Long time Tiger sponsor Nike stuck around throughout the abbreviated scandal and redemption period, only to emerge this week (the eve of the Masters), with a TV commercial that acts as something of a belated public pillorying of Woods.

The spot depicts a silent and seemingly contrite Woods being gently chastised by an undated voice-over of his deceased father.  Right before the black and white spot flashes to the Nike swoosh though, the voice of Earl Woods (in a very Mike Brady moment) is heard asking his son “Did you learn anything?” Because the man who masterminded Woods’ career from the age of two through international super-stardom would surely  have been that calm and accepting of potential career fall-out from Tiger’s skanky tales.

If you haven’t seen the spot yet, which aired exclusively on ESPN & The Golf Channel, I’ll try to provide appropriate pop culture analogies.  Think Psycho’s Norman Bates fighting off the voice of his dead yet still hectoring mother+a side order of Big Love‘s Alby Grant’s dearly departed dad disapproving of him from beyond the grave, with the Natalie Cole and Nat King Cole duet from the hereafter as the soundtrack, and you’ll have a better idea of just how creepy this sales spot is.  More than creepy though, it’s inappropriate and the timing is off.

I’m sure Nike’s marketing department had a very good reason for giving Woods a public spanking.  Perhaps they wanted to appease their investors with an acknowledgment of the fact that they too had been wronged by Woods’ “transgressions” but loved him (and sales generated) still.   Perhaps they felt that portraying Woods as a loving son gone wild after the passing of his father would generate further sympathy & sales.  Or perhaps they just wanted to see how far they could push Woods in his pursuit of continued percentage off the sales of his (golf) balls and (sports) equipment.   That last one might have been something of a low blow, but racy puns aside for the most part people don’t much care about Woods’ private life anymore, they just want to see the finest golf player in the world doing what he does best.

So Tiger, in the words of your most loyal sponsor “Just do it” and move on- the sports world has.

Rachel, who secretly wonders about the new term$ of Elin Woods’ continued spousal endorsement

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successful and even die-hard Folds fans were disappointed.

In the last week, Folds, identified as ‘Merton’ uploaded videos of himself creating piano improvisation on ChatRoulette.  For the uninitiated,  ChatRoulette, is a vaguely creepy ( and very popular with teens and other exhibitionists) service created by a 17 year old Russian boy, in which random strangers with webcams chat anonymously until they rather rapidly bore of each other and click to the next available chatter.

In the videos, Folds combines his dual personalities as piano virtuoso and goofy performer and improvises songs based on the suggestions or actions of his chat partners.

While other celebrities claim to have visited or used the service, Folds turns it into a cultural statement, creativity challenge and goofy, depressing and heartwarming experience all at once.

It’s fascinating to keep watching/listening as someone whose medium is fairly traditional- a guy and his piano, experiments with technology to challenge both himself and his craft.

According to Hollywood gossips, being lauded as best actress can lead to the dissolution of your marriage, if Oscar winners including Hillary Swank, Reese Witherspoon, Kate Winslet & Halle Berry‘s break-ups are anything to go by.  Male Oscars winners are quick to dispute the theory though.  Denzel Washington appearing on a nightly entertainment news program (don’t you just love that contradiction in terms?) disparaged the notion saying his marriage was secure and the concept was ridiculous.  Or is it?

In the last 12 years, 8 female awardees have found themselves without the mates they had at the time of their win.  Sure it can be chalked up to coincidence, but why is the notion of a woman wanting to ‘have it all’ still considered a curiosity, while it’s commonplace for a man to want to balance a successful career with a fulfilling home life?

Don’t get me wrong.  I don’t particularly care about celebrity infidelities, since my assumption is that they married for love or publicity and were amply protected by a legal laundry list of what is or is not permitted.  I was however rooting for tough, tender and talented Sandra B. to have found simultaneous success in both her career and personal life.

If we believe the cliche that like Jeff Bridges and his loyal and career-free wife, behind every great man stands a great woman, do we have to subscribe to the notion that behind every great woman stands an insecure or philandering man? I’m counting on Best Actress winners Dame Judi Dench, Meryl Streep & Helen Mirren to continue to prove that theory wrong too.

Rachel, who persists in believing in happily ever after in some form or another….

We might find them to be charming or engaging and frequently entertaining and regularly informative, but for the most part are not warm for their form/hot for their bods or connecting with them on anything more than a professional level of sorts.

I say this because after conversations with friends, we’ve collectively concluded that there seems to be a proliferation of attached individuals who feel the need to issue loud and generally inappropriate warnings to their female followers that they are MARRIED, before proceeding to flirt in manners that can be deemed as highly inappropriate if wholly awkward.

For this reason and also because it’s snowing for the 800th day this winter and because I’m punchy and overworked, I’d like to share

with you some thoughts on what does or does not work when (over)sharing on your social networks.

1. Shouting about your Religion: Unless you’re cultivating a faith based initiative and unless I’ve expressed even the remotest interest, kindly don’t overshare your practices and preachings.  I respect your right to be a disciple of the devil – I just have no interest in reading your ramblings when I take my Twitter/Facebook coffee break.
2. Blathering about your Beloved: You’re attached. We get it. We even think it’s cute and some of the things you say make us go awwww.  But your guilty conscience or inability to set boundaries in your online flirting should not make it awkward or icky for those you come into contact with.  Please refrain from pontificating about the sanctity of your union while trying to see how much flirtage you can get away with otherwise.
3. Inappropriate Icons: Yes dear. We get that you’re trying to make a point that you’re so hip that you view gore or porny images metaphorically, but that grade Z horror movie image as avatar makes me choose not to follow you and to take you a lot less seriously if I do.

When choosing what to share online, choose wisely.  You may think you know a lot about me based on my tweets or status updates, but what you do in fact know are the peripheral details of my life and nothing that could ever be considered awkward or inappropriate.  Well, at least that’s my intention- to entertain, inform, share and interact and build mostly professional and some friendly relationships.  There are things about me that you’ll never find out from reading my books, blogs or tweets and that’s as it should be.  My private life is my own, as yours should be.

Flirting is fun.  So is silly banter and online socializing, but pay attention- you may be crossing lines or alienating others without realizing it.

Rachel, who tries to think before she tweets and then frequently deletes

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In a time of very public outrage and very public interaction, as a celebrity communicator Smith has even more of a voice and platform than your average insulted consumer.  Instead of waiting for a snarky if genteel and well placed article to highlight his plight, Smith used his immediate outlet on Twitter and his inimitable voice to express his outrage and disgust.  He also posted a picture of himself looking (in his words) too fat to fly.

To play devil’s advocate for a moment though, in a time of heightened security, is it at all possible that Southwest Airlines was concerned that Smith might have been hiding explosives on his (by their description) larger than average person? Sure. That’s entirely possible, since Jet Blue seemed to have the same concern when my 81 year old teeny, svelte and gorgeous Aunt Malku, (she of the Hungarian accent so pronounced that she makes the Gabor sisters sound like Valley girls) was flying in from Sarasota last week and they patted her down, questioned her and detained her for about 4 hours before deciding she didn’t present a security risk after all.

Okay, so I’m exaggerating.  They only kept her for 45 minutes, but the absurdity of Aunt Malku’s  situation is as offensive as the Smith situation.

Then again, I’m sure there are people who are equally offended at having to share cross-country flights with screaming babies and barking dogs.  Oh please, I know for a fact you’ve had evil thoughts about the parents of the rambunctious toddler who alternated between drooling on your headrest and kicking your seat on your last flight.

So where does an airline draw the line and allow passengers to retain their dignity?  The first order of business is to create a unified policy on security issues and seat requirements.  Today’s travel restrictions are bad enough, but they make sense to most of us.  To further insult passengers who are deemed too fat or too tall, can’t be the right way to rule the friendly skies.  It doesn’t matter that Smith is a public figure with a louder voice and reach than most of us, what matters is that in issues of customer service and sensitivity, many airlines seem to have lost their most basic sense of appropriateness if not mission.

Time to completely rewrite their customer service and passenger guidelines instead of patching them with every color coded security threat.

Rachel, who would happily share a seatrest with Kevin Smith on any flight

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In the Hollywood of yesteryear screaming teens would line up to get a glimpse of a celebrity and mass swooning would commence if an autograph was procured.  In our own time, celebrities have become more up close and personal, tweeting (or having their minions take on the tasks) about the most mundane details of their lives, wives and grooming habits.  In between this and the extreme lowbrow end of the spectrum (Jersey Shore, anyone?) comes the difficult to place and hard to ignore Fan phenomenon.

Without fail, every day I’ll receive dozens of requests to this effect:

Subject Line: Someone you don’t really know, whose opinion you may or may not value suggested you become a fan of Mongolian sheep herding for fun and profit

The body of the e-mail goes along the same lines: Someone you don’t really know, whose opinion you may or may not value became a fan of Mongolian sheep herding for fun and profit on Facebook and suggested you become a fan too.

I’ll admit that some time back I dabbled in the process and created a fan page for one of my books.  As I’m a huge fan of irony, I enjoyed the fact that I didn’t quite have the stomach to force feed said page to my friends and colleagues and instead allowed it to wither in obscurity.

These days though, there seems to be no rhyme nor reason to the fast and furious requests, the culmination of which was an invitation to become a fan of someone’s cat.  I am not a pet person.  If I were a pet person, it is still unlikely that I would publicly become a fan of the cat of someone I know peripherally and exclusively online.   The request was irritating enough, more so when Fluffy’s owner e-mailed me to find out why I had not yet publicly declared my devotion to his pet.  Even more so when Fluffy’s owner seemed irritated, bewildered and irked that I chose to refuse to honor their request.

I could go on, but I know that you’ve got your own stack of invitations to ignore.  I will share with you some of the reasons why I detest this particular process though and why I feel it to be incredibly bad marketing in the majority of cases.

1. What’s the point? The majority of fan pages have no point, rhyme nor reason.  Their owners quickly slap together a fan page because in their misconception of social networking and/or self stitched marketing plans they believe that they must create a fan page.  Once it exists, they have no idea of what to do with it or its members.
2. What’s in it for me? While cleverly executed marketing campaigns allow you to discover brands in a new way, there’s generally a payoff at some point in the process in the form of information, trivia, exclusive offers and prizing.  Facebook fan pages mostly feel like an exercise in onanism, with the page’s creators hoping to guilt you into publicly declaring your devotion and then simply stringing you along while they wax rhapsodic about themselves and their accomplishments.
3. What’s the commitment? If your invitation piques my curiosity enough to warrant a visit to your page, what will I discover once I get there? What information have you provided to me about you and your brand and what this fan-dom actually involves in the form of messages, newsletters or commitment?
4. What’s the difference? Why is your fan page different than all others? Why should I bother?

Rachel, who prefers to like you from afar

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A bit late to the game, Buzz is a somewhat simplified way of interacting with those in your social network in short, sporadic messaging bursts.  While Twitter, Facebook and the rest rely on people actively seeking out connections, Buzz instead relies on your Gmail address book to populate your contact list.

Early comments run the gamut from those incensed that Buzz potentially publicly broadcasts contacts better left private, (by using your most frequently used contacts as your base for interaction, Google allows others to know who’s on your address book A-List), to those simply wondering about the timing, value and viability of the service.

As for me, I mostly wonder whatever happened to Google’s pursuit of the cutting edge? What was once of the most exciting online based companies, has instead become a mostly sluggish and somewhat bloated company, that relies on an ever outdated business model of advertising and acquisition.

Buying up smaller tech companies to include under their corporate umbrella has become the chosen Google method of expansion, something once considered unimaginative at best and mostly deplorable when done by Bill Gates in the early days of Microsoft.

When Google does launch something new, as in the case of Buzz, it’s generally a tired or tried and true formula, with Google seeming to make a half hearted attempt at capturing existing market share.

So what about Buzz? An early volley with friends/colleagues last night felt like a somewhat updated chain letter, or the opening credits of the Brady Bunch, where the family goofily looks at each other through their boxed in spaces, trying to find something to say or convey.

Don’t get me wrong.  I think it’s fun to have small updates in my inbox, but I’d love to see Google concentrate more time on perfecting their launches (whatever happened to Wave being the next big thing?) instead of simply giving us slightly updated products that we already have.   In the past few years we’ve already collectively learned a new way to connect online – Buzz doesn’t feel like it brings anything new to the party.

Rachel, who wonders if Buzz is something of a snooze

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It’s no secret that I have chronic insomnia.  Sadly, my sleeplessness seems to be as much a part of me as my dark hair or oddly colored eyes.  I’ve toyed around with the idea of starting a blog (don’t groan- doesn’t the world need yet another vanity blog?) dedicated to my pursuit of sleep, the inspirations that come to me when slumber eludes me and the new and improved sleep accouterments available, but for the most part have been uninspired (and extremely lazy).  Today though, I found out about a brilliant new promotion from Simmons called ‘Tweet for Sleep’ in which they give away a Perfect Sleeper mattress, and I decided to kick off my new blog with a post shamelessly pleading with them to give me a new mattress.

Rachel, who dreams of a new mattress. Well, I would if I slept long enough to dream, but you know what I mean.

It was a blistering hot summer day and though storms were predicted, the crowds were undeterred.  The music began, the crowds swayed, the rain started, the people danced.  It was nice and cozy in an  over the top druggie kind of way, until the lightning storms began.  Insane, crashing, terrifying, stadium shaking thunder and lighting kind of lightning storm.

As a born and bred New Yorker, I was convinced that panic would ensue and braced myself for spurts of violence.  Instead, the band played until they were sodden and then beat a hasty retreat.  People calmly walked to shelter all the while ensuring those around them were safe.  Then they continued swaying and patiently waited for the band to come back out for an encore.  After a while, when it was clear the concert was over, everyone made their way to the flooded parking lot and again, patiently waited for the thousands of cars ahead of them to clear out.

It all seemed so organic and natural, that I should have suspected there was more to the Grateful Dead machine than meets the eye.

A fascinating article in this month’s Atlantic tackles the notion of sociological and management lessons learned from the Grateful Dead and how they can apply to modern muddled business models.  It raises issues including the fact that Deadheads were of the earliest social networking enthusiasts creating communities around their musical obsession.  Seems like it all came about spontaneously, no?

Well, no actually.   According to the article, the band “established a board of directors (with a rotating CEO position) consisting of the band, road crew, and other members of the Dead organization.”  In addition to this they had a highly profitable merchandising division and “did not hesitate to sue those who violated their copyrights.”

There are many other elements that serve as object lessons for creative businesses, but the element that fascinates me most is what those who study the group refer to as “strategic improvisation,” for the band’s ability to change and grow their business model along with their fan base.  The band managed to take their creative skill of creating long unscripted jamming sessions into an actual business model of creating more nebulous fan driven marketing systems in the midst of their rigid business protocol.

In an era where pop stars are so carefully crafted and airbrushed and their music often over-produced if not impossible to listen to, it’s fascinating to take a giant step back to learn from one of the most talented and savvy bands of all times.

Rachel, who regularly thinks about what a long, strange trip it’s been

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I’ve been giving a lot of thought to the more popular blogs and methods of attracting readers/commenters. Similar to the old school web 1.0 methods of inflating visits through page refreshes (still widely used) and other html tricks of the trade, many bloggers seem to be most interested in upping their visitor numbers if not necessarily the quality of visitors.

A friend once invited me to join an online group which existed solely to have bloggers visit each other’s blogs and comment on each other’s posts thereby driving traffic, raising per view ad rates and conveying the impression of immense blog popularity. Like the friend trains on Twitter or the mass friending on Facebook, it doesn’t just feel artificial to me, it feels counterintuitive in the long run. I’ve always been a quality over quantity person and politely declined.

Don’t get me wrong, there’s something to be said for mass popularity, but as someone who for all intents and purposes manufactures hype for a living, I tend to question any over the top fads and seek out authenticity.  And yes, I fully appreciate the irony of that statement.

It occurs to me that I’ve had this blog going for just over a year, after leaving its earlier precursors to fade into an ignoble and mostly forgotten past. For me at least, my blog is a way of sharing thoughts that might not make it to articles I write and offers a venue for commenting on popular events in marketing or pop culture.  I’m not an obsessive blogger to say the least, nor am I using this platform as a venue for a hoped for next book deal or to raise advertising revenue.  What I am doing consciously though, is putting myself out there on another level and as a communicator, a business owner and someone who is not only knowledgeable about popular and social issues, but one who can articulate her thoughts clearly or challenge popular perceptions.  I’ve repeatedly told colleagues that if only one client went from maybe to yes after reading one of my posts, my blog has served its purpose.

What fascinates me the most about this blog is the quality and level of interaction.  While I doubt that I’ll ever boast 100+ comments a day, I do receive a steady stream of comments on other networks (i.e. Facebook, Twitter and the like) and a welcome daily dose of e-mail from people who feel empowered or comfortable enough to connect with me directly to discuss, argue or seek out my professional counsel.

My point being, there’s more to blogging than pages full of comments or hundreds of thousands of visitors- both are nice, but not necessarily the only measure of your blogging success.  Too many people don’t think about the potential to alienate or annoy their prospective audiences with too many requests for comments, invitations to join inane fan clubs and more.  If we like you, we’ll probably find you and if your work speaks to us- we’ll probably keep coming back for more.

Rachel, who is grateful to each and every one of you who keeps coming back for more