I would like to take this opportunity to share with everyone my favorite Friday pick-me-up. Everyone is excited for Fridays, this is no secret. But how many people do you know are excited for the drive to work on Friday morning?

Every morning I go through my typical routine, but never am I more excited to get into my car and head to work than I am on Fridays. Sit down, shut the door, put the seat belt on, and then the magic happens. I turn on B96.5 between 8:00 and about 8:20a.m., and they play the Wrong Song.

During the Rus Parr Morning Show's Wrong Song, DJs from around the country send in their best mixes that include everything from Sting to Biggie. Within seconds you find yourself laughing and dancing in the car, which only stops when you feel that driver to your right staring at you like you're crazy.

Lean on Me, Don’t Stop Believing, Tootsee Roll and Men in Black… it just keeps getting better! There is no double mocha latte that can replace the jolt in the morning the Wrong Song gives me. Join me every Friday, and see if you love the Wrong Song as much as I do!

Not everyone gets an Oscar nomination in their first big screen role. (I'm looking at you Ed Norton.) For most professional actors, their careers progress in stages and they spend a lot of time paying their dues. Before they get their big breaks, even some of cinema’s most respected actors will make ends meet by shilling for pretty much anything.

Some of the biggest names in Hollywood, like John Travolta and Morgan Freeman paid the bills by pitching soap and mouthwash. Before staring in classics like Legends of the Fall and Fight Club, one of Tinsletown's hottest hunks, Brad Pitt, made his mark selling Pringles. And nothing sells burgers like a cute kid, especially if that kid grows up to be a hot vampire-killer.

One of the funniest guys in Hollywood, Paul Rudd, took a turn as pitchman for Nintendo, with mixed results. But one of my all-time favorites has to be this gem from smart aleck actor Seth Green.

Wow, I miss the 80's.

MSN recently published an article entitled "The Top 10 Social Networking Annoyances," a few at which I laughed out loud because I experience them every day. "LinkedIn is uptight" - totally!

While this article is a great one, I thought it was missing just a few:

- Friendfeed feeds too many friends
Aggregators are now so complex that I need an aggregator to aggregate all of the information that is being aggregated in my subscribed aggregators. Jiminy Crickets.

- I may soon be a Twitter Quitter
I do love Twitter, I must say. I can't explain what makes it so fun and addictive -- it's, well...fun and addictive.
But, it's so buggy. There have been numerous excuses for this unexplained phenomenon (too many people following Robert Scoble or the technology was never built to handle so many followers, blah, blah, blah). The bottom line is that there are too many competitors popping up and if Twitter can't take the heat, it needs to get out of the kitchen. Our CTO suggested that Twitter limit the number of people you can follow. Not the number of people who follow you, just the number of people you can follow. So, 2,000 people might follow me, but I am only allowed to follow 20. It would certainly make us all a bit more selective about who we follow and thus unburden the Twitter bandwidth.
A second annoyance about Twitter is that I have a saddened sense of humanity every time I read the Tweets of certain people I am following. I know, I should just stop following them. But, it's like a soap opera! One gentleman lamented the fact that he was forced to get off Twitter to take his kids out to dinner. Oh my.

- Facebook should just tell me what Gem I am
I know this is the way Facebook stays in business...but, I vehemently dislike (I am trying to eliminate "hate" from my vocabulary) that I have to force 10 of my friends to take the "Which Gem are you?" quiz in order to find out my own results. Yes, that's right, I do want to know which Gem I am. I will certainly use this valuable information at some point...like on my wedding anniversary or in my annual performance review. "Did you know I am a diamond? That means I deserve a huge raise!" It could work.

- ncludr has not caught on
Despite my previous blog entry, includr has really not caught on like I thought it would. That's an annoyance. If more people used includr, we wouldn't need bumper stickers with sayings like "Visualize Whirled Peas."

Okay, I'm writing this blog from within a new program called Buzz Word, part of an online word processing suite in Beta test from Adobe. It allows me to write, similar to a conventional software-based program ... except the fonts are limited.

And that's where the similarity stops.

The documents are stored on Adobe's servers, and I can access them from anywhere. What's more, I can email them to a Co-Author or a Reviewer or a Reader at my discretion. That affords them differing permission levels of modification. The dictionary/spell check is teachable for either Within this document or Always. Colors. Bolds. Variable font sizes. Paragraph formatting. Charts. Lists. Cut. Paste. And yes I can embed and save images (4 megs or less) within the document with more freedom of placement & movement than Word ever allowed.

Then I can export it to my desktop as a Word document, PDF, Rich Text file or pure HTML.

It's damned sweet, that's what it is.

I'm not sure about the whole "do I have a connection" question as it relates to online enterprise activities such as this. My hunch is in the next few years, online connectivity will be ubiquitous, so that question/hesitancy is probably moot.

Confession time: I've been using Apple's Pages program for a month or so and prefer it to Word for all the elegant Apple features you'd expect. Buzz Word won't replace that immediately, though I expect to use it for longer documents which require ongoing revisions.

Over the past few months we have become very adept at harnessing new media and emerging technology to tap into market segments that traditional mediums often don't reach. Texting, Facebook pages, viral videos, podcasts and blogging are now normal elements in many of our marketing plans. We have an interactive team whose sole purpose is to share new information on everything from the latest widget and cool tool to ways we can create viral relationships with our client's customers. For many of us older folks here, it's very stimulating because there are many new ways to communicate, and new rules of engagement. An outdoor billboard has a seven word limit rule and an internet billboard has an entirely different criteria to meet to be effective.

These are easy enough to understand. But when we talk about creating a viral idea that can be so sticky that it gets passed around and posted by 1,000's of people in a very short period of time, well some of our clients just don't get it. They can't imagine a world where communication is mostly in the written word and not a two-way vocalized exchange. How can it be that these folks log onto their Facebook pages and communicate when it's convenient for them? The sharing isn't even in real time? What about posting music and videos to their pages in order to share with friends and further shape their online personality? Or spending hours and hours in forums, never seeing/meeting the people they chat with? Or narcissistically blogging their thoughts, activities and opinions for all the world to review?

And when clients ask what the ROI will be for these viral marketing tactics we give it our best guess, and nobody really ever knows. As one member of our interactive team put it, "isn't Nielson guessing when they share their ratings?" Sure we can measure how many read a blog or respond to a text message. And nothing replaces measuring the bottom line - increased sales. Now that's a unit of measure a client understands. And they'll just have to trust us on the what, how and why's of interactive and social media.

I just saw the Sex and the City movie over the weekend, so I'm all jacked up on the love.  Since I'm still waiting for my very own Mr. Big, the current love of my life is Google...and it's taking over the world!

I recently learned that you can now book print ads in local newspapers through Google using their auction based system.  Some of the newspapers who are experimenting with this new way of booking space are the Courier Journal, New Albany Tribune, Jeffersonville Evening News, Seymour Tribune, E-town News Enterprise and Pioneer News, plus over 800 others, nation wide.  Through your AdWords account, you can select a publication, run dates, which section you'd like to schedule your ad in and the ad size.  The bidding starts on a scale, with the minimum level being the least amount the paper is willing to accept and the highest amount being right off the rate card.  Once you've determined what price you are willing to pay and upload the ad, your ad schedule is in the almightly hands of Google.

I didn't actually get to test the process to see how long it takes to get approved (or rejected) and to see what level of pricing a paper would accept, since I didn't have a real ad, but I can't wait to try it.  This would be perfect for a client that is running a branding campaign over time and has some flexibility on the run dates.  It's also a great way to get a better price on smaller volume buys that may not qualify for a contract rate.

So, in conclusion, two thumbs up to Google for continuing to evolve their services and doing so locally.  I will definitely keep you posted on what happens once I place a bid for print advertising with Google!