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It’s a little off-topic, but hey, I love my dog. And I dislike barbarians…

Football fans: demand Vick’s expulsion from NFL!!!

I’ve previously posted (List this and 3 ways to create attention-getting copy) about the use of lists as a way to get and keep a reader’s attention.

Here’s another article I found on the subject: 7 Things You Need to Know About
Writing Lists That Work.

 I’ve recently been involved in a retail packaging design project. Someone jokingly suggested that we include a sound chip to broadcast an obnoxious sound in order to be sure we got noticed. Big laugh, idea dismissed.

Lo and beyold, along came this article… Product Packages Now Shout to Get Your Attention.

Imagine the joy of taking your kid to a toy store where every package yells “Buy Me!”

It’s probably the oldest conundrum in marketing… you have to be edgy to get noticed, but the closer you get to the edge, the more uncomfortable you may get with your choices. Will I still respect me in the morning?

Steven Levitt wrote the Freakonomics book. If you are the last person in America who has not read it, you should be informed it’s great. Steven has a blog, and apparently just moved his blog over to be hosted by the New York Times. Talk about a mighty step up for him in terms of expanding the reach of his message!

The Freakonomics book is filled with quirky and controversial dispassionate economic analyses of various topics. But on his very first day as a NYT-hosted blogger,  Stephen really swung for the fences with a post titled If You Were a Terrorist, How Would You Attack?.

What better way to get lots of people riled up than to open a forum for dreaming up effective terrorist acts? Stephen being a brainiac and all, I’m sure he was quite aware that this post would cause a stir, and sure enough… bang, right to the Drudge Report, and hundreds of comments. Some responding to the post’s question, some questioning its wisdom, and others calling Stephen a traitor.

Let’s set aside the issues of right/wrong, ethical/unethical/ left/right, etc. and examine the decision to Court Controversy…

Pros:

• Huge amounts of attention!
• A rocket ship to notoriety and name recognition.

Cons:

• You’re playing with fire, you might get burned. Threats, FBI surveillance, living forever in ignominy.
• The fame might be fleeting. Damage to your image and reputation might not be.

It seems like you really need to weigh both the pros and the cons before you unleash the hounds. On the other hand, it seems pretty clear that playing with controversy can be extremely effective in terms of gaining exposure.

Any opinions on courting controversy?

So what do you do when major flaws in your product are exposed? It seems you have two choices– I refer to these as the Tylenol response (mea culpa, fix the problem, redeem yourself) and the Politician’s response (deny, obfuscate, accuse or attack the exposer, and hope that people forget about the whole thing).

So which option does a lock company choose when it’s shown that its locks are pickable?

Check out White House High-Security Locks Broken: Bumped and Picked at DefCon for Wired’s article on supposedly tamper-proof locks being eminently pickable. Check out the Youtube video of a 12-year old girl making short work of it.

Note to self– never claim to a crowd of techno-geeks that you’ve created anything impregnable, unassailable, or uncompromisable. They will break you.

Is it really that simple? You toss up a website, sit back and let your bank account overflow. Here’s a good post from a web entrepreneur discussing how it’s not easy, and he wouldn’t want it to be easy anyways.