Max has a blast from the past: an essay he wrote in second grade, beginning: "My mom made me get up early in the morning and kill a turkey for Thanksgiving."

Last week I reminded everyone that customer service is one of the most overlooked and under-appreciated elements of marketing for any brand. In my explanation of this oft-forgotten component I wrote an observation of Best Buy and the poor encounters I had with its small business program's customer service. Well, since this is the day before Thanksgiving and since Turkey Day is all about giving thanks for the gifts we have all received and extending the hand of compassion and positivity to your fellow man, I want to tell you about the excellent follow-up I received from Best Buy.

It's hard for me to believe that it has been just over a year since my first Online Spin, which posted on Nov. 14, 2006. It has really been a wild year in the social media and social media advertising space, and in the course of launching a new technology in the space I have had the great fortune of interacting with, working with and even befriending a number of the people on the frontlines of changing the industry. t's been these individuals that have sparked many, if not all, of the Spins over the past year. I wish to …

Every year I cover Black Friday and Cyber Monday. It's a chaotic whirlwind that still makes me feel very much like I am on the outside looking in. What amazes me most is that almost everyone knows or talks about these two days (Thanksgiving night and the Monday after).

Big changes in life are inevitable, especially in the interactive business. So I wanted to discuss the personal side of why I decided to join a startup venture.

The online advertising industry has recently seen an unprecedented flurry of acquisitions. The rapid consolidation highlighted the market's close-to limitless inventory and steadily growing numbers of eyeballs, as well as further propelled online advertising on its way to becoming a mature industry. At this moment, however, with the consolidation still far from finished and the industry in flux, many -- both inside and outside the industry -- are wondering what will happen next.

According to an estimate I saw about a year ago, when consumers have a positive experience with a brand, they tell half as many as those consumers who have a negative experience with a brand (around 12 with a negative and around 7 with a positive experience). With all of this information, I find it disturbing and very surprising that in this digital economy, we tend to overlook one of the most fundamental elements of marketing: customer Service.

Facebook has unveiled AdWords (plus) for Facebook Social Web. If you think about Facebook as its own smaller, self-contained version of the Internet, then you can begin to appreciate the magnitude of the solution Facebook is trying to introduce. Especially if one day the Social Web overtakes the Informational Web in users' attention and interactions. If you look at the release as a whole, you can see its brilliance is in its simplicity.

As an advertiser of digital media, don't you want your ads to have the right messages at the right time in the right places? It's a fundamental media objective. Well, currently the only thing we have much control over is creating the right message. I'd add the right format to that. We can typically design the right ad unit sizes from the onset of a campaign. However, with today's media landscape constantly sliding, we often have no control over the right time and the right place.

"What is your message, really?" That was a critical and well-timed question that Ted McConnell, P&G's director of interactive innovations, called out during a keynote panel at the recent Ad:tech New York. He was describing a common phenomenon whereby advertisers get so caught up in elementary particles, mechanics, rationality or even bad intentions that they end up losing sight of what their message to prospects and customers truly is (or has mutated into).