“So, I think I know what I’m talking about there…Sparky.”

The comments on the video are classic.

—Ian

Quick answer: Yes, but only if you are very good. More on what “good” means in a second.

Back in July, spy photos and brief video surfaced on several automobile enthusiast websites. Depicted was a prototype Porsche station wagon, known in automotive parlance as a shooting brake.

The photos and video caused a sensation and spread throughout the enthusiast community, driving loads of comments on blogs and rampant speculation as to when the boys from Zuffenhausen were going to release the official car to the public. The Frankfurt Auto Show? Tokyo? People wanted to know.

The questions continued to pour in. Did this mean Porsche was abandoning it’s oft-maligned SUV, the Cayenne? Was this new shooting brake, clearly based on the entry-level Cayman, going to be Porsche’s only venture into the world of station wagons? Was Porsche going Volvo on the world, and completing its sellout?

The company had nothing to say. And if the voices clamoring in the blogosphere had calmed down for just a minute, they might have heard the faint sound of snickering.

As it turned out, Porsche’s shooting brake was a fake. The whole thing was dreamed up by the then soon-to-be-unemployed staff of Top Gear America as a parting gift to the show’s many fans.

Most people hate being duped, but in this case, there was no backlash against the show. Accumulate enough goodwill in a community and you will be forgiven the occasional whoopee cushion on the chair.

If you were inspired by the Top Gear crew’s antics and are determined to set the world afire with your own tall tale, here are a few things to keep in mind if you want to be good and do it right..

1. Execute. The only way you have even half a chance is to come up with something clever and then make it sing. It ain’t going to work if people don’t believe it.

2. Don’t mess with people’s emotions in a negative way. I think we can all agree that the Balloon Boy fiasco—originally dreamed up as a publicity stunt—managed to generate only the wrong kind of attention once the truth came out. Nothing that ends with a criminal investigation is worth it.

3. Enhance your cool. Some people don’t react well to being pranked. There isn’t much you can do about this, but you are required to have a sense of humor when dealing with those who don’t.

4. Don’t forget your audience. The Top Gear stunt worked well because the automobile enthusiast community is used to manufacturers trying to hide new models (often in plain sight) and used to manufacturers building show cars that never make it to production. Plus, these are enthusiasts; they love to talk about cars, the good, the bad and the ugly.

5. Be prepared for blowback. Some people, bless their gullible hearts, won’t understand the joke and may begin acting on some of the falsehoods you’ve laid out. Years ago, I wrote a newspaper column, published on April 1, which stated that the legislature had just passed a law changing Daylight Savings Time to mean a two-hour forward leap instead of the customary one. Despite naming my fictitious governor’s press secretary Jacques Strap and despite reminding readers to look carefully at the dateline of the newspaper, we were deluged with calls wondering when this was taking place. Exercise your power judiciously.

—Jonathan
(@bentpiton)

New iPhones hit the stores last week, and consumers—weak economy and two-year contract with AT&T be damned—went home with more than one million of the devices.

Despite the name, iPhones are not phones; they are powerful handheld computers. I own a first-generation iPhone and it can do things that early cell phones could never dream of; in fact, it can do things my first Apple product, a Macintosh SE purchased in 1990, never dreamed of.

Sure it can do all the standard smartphone tricks—texting, calendar, camera, maps with turn-by-turn directions, etc., but where the iPhone really excels is in it’s expandability through The App Store.

There are more than 36,000 apps available for the iPhone and those apps will do just about anything. Apple maintains tight control over the types of apps approved for distribution, but that has not stopped a flood of fart apps from spewing their effervescence throughout the App Store.

Without further ado, here’s a glance at the apps—good, bad and ugly—that grace the iPhones here at Eat Media:

Britta
My five favorite apps:
1.    Camera (Blackberry didn’t have one. Don’t know how I lived without it.)
2.    Maps
3.    Facebook
4.    YouTube (for playing Sesame Street clips to a cranky baby in the car)
5.    Amazon.com

The most disappointing app: Twitteriffic

The app that likely no one else in the office has: iPregnancy

Wendy
My five favorite apps:
1.    History Lite
2.    Wikipanion
3.    Facebook
4.    Pac Man
5.    NPR Mobile

The most disappointing app: UrbanSpoon is a great idea, but always recommends me to go to restaurants in St. Pete and Tampa. None of the suggestions are helpful, and Sarasota seems to be off the map.

The apps that likely no one else in the office has:
1.    The “Festivals” app, which lists every major religious festival this year and next, for eight major world religions.
2.    ”Snow,” which features snow falling across the screen while “Snow!” flashes. For some reason, I haven’t deleted it.

Jonathan
My five favorite apps:
1.    Oakley Surf Report: With a five-year-old obsessed with his Boogie Board, a good surf report is essential each weekend.
2.    Flashlight: Simple, but useful.
3.    YouTube: Time-kill central.
4.    Stars: I love the seasonal ballet in the sky and Stars helps me keep track.
5.    3banana: Note taking that syncs with my desktop computer at home.

The most disappointing app: Adventure. Thought this would be a fun trip down memory lane, but it was just sad to see what used to pass for quality entertainment.

The apps that likely no one else in the office has: Tracking the Eye. Hurricane season is on here in Florida.

—Jonathan (@bentpiton)

For the past few weeks, my existence has consisted of eating, sleeping, working and daydreaming about a tortoise. Discouraged by my new landlord’s no pet policy, a tortoise seemed a perfect low-profile pet candidate. My imaginary but soon-to-be pet tortoise is a girl and has a name—Priscilla.

To the best of my knowledge, a tortoise doesn’t bark or meow or chew up the baseboards. Best of all, tortoises are herbivores, so Priscilla won’t require any mashed up meat from a can.

After a week or two of dreaming about Priscilla, my fantasy was interrupted by a harsh dose of reality: tortoises hibernate. For several months. All winter long. I decided that Priscilla can not be, because when she hibernates, I will miss her too much.

If Priscilla were a website, we’d tell her that a hibernating site is a site no one wants.

We’d say, “Priscilla, before you become part of the world wide web, you need to get this through your exoskeleton:”

• What is going to keep your audience engaged and coming back and wanting more?

• Will your content hold your audience’s attention with it’s every move?

• Will your audience be unable to resist photographing it to document every new development and forwarding updates to family, friends and everyone and anyone else in their contact list?

Don’t let your content curl up for a couple of months and go to sleep while your audience checks back, obsessively at first, looking for any sign of life, then frequently, then seldom and then, maybe . . . not at all.

–Wendy Joan

PS. I’ve just learned that not all tortoises hibernate. And even the species that do can be kept awake if they find a good domestic setting. Which just goes to show that even if your content is suiting up for a long winter’s nap, there’s still time to change it’s natural instinct to ensure it never hibernates again.

GOOP (Gwyneth’s initials, although we never find out what the double O’s stand for) features G-Palt’s wisdom on everything from family-friendly recipes to assembling a fail-proof mommy uniform. I visited the site Sunday morning right after I read the article, and I signed up for the newsletter (who wouldn’t want banana-nut muffin recipes and fashion advice and from Gwynnie?).

But apparently the GOOP team wasn’t expecting the article to run that Sunday. In the Style section. As the lead feature.

Fair enough. I’d give them some time to scramble for more server space.

A few hours later, same error message.

And today, four days later, same error message.

Where is Gwyneth’s web team? How many hundreds, thousands, millions of subscribers have they lost from this oversight?

UPDATE: Strangely enough, I just received a newsletter from GOOP, as though their “something went terribly wrong” never happened. What??

TAKEAWAY: Crazy that we even have to say this, but it’s never okay to skip any form of testing (load testing, browser testing, user testing and re-testing, etc.). Never. But especially when you know you are about to receive national media attention.

–Britta

Confession: Up until this week, I’ve been building production schedules in Excel. It’s something I started in my early 20’s at Ammirati Puris Lintas, where I wore miniskirts and three-inch heels and tracked 100 unique print ads a month for the Dell account.

(That was before my eventual transition down to the creative floor, where, as a copywriter, I wore red corduroys and green Nikes and got to hang out in the creative lounge dreaming up campaigns for Montblanc and Marriott. Life was much better on the 35th floor.)

After hammering out dates for a July launch only to realize that a September launch would make much more sense, I loathed the thought of reworking the entire schedule. Which is when my brilliant partner Ian informed me that everyone else in the office uses ConceptDraw to build their production schedules.

Is this a print vs. web thing?

Lured in by the pretty colored lines that show intersecting milestones, I downloaded ConceptDraw and got to work. I endured multiple crashes and some annoying usability issues, but I got through it. And the launch date still wasn’t quite right.

Which is when I realized just how much extra work I had been creating for myself as an Excel devotee (er, dinosaur). Because a Gantt chart calculates the total number of days for each project phase, all I had to do was plug in the new launch date and—presto magic!—the schedule updated itself. It even knew the difference between work days and weekends.

Sometimes it’s shocking to realize ways in which you are (i.e. I am) behind the times. I use Mint.com on my iPhone. I Twitter occasionally. We play Pandora in the office on our George. I’m a slave to Basecamp and Backpack for project management, and can even work my way around Dreamweaver. So why was I still using Excel for my production schedules?

Because that’s the way I’d always done it.

Which goes to show that just like our clothes closets (i.e. miniskirts and chunky heels), our Applications folders could use a seasonal assessment.

Meanwhile, I wonder if could still rock the red cords?

–Britta

Here was what host Ari Shapiro said: “Author Jane Austen might be rolling over in her grave. A book called Pride and Prejudice and Zombies promises ‘all-new scenes of bone-crunching zombie action.’ And there’s the film: Pride and Predator. The New York Times says it will ‘Juxtapose brooding aristocrats with a brutal alien that lands in 1800s-era Britain, attacking residents and leaving them with neither sense nor sensibility.’

A quick search later in the morning revealed that, yes, there is a whole industry that marries literary classics with aliens or the undead.

Mashups of seemingly disparate concepts are nothing new, just look at what Harry Turtledove has done with historical fiction and his classic “Guns of the South.”

And now, they are part of the backbone of most user-generated content on the internet. I wonder, though, is the world is really ready to see what happens when Lizzie Bennett meets the living dead?

— Jonathan

Have you ever dialed a phone? I mean really dialed a rotary phone.

Not many people have.

In fact, fewer and fewer Americans are dialing a phone of any sort at all in their homes.

Nearly 18 percent of U.S. households no longer have home phone service and rely completely on wireless phones. This is up several percentage points over the previous year.

(An interesting footnote: wireless-only households tend to be occupied by people who have a tendency toward smoking and binge drinking. Go figure.)

Big whomp, you say. Landline phones have been in decline for years and many cell phone users are drunken chimneys.

But consider this: by 2020, the majority of people worldwide will be accessing the internet primarily through their mobile phones.

So if you want to get a little ahead of the curve, work on your mobile marketing and mobile storytelling right now. Cell phone novel, anyone?

-Jonathan

The Farmer’s Market
—There are some who come for the produce.
—There are some who come for the patchouli.
—There are some who come for the politics.
—There are some who come for the experience.

A “Farmer’s Market” that is more bad watercolor paintings and politics, than produce, attracts a very different audience than the back of a truck filled with fresh turnip greens. Everyone wants a community these days. But everyone also wants to service their prospective marketplace—to sell. The trick lies in setting up reasonable, sustainable expectations that ring true, balancing both community and marketplace.

Too much community and you face a challenging revenue model. One that (Facebook) focuses on the growth of a community’s user base, backed by a “figure out the revenue model later” mentality. Too much marketplace and branding and your content/message doesn’t ring true.

Your customers know where to find you, the content you feed Google is going to bring them to you. But promising them community and providing them marketplace is a bait and switch that consumers have no patience for—they are too savvy and too much information is available. When the perception of relevance begins to lean more toward marketplace/marketing than community/information you have a problem.

No one wakes up on Sunday and says, “I need fresh radishes and a didgeridoo.”

While attending the SAP Sapphire 08 Conference in March, I had the pleasure of listening to Keynote speaker Patrick Lencioni, author of The Five Dysfunctions of a Team. Mr. Lencioni’s book is one that I have skipped over in the bookstore hundreds of times. It has one of those covers that says, “self-help this way”. But on stage Mr. Lencioni is a whole different story—or better yet he is the same story but he is more animated and incredibly engaging.

Lencioni’s lecture, and review of his book, provided insight into some of the issues your customers might be facing. When customers aren’t internally on the same page it makes a content manager’s job challenging to say the least. Keep in mind that one of the most difficult things about managing content for companies is navigating the loss of control the company feels. On one hand, organizations know they don’t have the time or bandwidth to manage and create the volume of content that is required to succeed in today’s market. But on the other hand it isn’t like emailing a file to your printer and having a dented Minivan deliver boxes of stationary to the office a few days later. Hiring a content marketing agency to assist with content creation and management is one part execution, one part strategy and two parts teamwork

A content marketing partner should be an integral part of every organizations team. If you are hired to manage a client’s content make sure you understand your clients and their message. If their internal systems are unclear or there are inconsistent messages from client contact to client contact, let them know. You will gain trust by asking the right questions and stopping to ensure you get the nuts and bolts—and in turn they are less likely to micromanage you.

“Teamwork remains the greatest opportunity for competitive advantage, because teamwork is what allows you to leverage your investments in technology strategy and intelligence,” Lencioni said from the big stage.

To effectively use trust and teamwork as tools, content marketers need to listen, advise and listen some more before creating relevant: editorial, how-to’s, videos or case studies. And organizations need to do their part too and come to the table with clear goals, likes/dislikes and understand that a content marketing partner is a part of their team, not a hired gun. Spend the time. Select the Team. Build the trust.