Well, he scores on his Blog. Just look at the number of comments that this actor gets (243, 546, 501, 393, 189.) He is one of the very few who actually understands how to leverage the Internet to build relationships with his audience.

Oh, he has over 30,000 friends on MySpace growing at 1,000 per day.

Google Alerts are notifications that selected search terms  are appearing on websites. For example, I have Ralston360 and 360View as Google Alerts. I receive weekly notification (you can choose your own timing) that these terms are appearing on other websites. This notification helps me to see when someone is ‘talking’ about my company. Good stuff.

If I am unclear here, here is Google’s definition: “Google Alerts are emails automatically sent to you when there are new Google results for your search terms.” You can learn more by going directly to Google Alerts.

Jeff Jarvis, the master of BuzzMachine, has a great post today*, “Making war look worse”, about how a Reuters photographer doctored his photo of a Beirut bombing. Read it please.

Then refer to my post “Republican Marketing at Its Best” from August 5.

I know how much Photoshop goes into our design work for clients to clean up images and how much Photoshop could do to create an alternative universe (and lets not forget Playboy for that matter) but ENUF faking! The real world is interesting. I swear it is.

Want to see a great blog post that trully defines the inner workings of YouTube? Head on over to “No Man’s Blog” and see Ari Sharabi’s in-depth anlysis of YouTube. What we watch can be kinda scary.

That said, there are a few incidents where TV commercials get high levels of views. For example:

The Sony Bravia spot was viewed 3,493,898

Three Volkswagen Un-Pimp My Ride spots were in the top 100. This spot was viewed 2,242,916 times!

You can’t plan for this but, hey; being able to add over three million views is pretty serious marketing action.

(Yes, the font here is a bit strange. I have been wrestling with WordPress for a while. I give up!)

Speaking of Pimps…. here is our MosaicSF Pimp interview.

Steve Rubel writes in his post “Jack Trout Fishes for a Hook” that Jack Trout is incorrectly hammering word-of-mouth marketing in Forbes. I have to agree with Steve’s words:

“File this under man bites dog. Marcom guru Jack Trout is throwing a big dark cloud over word-of-mouth marketing (including blogging) because there’s no way to control it. What’s worse, he’s urging folks to just advertise instead.”

I mean, c’mon. WOM is for real and it can be stimulated.

Here is a tiny bit from Jack’s article.

“Now for the really bad news. There’s no way to control that word-of-mouth. Do I want to give up control and let consumers take over my campaign?”

Oh Jack, where have you been for the past five years? We all lost control a while back. We can no longer simply count on the old black magic of :30 TV commercials. Where has Jack been? Want the bad news… Jack is paid by major advertisers like AT&T, P&G and IBM to assist them with their brand strategies.

I’ll let Steve’s words do more of the talking about Jack. But, this Troutism reminds me of his ex partner Al Reis’s book “The Fall of Advertising and the Rise of PR.” Al gets it wrong too. He hammers advertising and praises PR. He sites Starbucks as a brand that grew without any advertising and just great PR. Well, if I had 6,216 street corner locations I wouldn’t need advertising either. And, by the way, who ever said that we can control what a writer ever writes?

The bottom line you ask? In today’s marketing world it takes a holistic approach. Do the ads, do the PR and do the WOM. Whatever it takes. It isn’t either or.