Musings For A Darkened Room

This week I decided to take a different approach with the Social Media Moment. Up to this point the posts I showcased have been funny moments. This week I decided to take a plurk from Anna Bourland that I thought had some really good subject matter and some solid feedback from other Plurk users. Anna discusses an article that she read offline about Social Media and how businesses should monitor it’s use.

Social media involvement has to be monitored to make sure your company goals are the focus.

I think this was a great post, and though ‘Audrey the Quotable’ again was in the running for this plurk. I wanted to go in a different direction this week. This weeks Social Media Moment has a great topic and I think any added feedback or thoughts you would like to share on this plurk would add to it’s value.

Finally, I remind you that you can alway feel free to contact me on Plurk or Twitter and let me know about something funny or interesting that you feel should be featured. I can only see so much, other users can be a great outside set of eyes.

So I’ve got to be honest with this one, this week did not have a slew of tweets or plurks to choose from.  Plurk was filled with mainly pointless banter and the occasional blog push, and with Twitter imploding from the lack of replies you didn’t get a lot of the usual back and forth or amusing comments.  This weeks selection comes from Audrey Seiberling, and though the follow up comments don’t have much strength the initial plurk is golden.

AnAudieMous shares something she said to advancedbourland…

As I mentioned in last weeks Social Media Moment, this is going to be a weekly feature on the blog and since I can’t obviously be on Twitter and Plurk 24/7 (though I wish I could) feel free to send me submissions.  You can direct message me on Twitter or shoot me a private plurk

So I’ve decided to start a new feature on my blog highlighting some of the funniest, most interesting, or most influential posts I find on the various social sites I participate in.  So much goes on with some of these sites that it is easy to miss funny posts or happenings so I am taking this opportunity to share some of my favorites with the masses.  Each week I will note throughout my day various topics or post that catch my interest and on Friday morning I will pick my favorite from the collection.

This week I chose a Plurk thread that I started, not because it is my own, but because of one of the responses in it.  The post started when I unintentionally came up with an incredibly amusing nerdy pick up line while talking with a colleague.  The follow up comment from Melanie Nathan was just icing on the cake.

If I could add people you would be in my favorites, be de.licio.us, and I’d digg you.

My mother-in-law recently became Craigslist obsessed. She has always been a sucker for a bargain or getting something for nothing, so naturally Craigslist makes tons of bargains and free goods available at the click of a mouse. During one of her browsing sessions she stumbled across one of the funniest ads I have ever seen. Since the ad has already been taken down I will share the whole thing here on my blog. Needless to say the items went quick, and a lot of it I’m sure had to do with the ad copy.

FREE! $10 Bill (We’ll throw in a couch and chair too!)

Date: 2008-05-29, 3:31PM

That’s right, we’re giving away a free $10 bill! Too good to be true? Not at all! This is a real, non-counterfeit bill, made in here in the USA and usable all over the world! (*but only where US currency is accepted).

How can you get this free $10 bill you ask? I’ll tell you. This $10 bill has two good friends named Couch and Chair, and they must all go to a good home together. If you can come and take Couch and Chair home with you, then $10 bill would love to join. Sorry, the $10 bill cannot be taken to a new home without BOTH of its friends because it would be lonely.

**For those who haven’t caught on, we’ll pay you $10 to take our couch and chair…**

What would you do with these new great things? Here are some suggestions for Couch and Chair: sit on them, lay on them, spoon with a friend on them, watch tv on them, take a nap on them, read on them. Really, your options are endless.

But what about $10 bill? You could buy two gallons of gas and a slurpee, a ten dollar gift card at your favorite store, ten items at a dollar store, a burrito with guacamole and chips and drink at Chipotle, two lunches at McDonalds, etc. Or, you could just go for a free walk in the park with $10 bill tucked safely in your pocket.

Below are pictures of all three items for your viewing pleasure. The couch and chair are tan leather. The $10 bill is greenish and made with whatever materials bills are made of. Though they don’t show in the picture, the couch has a hole on the seat cushion part where it meets the back that we covered with blankets or pillows and no one ever knew. The chair may have a rip or two as well. Other than that, they’re in decent shape and perfect for those in a new home or apartment, college students, rec rooms, or people who like $10 bills. Please understand their condition before you come. If you don’t want a couch with any rips, this just isn’t the deal for you, but we wish you the best in your search! But really, any rips are easily coverable. Or you could just put the $10 towards a slipcover.

If you’ve read through everything and think your home would be the perfect place for these items, there’s one last thing to know. You’ll have to come pick these up yourself. We’ve fit the Couch and Chair together in a minivan with the back and middle seats removed, but they wouldn’t fit into anything smaller. They aren’t very heavy and are easily lifted by two people. We can help you carry it to your car, but can’t do it for you while you just carry the $10 bill.

This is probably some of the most inventive and amusing ad copy I have read in a while. And it just goes to show that with the right marketing technique you can sell just about anything; even a ten dollar bill and some torn furniture.

Following the lead of a friend I decided to give the St. Andrews Face Transformer a whirl. The tool morphs a photo of a person into various nationalities and art styles. I’ve decided to post the best out of my batch for your viewing pleasure. The others were omitted simply because they didn’t look as realistic and you could see the photo effects over the picture.

East Asian Mike

Feminized Mike

Old Man Mike

West Asian Mike

I’ll let the picture do the talking…

This is a screenshot from the ad that just popped up while listening to my Iris Pandora station. Why is this ironic? Read the Criss Angel Is A Douche Bag and Zotfish Experience.

So as I promised the other day, today is the day I planned to wrap up the ZotFish and Criss Angel posts. Sadly since then there have been no further developments; so I thought I would take this opportunity to simply recap the events from day one.

Last Friday Mashable did a review of ZotFish, a website that provides a means for the general public to ask celebrities, politicians, and athletes questions. The idea behind the site is that people post questions and people on the site vote for the questions. The more votes a question gets the better chance the question has of being answered by the person being asked. I was curious to see if any celebrities had in fact answered and what celebrities were featured. As I browsed through ZotFish I discovered that the magician Criss Angel was one of the available celebrities to ask a question. I decided to test out the site with a humorous question for the emo-gician based off of a running joke on the Kevin and Bean show heard weekday mornings on the Los Angeles based radio station 106.7 KROQ.

The pressing question I decided to ask was, “Why are you such a douche bag?”. Following my post of the question I decided to take the idea and run with it. I generated a small buzz here in the office and was able to get quite a few colleagues to vote for my question. I then took it to the next level and contacted members of the Kevin and Bean show in hopes of getting some on air buzz on Monday.

I continued my personal promotion of the question support, and by 2:45PM PST my question reached the top position with 12 votes outranking the likes of Barrack Obama and Hilary Clinton. The question sat at number 1 for nearly an hour and a half before it was sadly removed from ZotFish. In a funny twist they also removed Criss Angel from their celebrity database.

When I got home I discovered that Michael Baldwin of Zotfish personally responded to my attempt with an e-mail. You can read the e-mail in ZotFish’s Response to my Criss Angel question, but basically he just explained that he appreciated my efforts but obviously it had to be removed due to the harassing nature of the question. Following the question takedown and his response I contacted the Kevin and Bean show so that they were aware that the question would not be there come Monday and I also wrote a response to Michael thanking him for the e-mail and letting him know the backstory on my efforts.

On Saturday I got responses for both Michael and Bean from the Kevin and Bean show regarding my attempts. Michael responded with, “Was amusing” and Bean simply followed up with a “very funny. good effort though!!”.

Though my attempt at getting radio hype for my efforts failed I definitely learned a lot from this. First I learned that with the right subject matter you can start a decent buzz fairly quickly, but I also learned that if you are going to do something like this you need to take it slow so that you aren’t caught in the act early on. I was in no way trying to do this maliciously or as a way to thwart the serious efforts of ZotFish, I simply wanted to experiment with the site a little and hopefully build some hype around something that Kevin and Bean show fans would quickly relate and respond to.

That said, I again want to commend ZotFish and Michael Baldwin for their quick takedown and response to the question. If they want their site to be a successful one they will need a quick response time like this, especially as they grow in popularity. As the site gets bigger I am sure questions like this will become an everyday occurrence, and the more bogus questions users and celebrities see, the less serious they will take the site.

If you’re interested in reading about these events as they unfolded including images of the questions ranking and the takedown of Criss Angels page follow the links below. They are in the order in which they were posted.

Criss Angel is a Douche Bag
ZotFish.com Deleted My Question
ZotFish’s Response To My Criss Angel Question
My Response To Michael Baldwin of ZotFish
Nearing My Final Wrap Up Of The ZotFish Fiasco

Today I spent the day with my family at the San Diego Zoo, but I was thrilled to see earlier this morning that I got a follow up response from ZotFish. Also, last night I received an e-mail from Bean from the Kevin and Bean show.

Michael from ZotFish responded with, “Was amusing!. Bean from the Kevin and Bean show responded to my e-mails with, “very funny. good effort though!!”

I’m going to keep my blogging open for this through probably Tuesday at the latest just in case anyone else from the Kevin and Bean show replies. This has been a fun venture…hopefully I’ll get another opportunity to do something like this again in the future. Don’t worry ZotFish, I’ll leave you out of it next time! ;P

After my last blog post and my e-mails to the Kevin and Bean show, I decided I would take a moment to respond to the e-mail I received from Michael Baldwin of Zotfish regarding the events that took place today. I wanted to make sure that it was all in fun, and also let him know that I appreciated his e-mail and applauded ZotFish’s efforts to stop bogus questions such as my own. Here was my response:

Hi Michael,

I appreciate the e-mail; know that the Criss Angel attempt was all in fun. However I did cover the events of the day related to it on my blog and gave ZotFish some link love as well as some recognition for the sites efforts to thwart my question. If you’re interested feel free to check it out at http://www.musingsforadarkenedroom.com.

Warmest Regards,

Mike Wilton

I was thrilled to find out when I got home that ZotFish had actually taken the time to respond to my Criss Angel question attempt personally. While I am bummed that things didn’t go as planned, I applaud ZotFish for their quick response to something like this. I really was hoping that perhaps I could have gotten some KROQ involvement before it got to this point, but I never knew for certain that they would get involved to begin with. I am going to send out an e-mail to the Kevin and Bean show and let them know about the question being taken down, but I do plan to direct them to my blog just in case they are still interested in how things went. Oh, and if you’re wondering what ZotFish had to say about the question, here is the response I got:

Hi Mike,

Congratulations on getting your question up to the #1 spot!

I appreciate the enthusiasm — ideally everyone would get that many of their friends to register and vote on their questions. Of course, we’ll have to remove it due to its harassing content, since we are launching a serious site.

We welcome all questions of yours that aren’t offensive, however.

Cheers
Michael
ZotFish

Again, there are no hard feelings with ZotFish and I wish nothing but the best for the site. I think it is a great concept and if they can get it to work and if they can get some responses from the celebrities I think it will be an incredible site. Again my purpose for this was simply to cause some buzz and hopefully have the opportunity to potentially get KROQ and some of their listeners involved in something that would be overall quite amusing. Obviously Criss Angel would have never answered, but the buzz alone would have been worth every ounce of effort.