When you set the mileage standards for the rest of the United States to live by proclaiming “we’re not just sitting around waiting for high gasoline prices to come down,” you have to have a pretty big set to say it with a straight face as you show up in your Suburban. that’s exactly what transportation secretary Ray La Hood did according to Jalopnik.

Nothing like shoving higher fuel economy standards down the automakers throats to force new car buyers into more fuel efficient vehicles and then ride around in the type of vehicle you say is the problem. Drive as I say, not as I do.

We could cut him a little slack if he was a member of the joint chiefs of staff and had to have a small platoon of Secret Service Agents in the vehicle with him, but for Christ sakes Ray! You’re the Transportation Secretary! You’re not in charge of nuclear missile codes or the whereabouts of key CIA agents! You should be showing up on a bus or some other form of mass transportation! At least a Chevrolet Volt. The government bailed out GM out so sell competitive fuel efficient vehicles like the Volt, not so the General could sell more Suburbans.

Yep, lotsa balls under La Hood. Unfortunately, no brains.

By Vernon Heywood

Remember those parents who were suing recording artists because their brainless kids did stupid things that either got time in jail, injured… or worse, because they were supposedly emulating actions described in the lyrics of the artist’s songs? You know the one’s I’m talking about, the one’s who were looking for someone else to blame for their own lack of parenting. I feel sad for their losses, but curse their cowardice and inability to take responsibility for their actions or lack their of.

This blog post, however similar, is not about them.

This is a different type of stupidity altogether. Sure, ultimately parents are to be held accountable over all, but society has to take part of the blame here on this one as we have allowed it to permeate every aspect of our entertainment, from magazines and tabloids, to internet, to TV, to even our news.

What is this new problem? The acceptance of dirty laundry and stupidity as well as asinine antics as acceptable forms of entertainment to achieve your five seconds of fame with.

It started with Jerry Springer, Ricky Lake, and the Maury where guests are invited to share stories such as how they had an affair with their grandmother’s, boyfriends’s conjoined twin while she was asleep in the same bed and I’ve had 2,496 men paternity tested and I still don’t know who my babies’ father’s are and assorted other ghastly and unbelievable tales that one just shouldn’t make public, let alone air on television.

One could argue that the show is to make people feel better, that they are not the only one’s to be going through this tragedy. But with the way society seems to be deteriorating I argue it has had the opposite effect and has only made it more acceptable for other people not to choose a responsible path. I’m sorry you don’t know who you’re babies’ fathers are, and you can have sex with as many conjoined octogenarians as you want, I could care less, but society was much better off when you were ashamed of that fact, not proud enough to broadcast it to millions of viewers.

The problem has only escalated with sites such as YouTube, MetaCafe and Break, as the stupidity is no longer limited to what producers could fit into a 30 or 60 minute time slot, but you could now air your stupidity for the world to see 24/7 with the hope of going viral which brings me to my case in point.

A lot of viral videos are viral for a reason, they are funny, and/or clever, usually include some sort of stunt we wish we had the balls to do ourselves, and/or are just plain mesmerizing. Take for example the video that set me off which features champion drifter Vaughn Gittin Jr. hooning it up in a parking lot and eventually taking out Happy, the Carl’s Jr. star-shaped mascot. Funny stuff, right? Obviously it was staged, who goes around with a full camera crew, hits a walking restaurant icon and runs, right? I have no problem with this and if you’re child emulates this without staging it, yes, you’re to blame.

Here’s where I have a problem: This video hits just as summer break hits, and many kids will be getting their new driver’s license and/or a new car as graduation presents to kick off the summer. There’s something about being behind the wheel that makes us all forget a good deal of common sense when our friends are around and we want to impress. Throw in the additional temptation of instant stardom and now we have a recipe for spectacular disaster, but hey, it’ll go viral and you’ll become a star, right?

So you’ve got the staged of part of your own YouTube stunt down (look out Ronald McDonald), now let’s talk about your drifting performance. Guess what? Odds are, you’re not a pro. Reenacting this stunt, or some other you may feel more comfortable with shouldn’t be practiced by anyone not on a closed course, especially if you’re not a professional. You know that fine print on the new car ads telling you these actions should only be performed on a closed course by a professional driver? It doesn’t appear on this video. Granted, that’s probably why they are more boring, but there is a reason for it. Warning or not, how many kids do you think are going to resist the urge to become a YouTube sensation? Especially when the odds of failure have an equal chance of netting you stardom as a successful stunt. It’s not about success or failure, it’s about witnessing stupidity at it’s rawest form.

Carry on.

Oops. You took out a mailbox? Oh… and that parked car? Wow, look at your new car, is not so new looking anymore…and it only turns right while the rear wheels go left and billows blue smoke from under the hood? Bummer. But hey, it’ll look great on YouTube! Sorry about the fines, the property damage and anyone you may have accidentally run over in the process, that’s the price of fame, right?

I hope when the time comes, I’ve taught my son well enough to realize it’s not cool to be a YouTube star for the wrong reasons. But when there’s a whole new generation of kids who don’t know which notch in their mother’s bed post their father is, and are no longer afraid to do the nasty with their own grandma in the same bed, there’s a whole class of people that are going to make that job a lot tougher for me.

Thanks for providing an even lower common denominator America.

By Vernon Heywood

Here it is Monday and my life feels so empty now. The days leading up to the falsely prophesied event made for some very entertaining tweets, memes and Facebook status updates.  “People were telling rapture jokes like there’s no tomorrow!” ba-da-bump-ch-ching! Thank you, I’ll be here all week, try the veal and be sure to tip your waitress.

My personal favorite, other then the Randy Macho Man Savage preparing to take down JC to save mankind, was @RaptureHelpDesk. Denying rumors of Jesus being Raptimpotent, and “TRUE FACT: @Jesus did not fake the #RAPTURE to clear out ticket lines so he could get into #SNL tonight with @jtimberlake and @LadyGaga” kept me rolling on the go. I couldn’t wait for the next 130 characters to pop up in my feed.

Sadly, the only thing that was raptured at the end of the day was @rapturehelpdesk when it signed off. Here’s to hoping it comes back in December 2012 when the Mayans get their shot at being ridiculed. Just before the “END TRANSMISSION” tweet, they did tease with “For now, all we ask is that you be good, love one another, and achieve a few goals… we will see you again in December 2012!”

Until then, you can review all the hilarity in it’s glory at http://twitter.com/#!/RaptureHelpDesk. Follow it and forget about it and maybe you’ll get a nice surprise in 18 months as the tweets hopfully start to flow again to entertain you until the next real end of the world comes.

By Vernon Heywood

This was too funny not to share, however the names have been changed to protect the guilty, and I have no recollection of ever having spam with that woman.

A friend in the SEO biz, let’s call him JoSE O., was recently contacted by a client who had some questions regarding an email he had received from another SEO service. Apparently Beelzebub@bestfrickenSEOever.com had sent an email with the following claims for better site ranking:

To: Kent Tellue

Subject: Can You Really Compete on Google?

Only if you know what your competitors are doing.   We know what your competitors are doing through our proprietary software and we use it to crush them.

Here is what you get from us:

• 8 years automotive SEO experience
• Proprietary software allowing us to “spy” on your competitors
• Manual link building to high PR value sites
• Unique content from the ground up
• Competitive pricing

We are the best in the industry and we can prove it.

Don’t take our word for it, simply reply to this email and say Prove It!

Of course, Kent wants to optimize his site to the hilt and wants to know what JoSE O.’s company does that bests bestfrickenSEOever.com’s bag of tricks.

JoSE O.’s initial concern is that bestfrickenSEOever.com doesn’t even have a website, and no other contact other than beelzebub’s email address. The spam and scam alarms start going off in his net savvy head and worse, if the company is legit, it may be black hat optimization that could destroy everything that JoSE O. and his team had worked to achieve so far.

So JoSE O. calls Kent Tellue to explain his concerns about the email and the possible SEO backlash, and in addition, prior to the phone call dug up all kinds of examples of the work they had done so far to validate the legitimate SEO gains they had made. Kent’s out of the office so he left a message.

After the mad dash to reinforce his company’s position, and leaving the message with Kent, JoSE O. has a moment to calm down and then it occurs to him to check out who this upstart competitor is through the whois registry.

Imagine his surprise when he found out the URL was owned by his own company!

That my friends, is spam Karma!

By Vernon Heywood

On May 17th, I attended to Automotive News Marketing Seminar in Los Angeles, CA. I found what the speakers had to say both informative and insightful, but probably not for the reasons you would think. Among the panelists were Jeff Conrad – VP Acura Sales Division American Honda Motor Co., Inc.; Bill Fay – Group VP Toyota Marketing Toyota Motor Sales, U.S.A., Inc.; Tony Disalle – U.S. VP of Buick Marketing General Motors; Donald Romano – President Mazda Canada, Chief Marketing Officer Mazda North American Operations; Fred Sattler – Executive VP, Managing Director Initiative+ and Steve Shannon, VP Marketing Hyundai Motor America. Presiding over the panel was AutoWeek editor-in-chief Keith Crain who made no bones about sticking a fork in the OEM marketing execs to see which ones had social media campaigns that were well done, and which ones were done well, and in some instances, even seemed a little rare.

One had to wonder as we sat through presentation after presentation, which a few of us even napped through, how well they understood the material they were covering when their presentations of new media, with the exception of Mazda, were as flat as the old media they claimed their audience was outgrowing. Mazda created a dazzling Power Point presentation that kept the audience engaged, entertained them, got the point across, and even glossed over the missing details–like a successful campaign example.

Meanwhile, the other OEMs relied on charts and graphs and historical anecdotes that seemed designed more to convince themselves they knew what new media was rather than their audience. The presentations were flat and dull and were as effective as a black and white photograph trying to illustrate the beauty of a Technicolor world. When it was time to click our ruby slippers and go, Mazda was the Wizard of Oz and everyone else was stuck back home in the dull black and whites of Kansas. At one point, Crain even asked the panel, “Are all of you too old to know what new media is?” We all laughed, and the panel did as well albeit uncomfortably, with the exception once again of Romano, who jokingly or not, answered, “Yes.”

The truth is, new media is still evolving… daily. So the confusion as to what it is or isn’t is understandable, and I don’t aim to criticize based on knowledge of the latest technology alone. But the heart of new media never changes, and that is to embrace the moment. You can’t stand back and analyze it, you need to react and interact. You can’t preach your story, you have to get your audience to participate in it. Once others begin to interact with you in the new media du jour, that’s where you will begin to win brand recognition and earn community respect. Make your audience part of the game, not just the spectators.

That’s why all the other OEMs failed at the Automotive News Marketing Seminar and Mazda did not. All the others treated us like a captive audience instead of engaging us. And we are no longer captive as the flash of mobile device screens from table to table proved throughout the seminar. Mazda not only made their point with their presentation, but in the manner it was presented. All that was missing was Mazda Marketing Seminar check-in on FourSquare and a hashtag to tweet with.

The irony of this missed opportunity to demonstrate what new media is really all about, is that marketing people are like the flu, spreading themselves through a room and making contact with as many people as possible, infecting as many people as possible with their presence. For them, it’s all about the networking, everyone is either a potential client or a future employment opportunity, so they are the easiest audience in the world to reach out too. Yet the head marketing gurus for each of the OEMs in attendance, with the exception of Mazda, didn’t even seem in touch with their own kind.

Good enough. I can’t think of two words that better describe American apathy and a lack of pride in their workmanship.  Do you think our forefathers ever would have broken free from the shackles of Mother England if they had merely thought things were “good enough?” We used to be a nation of craftsman, not simply producers, we had skilled laborers, not bodies to get through the production cycle. We strove to be the best, but somewhere along the way someone decided that “good enough” was.

Was it our best? No, but it was “good enough.” A lazy man’s way of saying “I’m only putting in the marginal effort even if I could do better.” I see it everywhere, look at our automobile industry. Do you think Henry Ford stopped with the Model T because it was “good enough?” No, he made it better, cheaper and found innovative ways to build it, because “good enough” wasn’t. He wanted to be the best. Maybe not necessarily the best car, but definitely the best car company. I recognize this fact and I’m not even a Ford fan.

The automotive industry found itself in dire trouble and needing bail outs because of the predominant “good enough” attitude. It’s hard to escape the grip of that attitude when unions promote safe haven work places where a worker has no incentive to do his best when he can get paid the same amount for doing work that is only “good enough.” The bailouts haven’t entirely erased this way of building cars either. I still see it in cars today.

The first new model to roll off the assembly line from a manufacturer who hadn’t had a new model in over a year thanks to the economic downturn, still had gaps I could fit my fingers into up to the second knuckle on one side of the rear hatch, but tolerances more inline with the rest of the vehicles build on the other side of the hatch that I couldn’t even get the tip of my pinky into. I can only imagine somewhere down the assembly line somebody decided that was “good enough,” but it wasn’t. There’s not a single foreign manufacturer currently importing or building cars in the U.S. that has tolerances that far out of whack. So why is it “good enough” for U.S. manufacturers? I argue that it’s no pride in their work, just a desire to do only what’s “good enough.”

It’s not just the automotive industry either. I see it everywhere, from IT jobs to vending machines. We have a vending machine here at work that constantly has large bottles dispensed from the second row get hung up between the next level down and the side of the machine as they plummet to the dispenser door below. Moving the beverage to be sold from another location in the machine, even the third row, would most likely solve the problem once and for all. Instead the vendor continually opts for the easy way out, removing the jammed energy drink when it happens. This is “good enough,” but only until it happens next week. In the mean time, people who use the machine get frustrated that they’ve lost their money and other people can’t use the machine because the jammed product is blocking several other rows. All the while, the vending machine operator is losing money. The easy way may seem good enough, but clearly it isn’t.

Don’t even get me started on the two hours I spent sorting through poorly laid out site architecture that is going to continue to produce additional technical issues because someone didn’t lay the ground work properly because it would have taken more work, and instead settled for “good enough”–and it isn’t. Now we are too far into it to change it without breaking the whole site, so instead we will have to settle for continually correcting smaller scale errors that are caused by the poorly designed architecture. All the hours wasted fixing those errors thus far have taken far more time than if the initial designer had taken the extra ten minutes to set up the directories properly to begin with. Again, what was good enough to finish the job ten minutes sooner is not “good enough” down the road.

I can only think of one company in this world that can afford to settle for “good enough,” and that company is Apple. The only reason they can ship a product that is merely “good enough” is because nobody else’s product is. But what Steve and the Apple Corps. are doing is smart. They aren’t resting on “good enough,” they are developing the next level of “good enough” before the competition even has a chance to catch up to the current version of “good enough” and you don’t even realize that what you’re buying is only “good enough.”

Think about it, iPhone without video capabilities even though other phones already had it. The rest of the phone was so far advanced that they could ship it without, and offer it in the next version forcing you to upgrade. Brilliant.  Not only does this strategy keep Apple ahead of the game, but ensures a steady stream of upgrades as people continually trade up to the next big thing. Each new version of their product puts the onus of what’s good enough on the consumer instead of Apple. It’s up to you, the consumer, to buy the next version if you want to have the best instead of what’s now blatantly obvious as only “good enough.”

If only we pursued beyond the “good enough” envelope in everything we did instead of just our electronic gadgets.  i believe we could be great again if we did. If we really want to fix the economy and the automotive industry and become a great nation of craftsman and skilled laborers again, we need to follow Mr. Jobs example. But first we have to stop settling for “good enough,” and start building things the best we can again–not just “good enough,” but, better than the rest. We need to be the front runners–those who set the standard that others try to meet. Once we do that, then, and only then, can we decide what’s good enough and leave our audience eagerly anticipating our next big thing, leaving “good enough” to last years model, and our competitors.

Until that happens, “good enough,” isn’t.

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