Barack Obama IS a Super Hero. But only to the extent that we do our part, too.

I like to start a zillion things to study topics like how to make something go viral. And I thought you might want to take a gander at my Obama blog. I make several updates about five days a week.

The idea about is is to keep a watchful eye (how do you keep an UNwatchful eye?) on what is happening with the Obama camp in the mood and hold Obama and crew accountable by checking up on which promises they were able to keep, which were totally forgotten, which went exactly by the plan on his site, and which were blatantly abandoned for one reason or another. I also post pics there and have a laugh as often as possible.

I figure if he has a decent score card in four years, we re-elect him.

[via TechCrunch]

That is This Week’s New Crack.

photo credit: islands are forever

I’m putting the finishing touches on this list of bloggers to contact for a promotion. I love this part of my job, I meet the greatest people…

Anyway in doing that I found a post hailing this product line called Lush as a form of crack – and since I blog about found gems in the parlance of the new crack, it seemed like destiny.

I mean really. Who can resist this?

You are cruelty-free. You use a minimum of packaging. Your Dreamcream eradicated the hideous itching I had throughout the winter, when my skin was so dry I could scratch my name in the flakiness of my legs. The natural, often organic ingredients you use make me smell sexy, and my husband, sexier.

My name is Tracie, and I am a Lushie. It’s been two weeks since my last Lush purchase.

So I went to the site, which has bath and beauty type products and I think I’m in love.

I have no idea what it smells like, but it sounds like it’s heavenly. That isn’t what impressed me though. I’m fasinated by this product they have called a Bath Bomb. It’s a solid block of good smelling stuff you drop in the tub that’s supposed to erupt into a lovely bath experience. Yay.

Here’s what they say:

Pop a LUSH bath bomb in a pre-run bath and it erupts in a mass of fragrant fizzing, sometimes launching flower petals, leaves, natural butters, and even confetti into the bath water. After a mad frenzy it calms down and gently scents the water with natural essential oils.

Someone like me who uses de-stressing as part of my daily healing treatment doesn’t look at the price tag on things like that. It’s $6. Yeah, I can buy a bottle of decent bubble bath for $4, and use that bottle over and over again. But it won’t give me a unique experience like this one. And they don’t have names like “The Sex Bomb” or “The Happy Pill”. For an aromaholic, stuff like that is irresistible to me.

The lesson?

You may think you have no use for social media, but no matter how big or small your company is, if you have even one fan, you should be at very minimum, enabling your fans to submit your site to social media with as much ease as possible. Stay in touch with them. Give them freebies. Because that willing fan can reach hundreds of people who could also become raving fans. One thing Lush could do better is rally those bloggers and organize them into a force that spreads their message. They have a customer forum… great start but they could do so much better. It is massive profit waiting to happen.

Maybe I should write a book about the system I use to rally fans and fanatics to spread the word about a company?

Nah. I’ll save it for the membership site. It’s not really a whole book…

PS- Free tip. If you have a product that people are fans of, add pictures of all your stuff to Flickr. Why?

Because many bloggers use sites like Flickr for royalty-free art. There’s even a plug-in that automatically adds attribution to the person who created the photo. Then from your page you could even look up everyone who ever linked to that page to easily find that subset of your fans.