The Name Game

Naming things isn't easy. I feel like maybe I didn't acknowledge that enough in my last entry. While I don't change my stance on the Gamer razor, I will respect the fact that it's a challenge to name a product. Especially in a case where you have to name something that is basically the exact same thing as everything else in the line (like the Fusion Gamer) yet the name has to give the product a character of it's own.

Case in point, the "Become A Doritos Guru" contest. I remember seeing this bag on the shelf and saying, "What? I have a background in advertising! Of course I can come up with an awesome name and advertising idea for this!" I made a few phone calls to colleagues who I thought would help make this happen. After that, I paid for the bag of Doritos thinking I was about to taste $25,000 and 1% of the flavour's future sales.

I was so intrigued at the time as to what these could possibly taste like. But when I took my first bite, I knew I was in for trouble. "Uh...this tastes just like regular Doritos," I said to myself. "Maybe just a touch spicy, but other than that they taste just like any other Doritos chip."

From then on, all I could think about were "cheese" and "spice". Spicy Cheese? Cheese Spice? Extreme Cheese? "Damn it!" I said in frustration, after eating the whole bag and still not having a clue what to call it. The chips weren't even that great.

What do you do? Odds are, naming it straight-up isn't going to cut it anymore. I was hoping there would be something distinct about the taste to work around, but all I had to work with was "spicy". As if that hasn't been done before.

I was kind of hoping to waltz in and collect $25,000. Didn't happen. Partially because I didn't have the time to dedicate to it, and partially cause naming things is hard. But like anything else in advertising, you probably could come up with the right name through 1+1=3. Know the target. Know the product. Come up with the creative concept to bring them together. I didn't do the math. I just ate the chips.

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Your Online Footprint

image from sing365.com

When you run a Google search for my name, an Amazon review for the album "rear end" by Mercedes shows up that I supposedly wrote in 2001. In the review, I supposedly said:

"This is NASTY music! I can't believe I wasted money on thi- OMG! OMG! I WASTED (dollar ammount)!! GAH! neway, the beats (...), and the lyrics are just too raunchy and don't even make sense! She'd be better off in the porn industry. GO BACK! GO BACK! (and give me back my fourteen dollars)"

Nothing too bad. However, I don't want to associate with it. Especially since it's the very first item that comes up on Google when anybody searches me. The big problem with this review is, I didn't write this.


I didn't have an Amazon account until 2004. My friend Ahmed wrote this as a joke. He denies ever doing it, but if you look at "my" profile, the nickname is his real name. The bigger problem with this is: it's eight years later, he lives in Texas and even if he were to finally admit he did it, he doesn't remember how to log in to remove the review. Unfortunately, that review will probably forever stand as a "scar" to me. I hope that it doesn't negatively colour the perception others have of me, but it's out of my control now.

That was an isolated incident. For the most part, we have complete control over what we contribute to the Internet. However, most of us don't always take precaution before we post. And in the age of "Web 2.0", the problem only gets worse when it's so easy to Tweet too much information or post a picture you think only your Facebook friends will see until it "magically" ends up in plain view of everyone.

What if your mother were to find this stuff? What if a future employer found this stuff? Employers do look up potential new employees on Google to find things you may not want them to see. I remember sitting in an informational with someone at an advertising agency with hiring power. This person would regularly search the names of applicants on Google to see what they could find. If this person found anything bad, they would print it out, and when the applicant came in for their interview, this person would present all the dirt on the applicant they found and use it as examples of why they wouldn't be hired. Imagine sitting in a job interview where the interviewer was presenting drunken pictures of yourself that they found on Facebook. The agony!

To me, one of the highest profile cases of falling victim to your online footprint occured in the murder trial of Stephanie Rengel. The girl convicted of nagging her boyfriend to kill Stephanie left an online footprint the size of Big Foot for the prosecution to present to the court. MSN conversations, text messages and Facebook wall posts flew right in the face of her "I only said it a few times and never meant it," defense.

Not even the delete button can save a person (or in this next case, a company) from falling victim to their own online footprint. Back in 2006, a website popped up called "All I Want For Xmas Is A PSP". Supposedly, it was made by a bunch of guys who were trying to convince their friend's mom of buying her son a PSP. However, the Internet community got suspicious and revealed that it was in fact Sony that made the site. Sony deleted all traces of the campaign, but savvy users saved everything. To this day, the video remains as a scar on the face of the company.

I've spent most of this entry talking about the bad side of our online footprints, but the idea of an online footprint in general is fascinating to me. What about the millions of abandoned blogs? Most of those don't get deleted, they just stay there as "online artifacts" of sorts. Maybe I'm alone in this, but sometimes I'll read a blog that hasn't been updated in years and wonder, "What happened to the user?" Why did they stop? Where did they go? Where are they now?

We can even take this discussion into the afterlife. Odds are, everything you post on the Internet will stay there longer than you stay on the Internet. What then happens to everything online you left behind? There's been a lot of hot-button discussion as to what to do about social networking profiles when that person passes away, but we'll save that discussion for another day.

Before I go, I'll leave you with this question: what does your online footprint look like?

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Allow Me to Reintroduce Myself

Welcome to my blog!

While this is my first post under this name, I'm far from a newbie when it comes to blogging or creating content for the Internet. I've been blogging personally since 2003, with hundreds of entries under another alias, along with some experience corporate blogging. Check out of one of my entries I did for the radio station Z103.5 here.

So why am I here starting yet another blog?

Well, I have a few reasons:

1) I have to for a school assignment.
2) I want to help my professor and fellow blogger Anthony Kalamut properly format his blog and I couldn't recommend any solutions without using the Blogger interface myself.
3) I want to build a more professional web presence for myself.

Back when I started blogging, my mindset towards the medium was different. I treated it as a personal diary that just so happened to be on the Internet. I never thought anybody else would ever find it.

Then I found out that some of my friends were regularly checking it out to see what I would write about next. Then I started getting comments from people around the world. Then I found my blog on Technorati, and saw that my blog was ranked within the top 1 million in the world.

Normally, it's not that impressive to know that there are close to a million people more popular than you. However, in a blogosphere that has well over 100 million bloggers, it was a cause for pause.

"Wait a minute," I said to myself. "People are actually reading what I have to say?"

For better or worse, there were people that did care about the musings of a high-school-turned-college student venting about his day-to-day drama. It got me really conscious as to the contents of my "online footprint", to the point where I almost went cold turkey. I didn't want to jeopardize myself by posting something on the Internet that I shouldn't. So, I just stopped posting.

The problem with that mindset is, I'm striving for a career in advertising, with aspirations of someday specializing in online, interactive and social media. I'll gladly work with traditional media; I've spent the last 4 years of my life working in the radio business and got into advertising in the first place to further explore roles I could do within the traditional media realm. But my knowledge and passion for online, interactive and social media are arguably the biggest assets I can provide to a company and the assets that set me apart from the rest.

So lets bring it back a bit. How then, do I then sell myself as someone in touch with the online world without anything online to show for it? The answer I came up with: start fresh.

"With great power comes great responsibility."

Yes, it's corny that I pulled out the Spiderman quote, but it's very fitting in this case. A blog is an extremely powerful tool of communication that can change the world. I want to continue using it, but more wisely. No more "hacker aliases". No more muttering under my breath online when I really want to shout out loud. No more trying to hide from accountability. There's nothing wrong with shouting out loud. It's just a matter of making sure I can stand behind everything I shout.

This is my blog, in my name, for the world to see. My goal for this blog is that I want this to be valuable to everyone; from my friends, to my family, to teachers, to future employers. I want this to be the culmination of my writing ability, my creativity, my thought process and my skills working with online tools. I want to be in a situation where anybody that searches my name on Google will find this blog and see the best I have to offer.

Is my answer the right answer? I don't know. But I guess we'll find out soon enough.

Over the course of time, I'll be posting about a variety of different subject matter using different media to help me express myself, such as video and possibly a podcast. Hope you stick along for the ride.

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