8.) The Manifesto on More Shameless Advertisements

The other day was Free Cone Day at Ben & Jerry’s. They have this event every year to promote their ice cream. They really don’t need the publicity, but they do it anyway. I suppose that if they didn’t, people would become upset, and they would lose business. But they must lose tons of money on this, as hordes of people show up to every location in Vermont. This leads me to wonder: How do large companies handle promotions?

Shamelessly. They handle promotions shamelessly. It’s like the Manifesto T-shirts, possibly coming soon – they’re comfortable, versatile, and the best way to promote everyone’s favorite website. Tell your friends. Ben & Jerry’s is slightly less shameless, largely because everyone loves the veritable holiday. However, when a company hires a skywriting plane to write its name in the sky over the Super Bowl, that’s shameless. I wish I had that kind of money.

Okay, so maybe Ben & Jerry's is kinda shameless....

In December of 1999, a small startup not yet launched got a town in Oregon to change its name – to Half.com. Now a popular fixed-priced online retailer, Half.com clearly had enough influence – as a small start-up – to get an entire town to change its name. Besides the fact that Half.com, Oregon, had a whopping population of 360 and really did it for the tourism, the important thing is that a start-up got an entire town to change its name. (According to then-CEO Joshua Kopelman, he chose what used to be Halfway, Oregon, for its “folksy, warm nature…. They have llama rides.”) The promotion seems to have worked, as Kopelman sold Half.com to eBay the same year his site launched – for $350 million.

Town names have been promotionally changed in the past. Dish, Texas, and the “Google, Kansas” April Fools joke, to name two. Ismay, Montana, temporarily changed its name to Joe in 1993, to honor Joe Montana. The promotion was hugely successful. And by “hugely successful,” I mean that the 26-person town is still very much unheard-of. But the award for most shameless promotion in history would have to go towww.themediamanifesto.wordpress.com. Manifesto, OUT.

The Manifesto Makes Another Announcement

Greetings, comrades all. We have decided to operate both on WordPress and on Blogger. These next few posts will experiment with the dual sites, and we'll see where we go from there.

New Site

Greetings, faithful readers of the Manifesto. We've got a new site on WordPress now. Come check us out, comrade, and follow the Redvolution. (Not all of the posts from this site have transferred to WordPress, so for the time being, it's basically whichever format you like more.)

http://themediamanifesto.wordpress.com/

http://www.facebook.com/TheMediaManifesto

Also, be sure to check out our other blog, Pavlov's Hair Conditioner.

http://pavlovshairconditioner.wordpress.com/

http://www.facebook.com/PavlovsHairConditioner

7.) The Manifesto on How to Be Social When You're Being Anti-Social

Hey, do you want to be my friend? What? You’re not on Facebook? Is that even possible? I thought it was, like, a law of physics or something. I guess you’re just anti-social.

Facebook and other social media sites play a huge role in the development of our culture, not to mention that of friends, farms, fish, and gangsters. And spammers. But let’s not go there. Without Facebook, what would “friend” mean? Didn’t they invent that word? No? Well, at least they made it a verb. Just like Google (I google, you google, he/she/it googles) has created a new word in the English language and, I dare say, numerous other tongues, Facebook and other social media sites have created, changed, or altered the meaning of numerous words. These include “friend,” “tweet,” “like,” and “creepy stalker.” With regards to that last one, the sites have also created new ways of being rather unkind to others, such as spamming their walls, popularizing rumors, and burning their FarmVilles and pillaging their Café Worlds. I’m not sure if that’s actually a feature, but if you’re listening, Zynga….

Cute bird + Simple command = The quintessence of low.

(Image courtesy of http://technorati.com/blogging/article/trouble-deciding-who-to-follow-on/)

As for Twitter, I’m technically a member (username: xavieryes; password: *********, not necessarily in that order), but virtually never use it. Heh. See what I did there? Virtually? It’s a website? Huh? Huh? Oh, for crying out loud – it’s a pun, dagnabbit. Just like Twitter. I’m sure that makes sense somehow, and it provides a convenient leap from tangent to topic. I find the whole “tweeting” thing to be rather obnoxious. “hey, guyz, guss wat? im in da kitchen makin a sammich.” Okay, so maybe that isn’t a completely accurate representation. There probably wouldn’t be a period at the end. But people tweet about everything from Growl improvements to bowel movements. (For those who don’t know, Growl is a computer program that conveniently fits this admittedly irritating little rhyme.) This has to stop. Now.

But what can we do? How can we combat the insipid, ineffective ignoramuses who invite intelligent insults? Well, for starters, we could kill them, but that probably wouldn’t work out too well for either party. We could vandalize their computers, spray-painting “’I’m’ has a capital and an apostrophe, you know-nothing twit” on their monitors. Or, since that probably wouldn’t fit, we could create bumper stickers that say “Save the Grammar,” peel them off, and staple-gun them to the offender’s forehead. That might work. But probably the best way to enforce laws of decency is to remove the grammar-illiterate from the very thing that keeps them alive. That’s right. The Internet. Manifesto, OUT.