Frauds and fakes

I saw a play last night - kinda sorta about the JT Leroy thing, and the James Frey thing, and the Stephen Glass thing and a thing I hadn't heard of - the Nasdijj thing.

All literary fraud things. Fakes. Hoaxes, really. But...

I remember learning that George Eliot was really a woman who submitted her work as a man because she knew it wouldn't be considered for publication otherwise. And George Sand was a woman too - a Baroness, in fact. Mark Twain's real name was Samuel Langhorne Clemens. (Alright, that's not exactly the same thing, but I wanted to throw it in there anyway, because I happen to remember his full real name.)

I'll grant you that they then wrote fiction that didn't depend quite so, er, significantly on their assumed persona as a teenage gay hustler (JT LeRoy); a recovered alcoholic, drug addict, and criminal (James Frey); a Native American raising a son with Fetal Alcohol Syndrome (Nadijj); or a journalist reporting the news, supposedly (Stephen Glass).

Still.

Seems to me that these days, every week is a new episode of "Which Lie Did I Tell?" (thank you William Goldman), offering a strong lead-in to the latest and greatest reality show we're all watching, "Fess Up or Keep Lying?" which could re-use the Jetsons' theme (sing with me now): "Meet Bill Clinton... his wife Hill'ry. Congressman Craig. Gov Spitzer. Fess up or keep lyin'?"

Political fraud, literary hoaxes. Fiction doesn't hold a candle to the outpourings of courageous and valiant individuals who have suffered and survived, and who, by the way, know how to string a sentence together and have a tantalizing background story. And I'm not talking about the Bush twins.


(Note: Those aren't pictures of Britney - those are pictures of the girl who posed as the boy who was supposed to be JT LeRoy, who turned out to be a 40 year old woman named Laura. No kidding.)

The list (courtesy Real Simple)
Ethylene-producing	Ethylene-sensitive
Apricots	Apples
Avocados	Asparagus
Bananas	Broccoli
Cantaloupes	Carrots
Honeydew melons	Cucumbers
Kiwis	Eggplants
Mangoes	Green beans
Nectarines	Lettuce and other greens
Papayas	Potatoes
Peaches
Pears
Plums
Tomatoes

Marquee this

This is a test

Metrics - look who's riding the pendulum now

Once, a long long long time ago, I worked at Citigroup. Honest, I did. And at Citigroup, 'metric' is a verb. Everything that happened, or that thought about happening, or that might happen, had to be measured, analyzed and reported. The trick was - once the data was sliced and diced and served on a silver platter, then what, pardon the word choice, happened? In the wise words of my very wise boss, we promptly and with gusto threw all that data on the floor, walked on it and stomped it into the ground. Hmmph.

But I did say that my boss (let's call her V) was very wise, and so she assembled a crack team (including yours truly) to develop a system not only to investigate and measure data, but to display that data in a friendly and supremely usable way. She developed a dashboard for executives that looked like the controls on a cockpit (just imagine all those suits with their own custom cockpit for their business units - they were in heaven!) and that functioned proactively. Let me repeat - the cockpit had its very own brain. This was more years ago than I'd like to cop to - but it was bleeding edge back then, and it's not all that commonplace now.

Why am I posting this history lesson? Well, everywhere we turn today, it's all about marketing metrics, and click counting, and data delivery. But T and I were at lunch yesterday, discussing the thought that although programs are reporting more metrics, and are counting every click every which way, our clients still are not in that much better of a position or more prepared to act on that data. Countless times we have delivered a database of qualified, enthusiastic and interested consumers to a client - only to have them say thank you and, metaphorically anyway, put it away on a shelf to gather dust. What is the post-activity activity? Who follows up on those addresses and emails and opt-ins and opt-outs? Who turns interested consumers into loyal customers?

Metrics are great, and they're certainly a huge step forward from the black hole of marketing (does this sound familiar? "I know that 50% of my advertising is wasted. I just don't know which half"), but they can also be just another safety belt. Just as you won't get fired for hiring IBM, you can rely on today's metrics to cushion your decisions ("but we saw an 80% click-through rate!"). The key really isn't the metrics, folks, but, as V, my very wise boss, realized oh those many moons ago, it's the action you take because of the metrics. All those suits may have had access to the data, in dry-as-dust 10" thick greenbar reports - but until V provided a simple (and fun, suits are people too) interface that not only reported the data, but more importantly, facilitated action based on the data (at the push of a button, minatory emails could be sent, limts could be changed, vendors could be challenged), no one was leveraging the data.

Marketing programs are no different. Metrics are great - but the best programs are the ones that take the metrics in stride and come complete with post-activity activity. 80% of your audience clicked through where you wanted them to? Fabulous! But in our view, only if the program continues to produce consumer activity (measurable to be sure: how many of them went on to sign up for that special promotion, how many of those resulted in a sale) is the program truly complete. Because, to murder the bard, the sale is the thing.

Our new favorite thing

So we all know, perhaps evidenced by the fact that we don't know, that Americans are not nearly as interested in SMS messaging as our counterparts in Europe and Asia (not really a newsworthy observation since 2003, when this was NEWS - see The Economist, Bluetooth News, etc.). And, T and I were no different. But then, aha!, along came GOOGL (or 46645) - the mobile 411. And I mean 411 as in the "down-low," the "info," the "story."

Want to know how many square feet in an acre? Text "acre to square feet" to 46645- and in seconds see

1 acre = 43560 square feet

appear on your phone. Want to know where and when "Inside Man" is playing near you (and you do... it's not to be missed). Text "Inside Man, 10023" (um, use your own zip code) and see

(1/3)Movies: * Inside Man 2hr 9min,R,Suspense/Thriller/Drama, 3.7/5 AMC Loews Lincoln Square 12 & IMAX 12:10 1:30 3:20 4:40 6:30 7:45 9:50 10:55 1998 Broadway

Is this great or what? And best of all, this spells the end of those $1.50 411 calls you make on your phone to get the number of that restaurant. Instead, text "Ouest NYC" to see

(1/2)Did you mean 'OUEST nyc'?
Google Local: Ouest 2315 Broadway New York, NY 10024 212-580-8700 5.2 mi, N

Does it get better than this? Okay, maybe just a hair - sports scores, please? Texting "GMU Uconn" returns Sorry, 'gmu uconn' did not return any results. For HELP on Google SMS, please reply with 'help' or go to http://sms.google.com. As we know today, the results were extraordinary: the first result listed on Google reads UConn's luck finally runs out vs. GMU.

And, unlike American Idol's text-to-vote option on Cingular, GOOGL works with every carrier, every phone that is SMS capable. It's been said before, but we'll say it again, Google changes everything it touches. What can we say? Google's GR8