The more holistic you can make your marketing efforts -- obviously, without spreading them too thin -- the better off you'll be. Even with word of mouth, we often have to hear a message from multiple sources before we decide to try or buy. But with each successive exposure, our interest grows, until finally even the most hard-core laggard among us will give in and create a Twitter account or virtual farm.

Google's having a tough time in Europe. Last week, an Italian judge found three of the company's local executives guilty in a privacy violation case because they allowed a teenage user of YouTube to post a video in which an autistic boy was bullied by other youngsters. Separately, Google received a letter last month from a unit of the European Union warning the company that it is likely breaking EU privacy laws. Such are the challenges of indexing the world's information and unshackling individual expression. Both issues highlight the differences between the United States, where Google was born, and …