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OK, I admit it. I love Men’s Health Magazine. When I read an issue I feel like there’s still hope for me–still time to create chiseled six-pack abs, land that perfect job, take an epic trip, generate untold wealth, attract hordes of smoking hot babes just dying to please me–you know, the basic stuff a man of my stature deserves. It’s full of useful tricks and tips, style advice, fitness regimens and human interest stories, sort of playing the role for me that Cosmo does for the ladies. I tend to enjoy staying plugged in to the younger set because I feel better when I do.

So when they offered me a chance to get some email alerts once a week or so on fitness and style, I signed up for a few. It was a way to stay plugged into that content between issues and get some good advice on whatever manly activity I was currently weak in.

Big Mistake.

EVERY single one I have received so far has been marketing spam. I was HOPING for, and expecting, blog-style columns driving me back to the site where I would be happy to consume advertising while I read invaluable posts about advancing my career and or 99 sex tricks certain to drive her crazy. Instead, I’m getting pummeled by teasers for $79 nutritional supplements and workout CDs. There has not been one single link to useful advice that I didn’t have to buy. VERY disappointing.

Look, content marketing won’t work well unless you surface valuable content. You have to provide information worth consuming that folks will want to share and that will enhance your reputation as a trusted provider of whatever it is you provide. All this tactic did was get me to unsubscribe from those emails as fast as I possibly could, with the additional side effect of undermining my desire to return to the site on my own. It was a classic bait and switch that altered my point of view on the publication from trusted source to spammer.

Another brand I cared about, forever tarnished. Sad. Very sad indeed.

It’s fall here in Charlottesville, sort of, and school is back in session. The University of Virginia’s Board of Visitors, that venerable group in charge of running the place, has declared that they are “ready to move on” from this summer’s disastrous debacle in which they attempted to fire their new president, Theresa Sullivan, and then reinstated her under great pressure from just about every other University constituency. It was a PR and marketing disaster in every way and I can certainly see how they’d want to move on as fast as possible.

Sadly, the sludge from this mess just keeps bubbling up to remind everyone in the community how poorly handled the whole thing was. Through Freedom of Information Act requests, journalists from local as well as national papers, like this week’s New York Times and The Chronicle of Higher Education, have released scathing accounts of the disaster and how it affects higher ed in general. I’m a proud Wahoo, so this stuff really bugs me.

I’d like to focus on the latest blog post from the Chronicle, because it exposes what I think is the biggest PR and marketing black eye of the whole thing: namely that The Rector of the Board of Visitors, Helen Dragas, has not only been opaque and obfuscatory in her explanations on why she felt the University needed a new president, she has actually solicited students and high-profile faculty like Larry Sabato to write her opinion FOR her, to lend their credibility to her tarnished message. Sabato politely declined.

One of the central roles of a university is to cultivate forms of free and open expression that embody the public sphere. What Dragas sought to create was something that looked like a public sphere, but would in fact be a planted product of corporate media relations, to go unrevealed as such.

So? you say. People do that all the time when they hire PR firms to write for them. We do it all the time when we solicit influencers to spread our thoughts around. True. This is different to me because it does not appear Ms. Dragas is seeking influencers, she is seeking mouthpieces. She is not willing to stand on her own merits publicly, but is asking students and faculty to speak for her, to lend her message the credibility through accepted channels she seems unable to generate for herself.

If you know anything about UVA, you know that the students are held to a very strict honor code that says if you lie, cheat or steal you are banned from the community forever. By asking a student to write her opinion for her, without crediting the original idea back, is Ms. Dragas pressuring that student to violate that honor code? Should the Rector be allowed to put faculty and students in that position? What does it say about the ethics of the Rector that she would consider violating the very code the University bases so much of its institutional integrity upon?

Read the whole article. It should give our whole industry pause. Anyone asking us to artificially create consensus, hide the truth, violate ethics, or induce spin should NOT be clients. Right??

It’s no conspiracy. Facebook acknowledged it as recently as last week: messages now reach, on average, just 15 percent of an account’s fans. In a wonderful coincidence, Facebook has rolled out a solution for this problem: Pay them for better access.

As their advertising head, Gokul Rajaram, explained, if you want to speak to the other 80 to 85 percent of people who signed up to hear from you, “sponsoring posts is important.”

Above is a quote from an interesting read from the New York Observer today in which we learn some unsettling, but not at all surprising truths. Namely, that a lot of the capabilities that social platforms enabled in the beginning to lure you in and get you hooked are now systematically being yanked from your unhappy clutches: unless you’re willing to pay. Examples include Twitter automation on LinkedIn, basic messaging functionality on Facebook fan pages, Twitter account verification and validation, and so on.

This is why I am constantly advocating for not confusing strategy with tactics. This is why I worry when so-called “Facebook experts” or “social media gurus” pop up. If they are such experts, they SHOULD tell you how to maximize value from this type of reality. They’d be recommending a thorough analysis of the costs and the expected reach you might generate. They’d be questioning whether these platforms are even necessary, given this information. They’d be advising you more holistically on how to diversify your communications so  that when these greedy software companies finally reveal their true colors, you’re not left holding the bag.

Wow, I sound like a financial advisor. But I guess that’s maybe what it comes down to.

Are you diversified?

This is an incredible set of stats. Enough said.