less?" asked Mike.
"Worthless! You bet! I'll buy IBM, HUD, whatever the hell three-letter friggin' companies are out there!" declared Jerque, as if he was suddenly making a speech to undecided voters.
(Credit:
CC Mr. Bill)
"Hold on, let me see if I understand this. He announced he's not dying and the Apple share price goes up. But by doing that, what you're really telling the world is that you don't think he has anyone in place to take over from him. It's a negative statement. How do you know he has no succession in place?" said Mike.
"Because if Wall Street hasn't been told, it doesn't exist!" explained Jerque, his face contorting in something that strangely resembled pain. "You tell Wall Street what's going on and Wall Street makes its bets on what you say! On a daily basis! On an hourly basis! That's how it works! We don't take real risks! We take calculated risks!"
"Calculated on the basis of what?" wondered a confused Mike.
"Of knowing everything that's happening, so that we can be sure we'll make money! This guy is so self-obsessed, I bet he thinks he's gonna live forever!" wailed Jerque.
"So he has no right to keep his illness secret? I mean, it's not as if his performance is slipping all that much, is it?"
"He has no right to catch a cold without Wall Street knowing about it! Who does he think he works for?!" hissed Jerque, still loudly.
"But when you had the inside of your nose replaced with that new plastic gizmo, did you tell your bosses? Or your clients?" asked Mike, hanging on to his innocent tone like a child gripping his last cookie.
"None of their damn business! I'm not a CEO of a public company! I'm just a guy trying to make a living in a world populated by cheats and liars!"
"So do you hold out any hope for Apple without Steve Jobs?" asked Mike.
"I didn't until this morning! Did you see the footage from Macworld?! The guy standing in for Jobs! What's his name, Diller?!"
"Schiller."
"Yeah, right! I think he might be a good bet!" chirped Jerque.
"Yeah?" said a surprised Mike.
"Yeah! That guy's carrying at least 25 pounds over! No way he's got some hormone imbalance! We'll need to know his cholesterol numbers, though!"
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