KoiFish — The World’s Second Best PR Blog

The image pretty much speaks for itself. This is from a T shirt brought to us from the folks at despair.com. If we can’t laugh at ourselves, at whom can we laugh? Poke around the rest of their Website if you like to look at humorous take-offs on those cheesy corporate motivational posters. I know I do.

Is there a reason that the only photos online of people in bed with their computers are nerds who sleep alone?

My old pal, Mark Kellner, wrote an interesting piece in today’s Washington Times about the dangers of taking technology to bed. He cites a study that explores how few home networks are secure and encrypted and what this means for sensitive work-related documents.

Mark also wonders about the impact taking technology to bed has on relationships. As you’ll read in the article, it doesn’t pose a problem for yours truly, but it has proven to be disruptive to some. Interestingly, the only photos I could find online of people in bed with their computers were of dorky dudes who clearly sleep alone. Do you take your technology to bed? If so, does it upset your sleeping partner?

Strangely compelling

If you’re like most people, you can recall a time in your life when you might have wished you had more friends. 24 hours ago I thought about how nice it would be to become a tad more popular and decided to do something about it. Today I have people from all over the globe clamoring to make my acquaintance and I’m struggling to figure out how to stop the madness. Frankly,  I’m not 100% sure I have figured out the best way to put the genie back in the bottle.

You see, in my quest to stay current on all things social media, I recently started playing Mafia Wars. Mafia Wars is a very simple — yet surprisingly compelling — game you play with your pals on Facebook and/or MySpace. The goal is to become the wealthiest, most powerful mob boss you can be. And, in the world of organized crime, you need a lot of troops to make this happen. Unfortunately, most of my real-world friends have lives. They have jobs and families. They choose to spend their free time constructively. Far too few were interested in helping me satisfy my virtual bloodlust.

Typical real-world friend

So I did what I had to do and visited the Mafia Wars forums where you can actively recruit new Facebook friends to join your mob. Without giving it much thought, I added myself to a list of folks looking for new “associates.” I figured this would be a good way to find a few dozen like-minded psychopaths to help me crack a few safes and break a few knee caps. I was wrong. It wasn’t dozens of people, it was hundreds. I’ve been getting friend requests from people around the globe at a rate of about 1 every 30 seconds.

On the one hand, this is kind of cool. My “family” is now a force to be reckoned with. I’ve also become an international sensation. And, most importantly, I do have a lot more younger, hipper and better-looking friends than I did yesterday.

Typical virtual-world friend

On the other hand, I’m wondering how long it will take for my virtual popularity to subside. I’m beginning to think I’m going to continue getting requests from strangers wanting to join my mob long after my interest in the game ends (I give that another week tops). It also occurred to me last night that my fellow mobsters have the same access to my Facebook information as my real-world friends. This meant I had to pull some personal information off of my profile.

When I decide to call it quits, I’m going to need to put the e-mail I use for social media experimentation into the witness protection program for a while until things cool down. I’m also going to have to spend a few hours “unfriending” people so my Facebook account is once again manageable. I suppose that’s all part of the fun.

This whole episode is yet another example of just how powerful social media can be for important as well as trivial matters. It also serves as a reminder of the need to use caution and common sense when messing around with applications such as this. Had I used my work e-mail for this adventure, I would have caused myself a ton of unnecessary grief.

But, at least for today, I’m going to enjoy my popularity, rally my troops and whack a few rivals. I think I’ll also be able to earn enough money to buy that casino I’ve had my eye on.

Can this woman make you feel happy? I'll bet she can.

I like social media. It lets us do some amazing things. One of my favorites is that it provides a simple conduit for people to be able to quickly and easily share little snippets of happiness with others.

Lots of these snippets can be found on YouTube. Two of my favorites come from a show called Britain’s Got Talent. The first one is of a former cellphone salesman named Paul. Paul is just a regular guy who isn’t someone likely to be described as classically handsome. He certainly doesn’t look like a kick-ass opera singer, but he turned out to be just that.  And, if Paul is a one-in-a-million kind of find, then this show must have auditioned at least two million people, because they also found Susan Boyle, an unemployed 48-year-old who has never been kissed. Like Paul, she absolutely killed.

This one seems too simple — its just some hippie passing out free hugs. It is still pretty awesome.

This one is about a young man with Autism who performed some amazing feats on the basketball court. The achievement on its own is enough to make you smile, but it is even cooler to see a group of high school students actually being supportive of a kid with a disability.

And speaking of disabled, my dad, a former airline pilot himself, really liked the interview with “Captain Sully” about the successful landing of his disabled airplane in the Hudson River. Apparently, landing on the water without tragic results is no easy feat. My dad flat out thinks it isn’t something he could have done even after 30 years of flying. It is rare to hear an airline pilot admit that there is anything they can’t do, so this makes me even more impressed by what Captain Sullenberger was able to accomplish.

BTW, from a communications standpoint, this interview shows that there is simply no substitute for competence. “Sully” is not a trained spokesperson, but he comes off better than a lot of corporate CEOs in this interview. He has earned the ability to be confident based on a lifetime of hard work and it shows. Confidence combined with competence is easy to recognize when you see it. I particularly like the part 6 minutes and 44 seconds in, where Katie Couric asks him if he was praying during the ordeal. He responded by saying that he was so intensely focused on the landing that he thought of nothing else. I admire people who look first to themselves for solutions to their problems. Those people make me happy.

I’m adding this video because just thinking about doing this makes me happy. It also makes me pucker.

wingsuit base jumping from Ali on Vimeo.

What stuff on YouTube makes you happy?

This is kind of cool. Tonight on the Daily Show, John Stewart was talking about the hijacking of the Maersk Alabama and the Naval base near Manama. In this segment, he brought up this old clip from the Muppet show:

He then told viewers to go do a Google search on Muppet Scat to see what comes up. It didn’t take long before Muppet Scat became the most searched for term on the Internet. Click on the screen shot below and see for yourself.

By the time the show aired here on the West Coast, the online buzz had already begun. When I performed my “Mupet Scat” search, I saw that  one blogger — who used many of the same blog SEO techniques I wrote about earlier this month — had already been able to get his post on the topic to show up on first page of  Google results for that term. This provides yet another example of how powerful and immediate blogs can be for search engine optimization. Very cool indeed.

View the Daily Show episode below:

By the way, my heartfelt thanks to the Navy SEAL snipers and all the men and women in the U.S. military. I’m grateful that we have so many good people serving our country who are willing to do the really hard jobs that most people don’t have the skill or stomach to do. Keep up the outstanding work.

Update: It took fewer than two hours for THIS post to make it to page one of a Google search on “Muppet Scat.” Plain and simple, SEO for blogs really works. Click on the image and check it out.