Big Support

Not long ago, Craig Lapp made his living driving a truck that helped carve Southern California's soil into new developments. But then housing sales slumped, and in November 2007 Lapp's construction company let him go. While he searched for another job, Lapp began working alongside his wife, Lynne, in a business based in their Temecula home, selling nutritional supplements made by the direct-sales company Isagenix. Nearly two years later and with no construction job in sight, Lapp says a one-time sideline has become the couple's bread and butter.

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"It's paying our mortgage, our car payments … putting food on the table," says Lapp, 55, who adds that he and his wife are earning a six-figure income. "It was our 'Plan B' that turned into our 'Plan A.' " Direct-sales businesses that rely on home-based representatives to peddle their wares are seeing their sales forces rapidly expand as the nation's unemployment rate soars to nearly 9% and those who lost jobs and nest eggs look for new ways to make money.

"We're recession-resistant in the sense that more people come to us during economic hard times for supplemental income or replacement of a lost job," says Neil Offen, president of the Direct Selling Association, the trade group that represents the largest U.S. direct sales companies.

While 2008 industry figures aren't yet available, "Anecdotally we're hearing that recruitment is up and … unfortunately as the unemployment rate rises to 10% or higher, we'll be picking up more people who need an income-earning opportunity."

The recession has become a recruiting tool. An Avon (AVP) cosmetics representative declares in TV ads that "I can't get laid off. It's my business." Companies such as Isagenix, a marketer of weight-management and nutritional supplements and snacks, and jewelry maker Silpada Designs are coaching their representatives to spread the word that direct selling can keep you afloat in the faltering economy.

"Right now, our direct-selling opportunity is really the No. 1 product that we have to sell," says Geralyn Breig, president of Avon North America. With that in mind, Avon this year launched its most ambitious recruitment campaign and saw its U.S. sales force grow to more than 680,000 through March, its largest ever, Breig says.

The same month, cosmetics company Mary Kay began airing its first TV ad for new representatives. In its first three days, visitors seeking information about becoming "beauty consultants" at MaryKay.com spiked 108%. Silpada Designs, a Lenexa, Kan.-based company specializing in sterling silver jewelry, says its sales force in the U.S. and Canada was up 11.8% on May 1 from a year earlier. And Chandler, Ariz.-based Isagenix says its sales force was up 30% in March from a year before. The hope is that larger sales forces will grow revenue, even in an economy that has shrunk sales for many companies.

"Representatives and recruiting are a leading indicator of future sales," says Jerry Kelly, Silpada's CEO, who acknowledges sales for his privately owned company were down roughly 10% in the fourth quarter of last year. "We're optimistic that we're going to fare fairly well this year as a company in a very difficult climate. … We're seeing a more determined and focused representative who might be looking to supplement lost income for their family."

There are roughly 15 million direct sellers in the U.S. — independent contractors who sell goods or services primarily through parties, demonstrations in someone's home and one-on-one interactions. In 2007, the most recent year available, the sales industry generated $30.8 billion in U.S. sales, according to the Direct Selling Association.

Sellers are recruiting

Avon aired its first infomercial last month, and rather than promoting makeup or skin products, it targets new recruits. The company kicked off its TV commercials earlier, with a 30-second spot during the Super Bowl pregame show in February. That ad, a 60-second spot and the infomercial will air all year.

The cosmetics company is also going to job fairs this year, scouting for new salespeople at more than 140 such events, Breig says. It's also beefed up its presence with online job search engines and since February has had a recruiting ad in the front of every one of its brochures. "We're executing the boldest recruitment campaign … in our history," Breig says. "It's part of our mission to enable women to have a financial solution."

That resonated with Elizabeth Leyba, an assistant office manager for a plumbing company who lives with her family in Munster, Ind. Leyba saw her hours cut last year and needed a way to make up her lost income while maintaining her office job and busy household. So in April 2008, after watching a TV commercial for Avon, she decided to give it a try. In the year since, she has discovered that she is an entrepreneur.

"I didn't know it, and I'm thrilled that I am," says Leyba, 39, who has sold more than $10,000 worth of Avon products and hopes to sell full time. "Even though there's a recession, even though the economy is bad, my business has continued to grow." Leyba's Avon earnings have paid for everything from gas to her 17-year-old son's senior pictures. "I've been working since I was 16 so, you know, I like the fact … it's your own business," Leyba says. "I am in control of my future now. Not corporations."

Compensation systems vary, but representatives primarily earn money from commissions on product sales or by purchasing the products wholesale and selling them at retail prices, says the Direct Selling Association. Commissions on sales typically are 25% to 50% of retail.

While representatives may also earn a small commission on the sales from representatives they've recruited, legitimate businesses do not use recruitment alone as a basis for compensation, the association says. Denise Ruiz-Cabrera, 31, of Branchburg, N.J., was nearly five months pregnant in March 2008 when she lost her job as a corporate recruiter. She could not find a new job.

"I exhausted almost every single contact that I had," she says of her search. Though she'd used Avon products, she'd never thought of selling them until this year. She saw one of Avon's recruitment ads, "and I thought to myself, 'Why don't I do that?'" Knocking on doors is history. Direct sales representatives now find new customers through such methods as referrals, gatherings and parties, spontaneous meetings on the street and the Internet. Ruiz-Cabrera is one who does it all.

"I've sort of coined the term, 'Welcome to 21st-century Avon,' " says Ruiz-Cabrera, who has a personalized website maintained by the company. She carries brochures in her purse and her baby's stroller, promotes favorite products on her Facebook page and meets new representatives she's recruited at the local Starbucks." I think people in these times, we're hungrier than we used to be," says Ruiz-Cabrera, who has made as much as $1,000 a month with Avon. "I had jobs lined up in the pipeline that all fell through because of the economy, and I focused all that energy on my business and in three months I've built something that looks to be pretty promising."

Retirees join in the trend

It's not only those who have lost jobs or endured pay cuts who have turned to direct selling. "We're hearing a lot from women who've recently graduated or are about to graduate and are finding it to be quite a challenge to find a career," says Rhonda Shasteen, Mary Kay's chief marketing officer. Then there "is the other end of the age spectrum: women who are approaching retirement age, and saw a lot of their savings wiped out, and find themselves with a very short time frame and with a need to make up a lot of money."

Lawanna Lloyd, 66, and her husband, Rodney, 69, retired in 2000. But in the wake of the stock market fall, Lloyd says they are now worth about half of what they were just 18 months ago. To make their retirement nest egg last longer, Lloyd's husband returned to work last year, teaching chemistry at a private school in their town of Boerne, Texas. Then Lloyd, who was a stay-at-home mom through most of her marriage, decided she needed something, too. "That's when I signed up with Silpada," she says.

She is rattled that there was a need for her and her husband to return to work at all. "It doesn't feel good," Lloyd acknowledges. "It makes life very uncertain, and scary. …Who wants to go back to work?" But she made more than $500 from her first jewelry parties in April, and she enjoyed hosting them. "I think Silpada does provide the perfect solution for earning some money and being able to set my own schedule," she says. "We had decided that we would do something … to earn income for four or five years and see where we are then. Hopefully by then the market will have recovered and we'll feel like we can retire again."

Kim Joseph, 26, of Stewartsville, N.J., received a master's degree in public health in 2006, but has struggled ever since to find a job in her field. She worked for her sister as a nanny before getting a full-time position as an account manager with a marketing solutions company. Last June, she decided to start selling Mary Kay cosmetics on the side, partly to earn extra cash for her upcoming wedding. She now intends to forgo a public health career and eventually sell the makeup line full time.

"I've been able to see how being a consultant gives me room to impact the lives of women," says Joseph, who added that selling Mary Kay also gives her freedom to spend more time with her husband without crimping their household income.

Direct selling is a fluid industry, with only 10% of representatives working "full time," or at least 30 hours a week. Many work only long enough to meet short-term goals, such as holiday presents. But some who work in or watch the industry believe the severity of this recession may cause more sellers to stick with it, even when the economy rebounds, at least as a way to supplement their income.

"I truly believe this has readjusted people's thinking," says Kathy Coover, executive vice president and co-founder of Isagenix. "With this economy, people can't take their jobs for granted anymore. They have to have another alternative … so if something does happen, this is their safety valve."

Submitted by James McLellan http://www.crazyfoxes-marketing-group.com/foxes-report/?jcmcl812 Mandatory Celibacy

Mandatory Celibacy in Catholicism

The story about Fr. Cutie of Miami is big in today’s news and will be for some days. Many in the public do not understand just how such a man came to the decision to accept mandatory celibacy as part of a package deal in order to be ordained in the Latin rite of the Roman Catholic Church.

Enough has been written about the fact that it has been a law for eight hundred years, just a portion of Church history. It will be helpful to compare conditions in 1966 to those of 2009 and then you may understand the generation for Fr. Cutie better.

In 1966 there were enough priests and religious sisters to staff Catholic institutions, including schools. John XXIII had died only a few years before and the Second Vatican Council under Paul VI had just ended. It profoundly influenced those who watched it up close, as we did in our Roman house. After John Paul II took over, the authorities interpreted the words of Vatican II in the spirit of Vatican I. Therefore, strictest orthodoxy and unified practices had to be enforced throughout the Church. The time for creative thinking and experimentation was over.

There came a long period during which John Paul II named bishops that had his spirit, one of total obedience, and the effect upon the people was set aside. He ran the Church somewhat like an army. Bishops lost the newly won authority outlined in Vatican II and became local representatives of the pope, who ruled through the Roman Curia.

Society, however, continued to change. The laity became much more educated, even in theology. Many priests and religious, sisters and brothers, left their old lives to marry. If you praise marriage, as many documents do, and you exalt the dignity of the individual, then forcing people into a package deal for the sake of ordination seems increasingly unwarranted. Old traditions could not be set aside. All the while John Paul II said this was “a man-made law,” on which all agree to this day.

Then there came the scandals of clerical and religious abuse. Many became felons despite their professions. Enough has been written about this in the press. One of my own nieces was a victim. Now, as numbers declined, the work load increased, and priests became more solitary, losing the old-style brotherhood that some might compare to that of the military. Their profession no longer received universal respect. Rather, the public became suspicious. Many lived double lives. Others broke the law.

Meanwhile, certainly under orders from the Vatican, bishops continued in the old practice of transferring problem priests from one location to another without alerting civil authorities. They also retained high-priced lawyers to defect their interests, including monetary ones, and fought litigation that inevitably arouse. Some even dared to intimidate or defame or insult victims themselves. After the fact, many would say that perceptions were different back then or that the matter was mishandled, which nobody disputes. Increasingly, bishops became isolated from the people and even from many priests.

The result: clerical life by the rules became a pressure cooker. Attrition has continued to this day. Morale is low in many places.

All the while, more and more rules are created from scratch to make marrying in the Catholic Church more difficult: a long preparation, and this, sometimes, after the annulment process that can cost $1800 (with the outcome not guaranteed) permitted only in the parish church building, and that can cost $400. Annulments are usually required if either party was married before.

The liturgy doesn’t attract some people so they go to Protestant churches that appeal to them personally, particularly in Latin America these days. Contributions are declining, in any case, and the shift to an Hispanic Church in the United States is marked. Foreign priests are imported to preside at ceremonies and administer sacraments, though many speak English poorly and do not understand the American way of life. They cannot identify with their people nor their people with them.

The rationale for the regulation, of course, is that celibate priests are totally at the disposal of the people, married priests would not be, although Eastern Rite priests can be married, Protestant ministers and Jewish rabbis always have been, and now converts from other church are admitted to the Catholic Church and even to the Catholic clergy: they are ordained Catholic priests and keep their families. There is no longer a danger of alienating Church property by inheritance laws and customs.

But if you are born a Catholic, this path is absolutely, positively forbidden. All laws are said to be sanctioned by God. Authorities are given the benefit of the doubt unless they order people to do something very clearly against the natural law. Subjects must obey, in faith, to be saved.

If you leave, you have no pension, maybe no benefits and no possessions and no secular profession (education was narrow, to keep you from forming a Plan B). 19 years in universities doesn’t guarantee you a living!

Now this situation for priest theologians was often worse, except for the famous, who could get secular jobs through an outstanding resume. These theologians cannot be employed by any Catholic institution at any level. Nor by other faiths because they, understandably, favor their own members. Nor by secular institutions because they typically receive government funds and cannot spend them on religion, under which theology is usually placed.

Their entire education did not allow for a Plan B. Double majors in college were usually disallowed. No secular skills were taught. In Europe these men can sometimes, because of a different Church-State relationship, be fully, professionally employed, but not in America.

What is the outlook? In a word, grim. This generation of bishops was selected by John Paul II. They think and act like him. The present pope continues his policies but sometimes less charismatically. Popes refuse to even discuss mandatory celibacy. Optional celibacy nobody is questioning. How long will the situation last? In Rome they have said that they think in centuries. It is clear that no pastoral emergency is liable to influence them.

So Father Cutie is facing a big choice that many thousands faced before him. Their number world-wide is estimated to be 100,000. No wonder there is a priest shortage. But the people were taught in catechism that Mass and the sacraments were necessary to strength and sustain the faith of their tradition. Father Cutie reminds me of Demosthenes learning oratory while speaking against the waves of the sea. I most certainly wish him happiness and a decision he can live with.

Some condemn him for breaking vows he made under restrictive formation laws. How free had he been in the seminary, humanly speaking? But “he signed on the dotted line” anyway. Let’s leave, as we must, all judgment to God. Let’s pray that the Church does recognize the signs of the times and, to start with, permits an open discussion that could one day lead to serving the pastoral needs of countless millions of Catholics, whose faith has said that they are to be served for the sake of Jesus, the Good Shepherd, and not neglected because of the letter of an old law.

Submitted by Dr James McLellan, Dr theol Member of: http://www.crazyfoxes-marketing-group.com/foxes-report/?jcmcl812 Power Copy Writing

Trying To Write Compelling Salescopy? Play To Your Readers' Emotions

If you've been a subscriber to Marketing Tips Report for any length of time, you've probably heard us talk a LOT about the importance of benefits in salescopy. Benefits show -- in detail -- how your product will solve your customers' problems, improve their lives, save them money, and so on. In a nutshell, benefits answer the BIGGEST question on readers' minds: "What's in it for me?"

But how do you know which benefits to focus on? What are people searching for when they type words into a search engine and end up on your sales page? More importantly, why are they searching? (Hint: it's not because they like to spend money on random sites on the Internet!)

The answer to "why" is the secret ingredient that lies at the heart of EVERY successful salesletter: emotional appeal. People don't buy things for rational reasons. They buy for emotional ones. They want to feel good... hopeful... satisfied... proud... relaxed... acknowledged... secure... you get the picture.

If you can identify the underlying emotional needs your product or service satisfies, you can write copy that identifies with your reader in a very intimate way. In a way that says YOU understand them. That you've been there yourself. And that you've found a solution to the very problem their emotions are driving them to solve.

That's powerful stuff. So how can you write emotionally-charged salescopy that connects to your reader? Start by looking at the problem your product solves. What's the underlying emotion it addresses?

Let's say you sell an eBook on 5-minute makeup tips. What problem does your eBook solve? The need to look professional in a hurry and without too much effort? What emotions are being catered to? Pride? Vanity? Laziness? All three?

Out of all human emotions, some are more powerful "sales" drivers than others. So the first step to writing emotionally-charged copy is to identify which "power" emotions are at the core of your product.

Here are seven power emotions that you can tap into, to write salescopy that converts the MAXIMUM number of visitors into paying customers.

Power Emotion #1: Fear of Loss

One of the most powerful human drivers of change is fear. Fear of losing those things that are most important to us. It could be our sense of security that's at stake. Our money. Our health. Or even our happiness. When you identify fear, you can write salescopy that speaks to that emotion, and indicates how your product will overcome that fear.

Here are some examples of copy that recognizes fear and offers a solution to it: "Lose $3,000 tomorrow without this advice…" "Protect your computer from viruses that can wipe out your entire hard drive." "Selling your home? Avoid the top 10 mistakes that can cost you thousands of dollars!" Notice how these examples use words like "protect" and "avoid"? Just as there are power emotions, there are power words that correspond to those emotions!

What are some other power words besides "protect" that correspond to fear? Well, you can try words like: Save Secure Safety Clinch Red flag Defend Keep in mind that when you identify negative emotions like fear, your ultimate goal is to show how your product or service takes away these fears.

Your job is to identify the fear that is there, relate to your reader based on that emotion, then provide relief from that unpleasant emotion. That's why the power words related to fear are positive.

Power Emotion #2: Greed

Greed is another powerful emotion that drives us to take action on our goals. Whether it's our thirst for money, security, fame, recognition, power, or just about anything else that we desire. So how do you acknowledge these desires in your salescopy? And more importantly, how will your product provide them?

Take a look at some examples of copy that does just that: "We'd like to introduce the easiest, simplest, and most efficient proven method for you to make money... This revolutionary method is 100% real and effective, and it will make you increase your income about 90%, so you can make between $100 and $500 a day."

"Club Sportiva gives you the keys to our private multi-million dollar car collection... letting you experience everything from the classics like a Jaguar E-type and Bentley to the newest exotic Ferraris and Lamborghinis." "Tired of scraping by, only buying products if they're on 'sale', living paycheck to paycheck? Discover how to break the cycle once and for all, and start living a life of luxury."

And here are some power words you can use to connect with your readers' inner longing for easy acquisition: All Amass Money Millionaire Monopolize Results Proven

Power Emotion #3: Lust

Lust is perhaps the most pleasurable of the power emotions. And who couldn't use a little more pleasure in their lives? Some examples of salescopy that hand you lust on a platter: "In this section, you will learn a step by step process for how to win the game of love, so that you can immediately begin attracting the love of your life." "Learn the seduction secrets that will make women melt in your hands..." "Are you ready for a night on the town? Your best girl friends -- check! Money for cover charges and one drink -- check! Oh wait -- what to wear? No worries, FlirtCatalog has one of the largest selections of sexy dresses to put your mind at ease!"

Home in on this pleasurable emotion using some of these lustful words Compel Attract Love Delicious Tempting Enticing Charming Discovery Health Tempt

Of course, people can lust after things as well as people (like a Lamborghini!). So keep in mind that your product doesn't have to be focused on "getting the girl" or other types of people-related lust.

Power Emotion #4: Vanity

If your product caters to people's vanity -- pride in their appearance, abilities, and achievements reflected back by others -- you're in luck. It's another top-selling emotion. "If you want to be one of those women who always looks great no matter what you're wearing, no matter what your age...and even if you're not at your "ideal weight," then this will be the most important letter you've ever read." "In the last 10 years, we've helped thousands of men and women of all ages and fitness levels to look and feel their very best -- people just like YOU!"

In fact, whole industries are built around this need to look and feel our best. Let's face it. We can all use a boost sometime. And those products that appeal to our vanity can provide them. Some other vanity power words include: Attractive Confident Magnetic Younger Stronger Beautiful You

Think about how your product or service caters to this power emotion... image consulting, exercise equipment, cosmetics, laser eye surgery, baldness cures... the list goes on.

Power Emotion #5: Pride

Do you feel pleasure when you know you've done something well? Feeling good about your accomplishments is what pride's all about. To connect with pride, your ultimate goal is to show how your product will provide a sense of worth or accomplishment.

Let's take a look at a couple of examples: "Would You Want Your Name Written In The 'Largemouth BASS' Hall Of FAME? What if I could show you insider up-to-date secret techniques that will put your name in the history records like the old-school stars -- Kevin VanDam, Denny Brauer and Gary Klein?" "Now You Can Transform Ordinary Fabric Into a Handmade Quilt That Your Family and Friends Will Love, Admire and Cherish – Even If You Have Never Made a Quilt Before!" "Transform the book idea in your head into a completed and ready-to-publish manuscript in your hands."

The opportunities for identifying with pride are endless! Your pride power-words: Accomplish Master Transform Best Biggest Greatest Money Proven Results Envy

Power Emotion #6: Envy

You've worked hard all your life, but you're not even close to making that 6-figure salary you thought you'd be making by now. But it seems every time you turn around, there's someone else who is. Ah, envy. Whether you've got it for someone else or you want others to envy YOU, it's a powerful emotion. And it's one of the top instigators of change.

Envy is the state of seeing others who have what YOU want. So if you're going to identify with envy, you need to be prepared to tell them how your product will give them what they're lacking. In a word, your copy needs to promise fulfillment.

Testimonials, examples, and personal stories inspire envy -- and give inspiration to take further action: "Your buddies will be AMAZED at your LUCK or so it would seem... If they only knew what you're about to discover..." "I was working a corporate job for almost 9 years. Finally I had it when my salary was cut by 30%... Today my life is drastically different. I work out of my home office in NYC. I gave up the suit for jeans, sweats and shorts. And I spend most of my day doing what I love: working out, shopping, volunteering and walking my dog Cheila. And I have already tripled my income this year working this business 20-25 hours a week."

"Desperate Scrawny "Nerd" From Texas Humiliates The "Big Boys" At The Gym After Accidentally Discovering The Body's Hidden Natural "Trigger" For Blasting Through Rotten Genetics And Packing On Up To 3 - 6 - Even 9 INCHES Of Shredded Muscle...NOT In Years...But Just WEEKS!"

Here are some envy power words you can use: Desire Covet Begrudge Secret Ordinary Extraordinary People just like you

Just remember, envy is only a negative emotion if it doesn't prompt someone to take concrete steps to change whatever it is about their lives that isn't working for them.

And if your product can provide those steps, your customers need to know about it! But first you have to capture their attention... by using genuine testimonials or personal anecdotes you can inspire a little envy, then go on to describe how your reader can achieve the same enviable state!

Power Emotion #7: Laziness

These days, there are a lot of things competing for our time and attention. Family, work, hobbies, giving back to the community... the list goes on and on. So products that can provide quick results with minimal effort are extremely appealing.That's where laziness comes into play.

Laziness is the need for maximum results with minimum effort. And its allure is powerful. Here are some examples of "lazy" copy: "Avoid the common fitness mistakes that waste your time.""How would you like to write your book in 3 days? Attend my Author's Boot Camp and get that book that you know is inside you out of your head and onto the paper in one weekend."

Your lazy power words: Instant access Save time In less than Break-neck speed Lightning Easy Guaranteed Roadmap Blueprint Avoid mistakes

Those are the top 7 power-emotions in a nutshell. Did you notice that salescopy from the same website came up in a couple of examples? For instance, the examples about writing a book covered laziness AND pride. Most copy will cater to more than just one type of emotion. And there are natural combinations of these emotions, too: pride, laziness, and greed; fear, pride, and vanity; or envy, vanity, and laziness, for example.

So by all means, choose two or three to highlight throughout your copy and sales process. In general, any more than that, and your copy won't be as focused or effective as it should. But remember, emotion is the element that will turbo-charge your salescopy, so think -- and FEEL -- like your potential customers.

By: The Internet Marketing Center Team Submitted by James McLellan http://www.crazyfoxes-marketing-group.com/foxes-report/?jcmcl812 People Cut Back During a Recession

Survey: Americans reclassifying luxury, necessity in recession By Sharon Jayson, USA TODAY A few years back, the list of "gotta-haves" for many Americans included a car, TV, microwave, home air conditioning and dishwasher. Now, not so much. A Pew Research Center survey released Thursday finds that the recession has changed Americans' minds about many items that used to seen as necessities. AMERICAN DREAM: Going from thriving to struggling leads many to redefine it. In a 2006 Pew survey of luxuries and necessities, 68% said a microwave was a necessity; now that's 47%. And 52% say a TV is a necessity today, down from 64% in 2006. "Societal conditions have changed," says James Burroughs, associate professor of commerce at the University of Virginia-Charlottesville. "In many ways, luxuries are things that are learned in response to a changing environment." The survey of 1,003 Americans April 2-8 by telephone and cellphone finds that appliances such as a dishwasher or clothes dryer are now considered more discretionary. Just 21% (down from 35%) say a dishwasher is a necessity, and 66% say the same for a dryer (down from 83%). Still, the dryer ranked second on the necessity list in 2006 and 2009, following the car, which topped the list both years (91% in 2006, 88% today). Pew researchers also asked about behavior changes amid the struggling economy and how much Americans' lives have been affected: 27% report they or someone in their household had lost a job or been laid off in the past year. 80% have cut back. 20% say they're doing more work in and around their homes. "Regardless of age, gender, education and other social or economic characteristics, the change in attitudes toward these consumer goods has occurred quickly and broadly," the report says. It also found technology is more indispensable: Cellphones and high-speed Internet access are as necessary or more necessary as they were three years ago. About half (49%) of those surveyed this month say cellphones are a necessity, the same as in 2006. But high-speed Internet picked up 2 percentage points, to 31%. One factor may be that the lines between work and home are blurring, says Stephen Sweet, associate sociology professor at Ithaca (N.Y.) College. He says many employees are expected to be reachable anytime, work at home when necessary and sometimes bring children to the office. "That explains some of the reasons we're viewing new technology in certain ways," he says. So is materialism losing its allure? "I think we are still a very materialistic society," Burroughs says. "But there has been a sort of small trend toward being a little bit more introspective about materialism and consumption." Submitted by James McLellan http://www.crazyfoxes-marketing-group.com/foxes-report/?jcmcl812 Cyber Gangs Break Codes on Social Sites

Cybergangs use cheap labor to break codes on social sites

SEATTLE — It's become the new front in cybercrime: scams and identity-theft programs that attack

such as Facebook and MySpace. To carry out many of these automated attacks, cybercriminals first must overcome "captchas," the distorted letters and characters that users of an e-mail or social-networking account are required to type to complete certain online forms.

For years, captchas have helped to stop or bog down automated programs aimed at creating, among other things, e-mail accounts that promote scams such as fake computer virus protection and bogus accounts on social websites that can be used to collect personal information on legitimate users.Now, security specialists say, a growing number of captcha-breaking groups are using real people to type in captcha responses for cybergangs around the world. This is allowing the gangs to create fake e-mail and social-network accounts by the tens of thousands — and use them as the starting point for a variety of cyberscams spread by e-mail and instant messages.

MySpace and Facebook say that, so far, they have kept such attacks largely in check. But security researchers say that as long as captchas are a key security feature on networking websites, cyberattacks on such sites are likely to intensify."We shouldn't have any illusions about captchas," says Sergei Shevchenko, a virus hunter at Internet security firm PC Tools. "If the professionals want to break in, they'll do it." For social-networking sites that have exploded in popularity during the past two years — Facebook now claims more than 200 million members — the stakes are enormous.

The social networks, scrambling to build audiences and ad revenue, want to avoid e-mail's fate: Today, 90% of all e-mail traffic is spam, and companies across the nation pour vast resources into keeping legitimate e-mail viable by filtering away spam.

Meanwhile, cybergangs recognize the opportunity to get fresh mileage from tried-and-true scams. They are repurposing ruses perfected in e-mail spamming to try to fool members of social networks into accepting — or even spreading — ads for fake products, data-stealing programs and other harmful computer bugs. "Social-networking sites are a viral marketer's dream," says Paul Wood, analyst at Message Labs-Symantec, an Internet security firm. "The potential to tap into a huge community of like-minded individuals is enormous."

A penny at a time

Captchas first appeared in 2001. They are based on the idea that humans — and not automated programs used by cybercriminals — can distinguish a word or group of characters shown as a warped graphical representation and then type them on an online form to gain access to a protected Web page.Social networks typically require captchas for creating accounts and sending private messages that include Web links.

Captchas represent the first line of deterrence against automated programs, called bots, which typically are assembled in large groups known as botnets. Bots are the little engines that propel online criminal activities. Bots, for example, are efficient at creating bogus Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo and AOL messaging accounts, as well as memberships on MySpace, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. These bogus accounts can serve as launching points to spread spam, steal data, pitch fake antivirus subscriptions — and scoop more PCs into the botnet.

Captcha designers have made their work increasingly distorted and camouflaged to defeat improved character-recognition programs carried by bots. Today, most major websites use advanced captchas that bots can't resolve. Enter captcha-breaking groups, bearing a new weapon that combines cheap labor with the Internet's capacity for quick, anonymous global transactions.

Spawned in the online underground, these groups are difficult to pin down, security specialists say. But based on recruitment ads, discussions on hackers' forums and the rising volume of bogus accounts being created, there appear to be dozens of captcha-breaking gangs employing hundreds of people in several countries, tech security researchers say.

Human captcha-solvers work piecemeal. They have shown up in Internet cafes or in sweatshops filled with Internet-connected PCs in China, India, Russia, Brazil, Argentina and Nigeria, working long shifts deciphering streams of characters forwarded by an unseen coordinator, researchers say.

"At least one major operation is being run out of Pakistan," says Adam O'Donnell, director of emerging technologies at messaging security firm Cloudmark. "I suspect similar operations are being run anywhere that has bandwidth and cheap labor."Cybergangs typically pay captcha-solvers a half-cent to a penny for every captcha they complete, according to online recruitment ads on hackers' forums that reflect how captcha-solving has become a growing underground business.

"You can pay a business for captcha-breaking services, and they'll make it happen," says Patrick Peterson, chief security researcher at Cisco. "You can have the captchas solved in the Internet cloud as you create each new account."

Networks fight back

Without the emergence of for-hire captcha-breakers, a particularly destructive worm that plagued the Internet in May — known as Koobface — would not have been possible. A worm is a program designed to self-replicate across the Internet.

Koobface — a cockeyed spelling of Facebook — targeted MySpace and Facebook. It initiated messages that duped victims into clicking on a Web link to view a funny YouTube video. Clicking on the link led to instructions to download a Flash Player update required to view the video. Clicking on the video player update downloaded a copy of the worm, which instantly searched out the victim's friend lists on Facebook and MySpace and sent copies of itself to everyone on the list. So, subsequent victims received a message that actually arrived from the account of a trusted friend.

"This certainly represented the sullying of what began as a clear, worry-free place to interact with peers," says Joel Smith, chief technology officer at messaging security firm AppRiver. MySpace and Facebook scrambled to warn users about Koobface, block suspicious Web links and take other defensive measures.

"We've been working for months to limit the distribution of Koobface over Facebook," says Facebook spokesman Barry Schnitt. "We take the security of our users very seriously and have invested significant resources in protecting them."

MySpace Chief Security Officer Hemanshu Nigam says improved security has reduced spam that reaches the network's members by 73% since Koobface first appeared. MySpace beefed up its message-filtering systems and developed a tool to warn members about suspicious links.

"We have put in a lot of features to cleanse things like Koobface," Nigam says. Researchers don't know who created or controls Koobface, which continues to morph on the Web. In mid-March, Microsoft added Koobface detection to its Malicious Software Removal Tool (MSRT), which automatically checks PCs running non-pirated copies of Windows Vista, Windows XP, Windows 2000 and Windows Server 2003 for more than 100 viruses.

In the ensuing two weeks, MSRT removed Koobface nearly 200,000 times from 133,677 PCs. "Koobface is constantly changing to avoid detection, with over 20,000 variations to date," Jeff Williams, Microsoft Malware Protection Center program manager, said in a blog post. "We're also working to detect new variants of the Koobface virus as they're discovered, so we can provide ongoing protection from this threat."

A 'shark' in 'warm waters'

Early versions of Koobface focused on spreading the worm far and wide. Besides copying itself to everyone on victims' friend lists, the worm stole cookies — small pieces of text, stored in the users' Web browsers. But it stole only those cookies that contained user IDs and passwords for members of social-networking sites Friendster, BlackPlanet, Bebo, Hi5, LiveJournal and MyYearbook. That gave the attackers starting points to launch the worm in the more popular social networks, says Kurt Baumgartner, chief threat officer at PC Tools.

As Koobface steadily added capabilities, Baumgartner observed it begin to incorporate malicious programs widely used by other criminal groups: Adware for a $50 fake antivirus program, called Security Protect 2009, that's now also being spread by the Conficker worm. Coding that turns an infected PC into a spam-spreading bot, the same coding used by the huge Waledac e-mail virus. A program called ZeuS that steals user IDs and passwords from a customizable list of banks.

"Koobface is like a shark that has found itself in warm waters with plenty of prey," Baumgartner says. Monitoring Koobface with Baumgartner has been colleague Shevchenko, a Russian expatriate. Shevchenko made some startling discoveries about captcha breakers. Monitoring Russian-language forums, he found an ad headlined "Kolotibablo," which means "make easy money."

The job description as translated by Shevchenko: "Your new job is printing English text that you see in the pictures. (Images of captchas were shown.) All you need is to know English alphabet and know where the keys are located on a keyboard. For every correctly entered word you will receive up to 1 cent, depending on the level that you have achieved. Your only limit is your typing speed. Every minute, you'll be able to correctly type the text from 10 pictures on average. Thus, with an average price of 0.5 cent per one correctly typed text from a picture, your salary will be 3 US dollars per hour."

Submitted by James McLellan http://www.crazyfoxes-marketing-group.com/foxes-report/?jcmcl812 Alder People Like Facebook

All in the Facebook family: older generations join social networks

(CNN) -- Penny Ireland's family is so scattered around the world that Facebook, the popular social networking site, has become the family's No. 1 way to communicate. The fastest-growing age group on Facebook is women older than 55, Inside Facebook says.

"We call it our living room," the 56-year-old mother said by phone from her home in Houston, Texas. "Everybody can tell what everybody else is doing." "Everybody" includes Ireland's five kids and her 83-year-old mother, who has a Facebook profile she accesses daily, Ireland said.

While online social networks like Facebook, Twitter and MySpace are known hang-outs for younger adults and teenagers, older generations in recent months have been taking to the medium at a faster rate than any other age group, according to industry reports.

Many of these older folks use social networks to keep tabs on younger family members and they often find fruitful connections with their peers after they've friended all of their kids and grandkids, according to an informal survey by Stanford University professor BJ Fogg. Join a conversation on this topic at CNN's Facebook page.

The trend is still relatively confined. Only about 7 percent of people older than 65 have online social-networking profiles, according to research from the Pew Internet & American Life Project. But Facebook's popularity is growing most quickly among women older than 55, according to a site called Inside Facebook, which tracks Facebook's growth.

There are now about 1.5 million female users older than 55 on the site, the group says -- roughly a 550 percent increase over six months ago. By comparison, membership among people younger than 25 grew by less than 20 percent over the same period, Inside Facebook says.

Facebook now says it has 200 million users, making its user base larger than the populations of all the world's countries except China, India, the United States and Indonesia. Such a vast presence, coupled with news media buzz about all social media, has pushed online social networking to a "tipping point," said Amanda Lenhart, a senior research specialist at the Pew Internet & American Life Project.

Fogg, the Stanford instructor, said the trend has spread outward from college towns, where Facebook was first adopted, and inward from the American coasts. Facebook today has a global presence, with 70 percent of users living outside the U.S., the site says.

"We've reached critical mass where there's been enough talk about Facebook and people have gotten so many invitations from their friends, they're going, 'OK, what is this Facebook thing? I've got to get onboard or I'm going to be left in the dust,' " Fogg said.

Parents who are interested in their kids' online activities contribute to the sharp increase in older users on Facebook, said Linda Fogg-Phillips, a 49-year-old who, with her brother, co-taught a six-week class at Stanford called "Facebook for Parents."

"Parents are finally at the point where they realize this is not going away. They better figure out how to get on it and they'd better figure out how to use it," said Fogg-Phillips, who is a mother of eight in Las Vegas, Nevada. "It's a snowball effect. It's viral in a good sense."

Older people often must overcome fears about privacy issues before they will join Facebook, Fogg-Phillips said. Once they do, they often find unexpected uses for the network, she said. iReport.com: Facebook, Twitter growing pains? That was the case for Craig Costa, a 55-year-old fly-fishing guide in Park City, Utah, who said family members forced him to join Facebook.

Costa still finds parts of the site annoying, and isn't comfortable having his personal information made public, but he has connected with old friends he wouldn't have otherwise -- including his ex-wife, who now is a Facebook friend of his current wife. "It's been really interesting because so many people have a connection to me," he said. "I was married before and my wife is now talking to my ex-wife. And some of her old friends are telling old stories about me to my wife. It's just bizarre for me."

Costa said he also can more easily keep up with his 28-year-old son, who lives in New York and also keeps a Facebook page for his dog. Karen Essman, 61, uses Facebook but said she has trouble convincing her peers to join social-networking sites. They often don't understand the interface or are afraid of scams, she said. "It's a little bit more difficult for older people," she said.

Margaret Brooks, 63, of Idaho Falls, Idaho, joined the site because there was no other place for her to see her 18-year-old grandson's artwork. She asked to be his friend online, and at first she worried he wouldn't respond."I did think, 'Oh my goodness, I'm old grandma. He doesn't want to have anything to do with grandma on Facebook,' " she said. "But he did, and every time I send something to him he sends something to me." Joanne Woeppel joined Facebook so she could keep tabs on her 13 grandkids.

But the Web site also has helped the 71-year-old keep up with other people without changing her routine. "I'm pretty much what you would call a loner. I'm content in my own company. I can find things to do to entertain myself that I don't need to be out and about," she said by phone from her three-bedroom house near Dallas, Texas. "I don't go out to socialize."

A former call center worker and aspiring sci-fi author, Woeppel visits the online social network about once a day. Spending time on Facebook, which she joined in September, helps her feel connected to family all over the country -- especially to the youngsters, she said. She has family members who live nearby, but says she's found a way to communicate with them in their own language through Facebook.

"Let's face it, kids that age aren't really interested in talking to people my age very much. It's more, 'Hi grandma how are ya? ... Bye!' " she said with a laugh. "That's basically what I get from my grandkids, so if I can engage them through just a little bit of chit-chat [online], it's a lot more than I can get over the phone."

Submitted by James McLellan http://www.crazyfoxes-marketing-group.com/foxes-report/?jcmcl812 Army Recruiter Suicides

Part Two

Why Are Army Recruiters Killing Themselves?

The way things rolled in Houston, it turns out, was especially harsh. Until recently, the Army told prospective recruiters they'd be expected to sign up two recruits a month. "All of your training is geared toward prospecting for and processing at least two enlistments monthly," the Army said on its Recruit the Recruiter website until TIME called to ask about the requirement. Major General Thomas Bostick, USAREC's top general, sent out a 2006 letter declaring that each recruiter "Must Do Two." But if each recruiter did that, the Army would be flooded with more than 180,000 recruits a year instead of the 80,000 it needs. In fact, the real target per recruiter is closer to one a month. Yet the constant drumbeat for two continued.

The Houston battalion's punishing work hours were also beyond what was expected. In June 2007, Bostick issued a written order to the 5th Recruiting Brigade and its Houston battalion requiring commanders to clarify the battalion's fuzzy work-hour policy, which could be read as requiring 13-hour workdays. He demanded a new policy "consistent with law and regulation." The brigade and battalion commanders ignored the order.

By mid-2008, a Houston battalion commander complained to subordinates of "getting numerous calls on recruiters being called 'dirtbags' or 'useless' when they do not accomplish mission each month." He'd heard that recruiters who had been promised birthdays or anniversaries off were being "called back to work on the day of the anniversary and during the birthday and/or anniversary party when they already had family and friends at their homes." To improve morale, the battalion's leadership decided to hold a picnic last July 26. "Family fun is mandatory," read an internal e-mail.

Crying Like a Child

Staff Sergeant Flores, a married father of two, who'd looked so haggard last August, was the station commander overseeing the pair of recruiting offices in Nacogdoches. The job required the veteran of both Afghanistan and Iraq to dial into two daily conference calls from his office at 7 a.m. and 10 p.m. "On a regular basis, he would complain to me that the 15 to 19 hours we worked daily were too much," a colleague told Army investigators.

When Flores' station failed to make mission, his superiors ordered him to attend what the Army calls "low-production training" in Houston on Saturday, Aug. 2. "When you're getting home at 11 and getting up at 4, it's tough, but it's the dressing down that really got to him," says a recruiter who worked alongside Flores. "They had him crying like a kid in the office, telling him he was no good and that they were going to pull his stripes."

Flores, 26, was told his failure as a station commander meant he'd soon be returning to a basic recruiter's slot. "He was an emotional wreck," said a soldier who spoke with him the evening of Aug. 8. "He said he felt he failed as a station commander," the colleague told investigators. "He had asked me for a firearm. I told him I didn't have one. It actually never crossed my mind that it might have been for himself." Flores hanged himself that night. "The leadership is the major cause for SFC Flores taking his own life, he was a prideful soldier," a fellow station commander wrote in a statement, carefully noting Flores' posthumous promotion. "I believe this was a snap decision because SFC Flores stated to me that he grew up without a father and he would never do that to his kids."

Amanda Henderson had worked alongside Flores in Nacogdoches. Her husband, Sergeant First Class Patrick Henderson, 35, served at a recruiting office 90 minutes away in Longview. Patrick met Amanda at recruiting school after a combat tour in Iraq, and they married in January 2008. With their new jobs, though, "there was no time for family life at all," Amanda says. While Patrick didn't want the assignment, his widow says, the Army told him he had no choice. He masked his disappointment behind a friendly demeanor and an easy smile.

But things got worse after Flores' death. "He just kept saying it was the battalion's fault because of this big bashing session that had taken place" six days before Flores killed himself, Amanda says. "I can't tell you how mad he got at the Army when Flores committed suicide." Two weeks later, Patrick spoke of killing himself and was embarrassed by the fuss it kicked up. "He started to get reclusive," Amanda says now.

"He sounded pretty beat up," a fellow recruiter told investigators later. "He seemed to be upset about recruiting and didn't want to be out here." Patrick was taken off frontline recruiting and assigned to company headquarters. But it didn't stop his downward spiral. The day after a squabble with his wife on Sept. 19, Patrick hanged himself.

A Senator Demands Answers

It wasn't until reports in the Houston Chronicle provoked Republican Senator John Cornyn of Texas to demand answers that the Army launched an investigation into the string of suicides. "It's tragic that it took four deaths to bring this to the attention of a U.S. Senator and to ask for a formal investigation," Cornyn says. After Cornyn began asking questions, the Army ordered Brigadier General F.D. Turner to investigate. Recruiters told him that their task is a "stressful, challenging job that is driven wholly by production, that is, the numbers of people put into the Army each month," Turner disclosed Dec. 23 after a two-month probe.

The report found that morale was particularly low in the Houston battalion. Its top officer and enlisted member — Lieut. Colonel Toimu Reeves and Command Sergeant Major Cheryl Broussard — are no longer with the unit. (He left for another post in USAREC; she was removed from her post until an investigation into her role is finished, and she is working in the San Antonio Recruiting Battalion.)

In an interview, General Turner would not discuss the personal lives of the victims, but his report noted that all four were in "failed or failing" relationships. Yet he conceded that "the work environment might have been relevant in their relationship problems." The claim of a failing relationship is denied by Amanda Henderson and by testimony from fellow recruiters. And an Army crisis-response team dispatched to Houston in October to look into last summer's two suicides cited a poor work environment — not domestic issues — as key.

After Turner's report, Lieut. General Benjamin Freakley, head of the Army Accessions Command that oversees USAREC, asked the Army inspector general to conduct a nationwide survey of the mood among Army recruiters.

The Army also ordered a one-day stand-down for all recruiters in February so it could focus on proper leadership and suicide prevention. The worsening economy is already easing some of the recruiters' burden, as is the raising of the maximum enlistment age, from 35 to 42. But with only 3 in 10 young Americans meeting the mental, moral and physical requirements to serve, recruiting challenges will continue.

Amanda Henderson, who lost both her husband and her boss to suicide last year, has left that battlefield. "The Army didn't take care of my husband or Sergeant Flores the way they needed to," she says. Though still in the Army, she has quit recruiting and returned to her former job as a supply sergeant at Fort Jackson. Because of the poor economy, she says, she plans to stay in uniform at least until her current enlistment is up in 2011. "Some days I say I've just got to go on," she says. "Other days I'll just sit and cry all day long."

Submitted by James McLellan http://www.crazyfoxes-marketing-group.com/foxes-report/?jcmcl812 Army|Recruiter|Suicides|Pressure

Thursday, Apr. 02, 2009 TIME

Part I

Why Are Army Recruiters Killing Themselves?

When Army Staff Sergeant Amanda Henderson ran into Staff Sergeant Larry Flores in their Texas recruiting station last August, she was shocked by the dark circles under his eyes and his ragged appearance. "Are you O.K.?" she asked the normally squared-away soldier. "Sergeant Henderson, I am just really tired," he replied. "I had such a bad, long week, it was ridiculous." The previous Saturday, Flores' commanders had berated him for poor performance. He had worked every day since from 6:30 a.m. to 10 p.m., trying to persuade the youth of Nacogdoches to wear Army green. "But I'm O.K.," he told her.

No, he wasn't. Later that night, Flores hanged himself in his garage with an extension cord. Henderson and her husband Patrick, both Army recruiters, were stunned. "I'll never forget sitting there at Sergeant Flores' memorial service with my husband and seeing his wife crying," Amanda recalls. "I remember looking over at Patrick and going, 'Why did he do this to her? Why did he do this to his children?' " Patrick didn't say anything, and Amanda now says Flores' suicide "triggered" something in her husband. Six weeks later, Patrick hanged himself with a dog chain in their backyard shed.

The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are now the longest waged by an all-volunteer force in U.S. history. Even as soldiers rotate back into the field for multiple and extended tours, the Army requires a constant supply of new recruits. But the patriotic fervor that led so many to sign up after 9/11 is now eight years past. That leaves recruiters with perhaps the toughest, if not the most dangerous, job in the Army. Last year alone, the number of recruiters who killed themselves was triple the overall Army rate. Like posttraumatic stress disorder and traumatic brain injury, recruiter suicides are a hidden cost of the nation's wars.

The Wartime Challenge

Behind the neat desks and patriotic posters in 1,650 Army recruiting stations on Main Streets and in strip malls is a work environment as stressful in its own way as combat. The hours are long, time off is rare, and the demand to sign up at least two recruits a month is unrelenting. Soldiers who have returned from tours in Iraq and Afghanistan now constitute 73% of recruiters, up from 38% in 2005. And for many of them, the pressure is just too much. "These kids are coming back from Iraq with problems," says a former Army officer who recently worked in the Houston Recruiting Battalion.

The responsibility for providing troop replacements falls to the senior noncommissioned officers who have chosen to make recruiting their career in the U.S. Army Recruiting Command (USAREC). They in turn put pressure on their local recruiters to "make mission" and generate the recruits — sometimes by any means necessary. Lawrence Kagawa retired last July after more than 20 years in uniform; he spent the latter half as a highly decorated recruiter, and his tenure included a stint in the Houston battalion from 2002 to 2005. "There's one set of values for the Army, and when you go to Recruiting Command, you're basically forced to do things outside of what would normally be considered to be moral or ethical," he says.

Because station commanders and their bosses are rated on how well their subordinates recruit, there is a strong incentive to cut corners to bring in enlistees. If recruiters can't make mission legitimately, their superiors will tell them to push the envelope. "You'll be told to call Johnny or Susan and tell them to lie and say they've never had asthma like they told you, that they don't have a juvenile criminal history," Kagawa says. "That recruiter is going to bend the rules and get the lies told and process the fraudulent paperwork." And if the recruiter refuses? The commander, says Kagawa, is "going to tell you point-blank that 'we have a loyalty issue here, and if I give you a "no" for loyalty on your annual report, your career is over.' "

It's not surprising, then, that some recruiters ignore red flags to enlist marginal candidates. "I've seen [recruiters] make kids drink gallons of water trying to flush marijuana out of their system before they take their physicals," one Houston recruiter says privately. "I've seen them forge signatures." Sign up a pair of enlistees in a month and a recruiter is hailed; sign up none and he can be ordered to monthly Saturday sessions, where he is verbally pounded for his failure.

The military isn't known for treating underperformers with kid gloves. But the discipline can be harder for recruiters to take because they are, in most cases, physically and socially isolated. Unlike most soldiers, who are assigned to posts where they and their families receive the Army's full roster of benefits, 70% of Army recruiters live more than 50 miles (80 km) from the nearest military installation. Lacking local support, recruiters and their spouses turn to Internet message boards. "I hate to say it, but all the horror stories are true!" a veteran Army recruiter advised a rookie online. "It will be three years of hell on you and your family." One wife wrote that instead of coming home at the end of a long workday, her husband was headed "to Super Wal-Mart to find prospects because they're open for 24 hours."

Today's active-duty Army recruiting force is 7,600-strong. Soldiers attend school at Fort Jackson, S.C., for seven weeks before being sent to one of the 38 recruiting battalions across the nation. There they spend their days calling lists of high school seniors and other prospects and visiting schools and malls. At night, they visit the homes of potential recruits to sell them on one of the Army's 150 different jobs and seal the deal with hefty enlistment bonuses: up to $40,000 in cash and as much as $65,000 for college. The manual issued to recruiting commanders warns that, unlike war, in recruiting there will be no victory "until such time when the United States no longer requires an Army." Recruiting must "continue virtually nonstop" and is "aggressive, persistent and unrelenting."

Lone Star Losses

Nowhere has the pace been more punishing than inside the Houston Recruiting Battalion. One of every 10 of the Army's recruits last year came from Texas — the highest share of any state — and recruiters in Harris County enlisted 1,104, just 37 shy of first-place Phoenix's Maricopa County. The Houston unit's nearly 300 recruiters are spread among 49 stations across southeast Texas. Since 2005, four members recently back from Iraq or Afghanistan have committed suicide while struggling, as recruiters say, to "put 'em in boots." TIME has obtained a copy of the Army's recently completed 2-inch-thick (50 mm) report of the investigation into the Houston suicides.

Its bottom line: recruiters there have toiled under a "poor command climate" and an "unhealthy and singular focus on production at the expense of soldier and family considerations." Most names have been deleted; the Army said those who were blamed by recruiters for the poor work environment didn't want to comment. While some recruiters were willing to talk to TIME, most declined to be named for fear of risking their careers.

Captain Rico Robinson, 32, the Houston battalion's personnel officer, was the first suicide, shooting himself in January 2005. But one of his predecessors, Christina Montalvo, had tried to kill herself a few years earlier, gulping a handful of prescription sleeping pills in a suicide attempt that was thwarted when a co-worker found her. Montalvo says a boss bullied her about her weight. And she was shocked by the abuse that senior sergeants routinely levied on subordinates. "I'd never been in a unit before where soldiers publicly humiliated other soldiers," says Montalvo, who left the Army in 2002 after 16 years. "If they don't make mission, they're humiliated and embarrassed."

Several months after Robinson committed suicide, Staff Sergeant Nils Aron Andersson arrived in Houston as a recruiter. Andersson had served two tours in Iraq with the 82nd Airborne and had won a Bronze Star for helping buddies pinned down in a firefight. "I asked him what he did to get it, and he just looked right at me and said, 'Doing my job, Dad, just doing my job,' and that's all he ever said," says his father Robert of Springfield, Ore. "He wouldn't talk to me about Iraq."

Aron, as he was known, had changed in Iraq. Perhaps it was the September 2003 night he gave up his exposed seat in a Black Hawk helicopter to a younger soldier who wanted the thrill of sitting there and who ended up being the only one killed when the chopper flipped on takeoff. Or maybe it was the day Andersson's squad had to destroy a speeding suicide van headed straight at their checkpoint, despite the women and children inside. Instead of returning for a third tour, Andersson chose recruiting. He trained at Fort Jackson, filed for divorce and joined the Houston battalion in 2005. "They were working the crap out of him," Robert says. "I'd get calls from him at 9:30 at night — 11:30 in Houston — and he'd say he was just leaving the recruiting office and starting on his 40-minute drive home." His easygoing son also developed a hair-trigger temper during his time at the River Oaks and Rosenberg recruiting stations. "He wasn't really a salesman," Robert says, "and recruiters are trying to sell something."

Several months into the job, Aron threatened suicide in front of a girlfriend. After Army doctors cleared him, he returned to work. "For the two years he was in Iraq, I'd turn down the street and be terrified there'd be a car with a set of government plates on it when I got home telling me that he'd been killed," his father says. "Suicide was the last scenario I'd ever come up with."

But that was what occurred on March 5, 2007. In the week before his suicide, Andersson was ordered to write three separate essays explaining his failure to line up prospective recruits. A fellow recruiter later told Army investigators that commanders "humiliated" this decorated battlefield soldier during a training session: "He was under a constant grind — incredible pressure. He just became numb."

Andersson, 25, stopped by his recruiting station hours before he died and said he had gotten married that morning to Cassy Walton, whom he had recently met. He seemed in a good mood. "Before leaving, he played a prank on the station commander that made everyone laugh," a fellow recruiter told investigators. But the newlyweds argued that night, and Andersson, inside his new Ford pickup, put the barrel of a Ruger .22-cal. pistol to his right temple and squeezed the trigger. His widow, suffering from psychiatric problems of her own, killed herself the next day with a gun she had just bought.

"That double suicide should have stopped everything," an officer who was in the battalion says privately. Instead, he reports, the leadership in Houston said, "We're just going to keep rolling the way we've been rolling."

Submitted by James McLellan http://www.crazyfoxes-marketing-group.com/foxes-report/?jcmcl812 Brain Power Evolves

Smart people may be less stressed

Smarts matter in our high-tech age of standardized tests, iPhone entrepreneurs and nanotech venture capitalists. "The future is built on brains, not prom court, as most people can tell you after attending their high school reunion," as the writer Anna Quindlen, puts it.

But how smart are we about smarts? Not too smart, suggests some looks at the science behind intelligence and achievement. "Family income is a strong and consistent predictor," of test scores, school grades and education, say a Cornell University study in the current Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal. "The longer the childhood exposure to poverty, the worse the achievement levels become."

Although a "large, robust literature" stretching back more than a decade describes this observation, study authors Gary Evans and Michelle Schamberg note there is no biological explanation for it. Why does poverty have this effect? To find an answer, the pair looked at 195 men who were part of a long-term study of rural poverty. The study included health records and income. In 2006, about 22% of all children nationwide lived below the poverty line, living on less than $21,200 for a family of four, according to the federal Department of Health and Human Services. (About 18% of people worldwide live below the international poverty line of $1 a day, according to Princeton economist Alan Krueger.)

At age 17, all of the men in the study had their " working memory," the short-term ability to remember things briefly, assessed. Intelligence tests and grades more typically test longer-term memories, measuring knowledge."The proportion of early childhood spent in poverty is also significantly related to working memory," finds the study, perhaps not surprising. But when the researchers went back and looked at the men's health records, the relationship between poverty and memory dissolved, revealing their health — as reflected in blood pressure, obesity and stress hormone measures — are factored in. What looks like an income effect is actually a public health problem.

Stress hormones over time are widely known to interfere with memory, an effect described in neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky's popular science book, Why Zebra's Don't Get Ulcers. Chronic stress alters brain chemistry, damaging a part of the brain called the hippocampus, central to memory formation. Although the study can't go back in time to look inside the brains of the young men in the study, the researchers suggest something similar likely occurred to them.

Brain chemistry aside, simply assessing intelligence remains a controversial topic, particularly widely-used "intelligence quotient" or IQ tests. The so-called " Flynn Effect," the 1994 observation by New Zealand researcherJames Flynn that IQ scores have risen from generation to generation for every country ever studied, with the gains coming not from vocabulary, math or other school topics, but in abstract thinking. Some researchers, such as Richard Lynn of the University of Ulster, suggest the tests are worthwhile, however, pointing to improved nutrition among the poor in societies as driving the IQ increases.

"The 20th Century has seen both massive height gains and massive IQ gains," Flynn himself notes in a study in the current Economics & Human Biology journal an argument for the nutrition explanation for IQ gains. But looking at diet and IQ scores in the United Kingdom from 1938 to 2008, he suggests, knocks the legs out from under that explanation.

In the study, Flynn looked at schoolchildren measured in 1938, 1947, 1982 and 2008, showing 11-year-olds in that time averaged a 15.6 IQ-point-gain during that 70-year period. The biggest jump took place between 1938 and 1947. However the gains were much more pronounced among wealthier kids than poorer ones, "which would imply that the upper classes made larger dietary gains than the lower classes as we go into the more distant past," Flynn writes, which he finds unlikely.

Instead he argues, "During the 20th Century, society evolved and therefore, set new cognitive problems that made us think differently than we did at its beginning." The modern world demands its inhabitants deal with abstractions, so we do better with abstract test questions now, Flynn argues, rather than being any smarter. Doubtless, debate over the roots of intelligence will continue. After all, "Ideas are like pizza dough, made to be tossed around," as Quindlen also once wrote.

Submitted by James McLellan http://www.crazyfoxes-marketing-group.com/foxes-report/?jcmcl812 Inside Minds of Columbine Killers

Two books get into the twisted minds of the Columbine killers By Jocelyn McClurg, USA TODAY

What was it about Columbine? Of all the school shootings over the past two decades, it's the one that festers, an ugly wound that won't heal. Now two journalists try to understand the incomprehensible as the 10th anniversary of Columbine nears.

On April 20, 1999, Eric Harris, 18, and Dylan Klebold, 17, entered their high school in Littleton, Colo., and shot and killed 12 students and one teacher. They didn't come away with the highest body count, even though they had hoped to blow up the school with bombs that never went off. Seung-Hui Cho holds that sad distinction with 32 victims at Virginia Tech.

But there was something so gruesome about what Eric and Dylan did — taunting the helpless students they shot in the school library before killing themselves — that the memory of that horrific day is hard to shake. Dave Cullen's Columbine is the more ambitious and ultimately compelling take on the tragedy. He tries hard to get inside the heads of Eric and Dylan, writing in teen-speak that allows us to inhabit their twisted points of view.

Cullen succeeds in making us "get" Eric. He was a rage-filled psychopath who hated the world. "Eric killed for two reasons: to demonstrate his superiority and to enjoy it," Cullen writes. "For Eric, Columbine was a performance. Homicidal art."

Dylan is a tougher nut to crack. Depressed, suicidal, a misfit convinced he'll never find love, he latches on to Eric in a kind of desperate ennui. Cullen nearly makes us sympathize with Dylan. But Jeff Kass, a reporter for the now-defunct Rocky Mountain News, casts a harsher light on Dylan. He opens his straightforward Columbine: A True Crime Story with a chilling account of what happened in the library. You can't read it and feel anything but revulsion for Dylan. Kass' book also benefits from extensive excerpts and drawings from journals both boys kept.

More insightful psychological profiles of Eric and Dylan can be found in the newly published Why Kids Kill: Inside the Minds of School Shooters by Peter Langman (Palgrave Macmillan, $24.95). Langman makes a strong case that Dylan was also a psychopath.

Cullen, unlike Langman, isn't a psychologist, and he never sufficiently answers the "why" question. (Can anyone?) But he breaks new ground (he claims Eric was not a virgin, for example), dispels myths (that Eric and Dylan were bullied, that they targeted specific kids, that they were members of the "Trench Coat Mafia"), and makes us feel intensely for those who were killed and wounded. His account of what happened to teacher Dave Sanders, who bled to death over many hours, is heartbreaking. So is his unraveling of the sad story of Cassie Bernall, wrongly heralded as a Christian martyr. It was another girl who told the killers she believed in God.

Could Columbine have been prevented? Both books reveal unfortunate lapses and intentional cover-ups by the authorities and cluelessness on the part of the boys' parents. But Eric Harris, coldly intelligent, was a consummate con artist. He hooked up with a lost soul who became his willing partner in a deadly, and unfathomable, folie à deux.

Submitted by James McLellan http://www.crazyfoxes-marketing-group.com/foxes-report/?jcmcl812 Using Twitter for Marketing

Marketers find Twitter a tweet recipe for success By Jefferson Graham, USA TODAY LOS ANGELES — Cake decorator Suzi Finer fills in spare time during the workday updating her "status" on Facebook, telling about 2,000 customers about what she's working on. It's no frivolous exercise: Finer is looking to boost business for her employer, Hansen's Cakes of Beverly Hills, and says that sales are up 15% to 20% since she embraced Facebook as a sales tool in September. "That's even in a recession," she says. "People are still having birthday parties and weddings, and seeing these little bits about cakes on updates get them excited about the possibilities." TELL US: How often do you post updates to Twitter, Facebook, or other social networking sites? Welcome to the social world of Facebook and Twitter, where you are encouraged to tell your online "friends" and "followers" about every little thing you're doing Most teens and young adults use the short space to discuss the latest movie, CD or TV show. Business people — including folks like Finer — find that the updates also work as a valuable sales tool. "It's become even more important than blogging," says Chris Winfield, who runs New York-based 10e20, which helps businesses with their online marketing campaigns. "It's more immediate than a blog post, and if you're trying to get out a message to thousands of people in a flash, status updates are the way to do it." Just ask Aaron Chronister, who saw his status update on Twitter grab media attention from CNN and The New York Times, and even a book deal with Simon & Schuster. Chronister of Kansas City, Mo., wanted to get attention for his local barbecue club and a unique bacon recipe. His status post in December got "re-tweeted" by someone else (the Twitter equivalent of forwarding), the media found it, and now he has a thriving ad-supported BBQ blog in addition to a forthcoming book. It all started with a status update, which he renews about four times daily to his 1,500 followers. "It's an easier way for people to see what's up with you," he says. "They don't have to read an e-mail, or go through all this stuff to filter through. Just a short little 140-character message." According to measurement firm Quantcast, Facebook averages 78 million visitors monthly, compared with Twitter's 6 million. However, traffic numbers on Twitter are hard to come by, as much of its traffic is on mobile phones. From his office in Rochester, N.Y., Jeffrey Hayzlett, Kodak's chief marketing officer, updates his status on both Facebook and Twitter as many times as possible during a busy day. He's become the face of Kodak for many Twitterers and Facebookers, as he attempts to give them "a glimpse into my life, which puts a face to the Kodak brand." Like Hayzlett, Finer is the face of Hansen's. She offers free cake samples to anyone on Facebook, posts celebrity-sighting snapshots and talks about the latest cake she's working on, or just the scent of butter cream. "I spend about an hour daily on this, in between cakes," Finer says. Her advice for entrepreneurs looking to boost business: "Don't bother people with sales (pitches) — like 'Come in and see what we have today.' That is so annoying. I don't want a commercial. I'm here to spread the cake love. Write about what makes you happy." Winfield's business used to consist of helping businesses get better placement on search engines, primarily by working on their blogs and improving their websites. Now, his staff spends a good deal of their time helping businesses update their statuses. "It's all about Internet marketing," he says. "If you can catch someone's attention on Twitter, and they go write a blog post about you, someone else might link to it, and that will help your Google rankings." Matt Rutledge, CEO of Dallas-based website Woot, sends out only one Twitter tweet a day — and it's the only marketing he does. Woot sells just one item a day and announces what it is nightly via a Tweet and an RSS feed to his website. Rutledge now has 270,000 Twitter followers — No. 18 overall on Twitterholic's rankings, and No. 1 business. Whole Foods Market and Zappos.com are close behind with 263,000 and 262,000, respectively. He can't point to any measurable sales gains from his Twitter love but says, "It's been enjoyable to watch Twitter grow. For us, with just one product per day, it's really well aligned with a short, micro-summary." Jason Hirschhorn, who recently resigned his post as president of Sling Media, the online programming arm for Sling, is happily unemployed but eager to broadcast his latest missives on both Facebook and Twitter from two to 10 times daily. "It's whatever's on my mind," he says. "I love the idea of telling people what I'm thinking about without having to talk to them," he says. On the plus side, he says he reads their posts as well. "I'm able to ingest a lot more than if I was having conversations with them," he says. "I wonder less about what to read or watch, because they post it, and I value their opinions." Effective Communication Suggestions

Ten tips for Effective Communication The ability to be able to communicate well is essential in all walks of life if we are to succeed and accomplish the goals we set out for ourselves. The key to any successful relationship is having the ability to communicate and this applies equally to personal relationships as well as building interpersonal relationships within the workplace. Here are ten tips for developing good communication skills that you can use to build upon. 1. Always let the person who is talking finish what they are saying before you speak, if you speak before they have had their say then you could miss a valuable point, if you break into their conversation it also shows that you think what you have to say matters more than what they do and is extremely bad manners. 2. Listen intently to what the other person is saying to you, if all you are doing is thinking of how you are going to reply to the person then your full attention isn't focused on what they are saying and you could miss something important. 3. Always stay focused on the present and never bring up past issues, however related it may seem. This only cloud the present issues and can make the conversation difficult and even more confusing. 4. Really listen to what the other is saying to you, it is so easy to drift away with thoughts of your own especially if you don't agree with what the person is saying to you, try not to get defensive and don't interrupt them before they have made their point. 5. Instead of trying to win an argument or conflict try to reason and find a solution that is agreeable to both parties, this is a much more effective way to communicate than trying to battle it out just for the sake of winning, this way no one is the loser. 6.Take a break if you cannot come to a reasonable agreement in a conversation when at odds, taking a break will allow you to cool down and gather your thoughts before communicating again. 7. Try to see the other's point of view and don't just stick with what you have in mind, talk over the ins and outs and explain simply and fully why you don't think their idea is a good one while making suggestions of your own, but don,t be too quick to dismiss the others idea until you have the full picture. 8. Even if you don't like what other person is saying try to be respectful of their opinion and do listen to what they have to say even if you don't necessarily agree with them. 9. Don't blow things out of proportion while conversing, if possible avoid starting sentences with "you always"or "you never", always think about what you are saying and make sure that what you are saying is true, blowing things out of proportion, blaming and bringing up the past only creates more negativity. 10.Don't always put all the blame on the other, sometimes we handle conflicts by blaming things entirely on the other and criticizing, try to analyze the situation objectively to find a solution. From: Charles Beaumont Meringandan West, Qld, Australia Submitted by James McLellan http://www.crazyfoxes-marketing-group.com/foxes-report/?jcmcl812 Sensitivity Friends or Fellow Marketers

Reflections from Daegan Smith

Are you being to touchy feely?

Facebook is a completely different animal than the other Web wunderkind it is often compared to: Google. The beauty of Google (GOOG, Fortune 500) is that, despite all its efforts to diversify, it really is all about searching for information. If I go to Google to find the best airline fares to Buenos Aires, a sponsored search result may actually be helpful as opposed to being obtrusive.

If I go to Facebook to try and top my friends' best score in Scramble, I'm there to freaking play Scramble. Even a "contextually relevant" ad for Boggle is going to irritate me. Yeah, Facebook may be "stickier" than Google. But I'm not hanging around waiting for an ad.

I'm also skeptical about Facebook's plan, unveiled earlier this month, to offer user information to companies so they can target specific users for online polls. For one, it sounds like another privacy backlash waiting to happen...similar to the Beacon service Facebook launched in 2007.

With Beacon, Facebook partnered with online retailers that would track a users' credit card use. So if you bought something online, friends in your network could see that. Problem was that when Facebook set it up, all users were automatically enrolled in Beacon. Not a smart move. After an unsurprising uproar, Facebook changed it so users had to opt-in.

Also, don't most people hate consumer research polls? When is the last time you decided it was a good idea to waste 15 minutes of your life happily chatting with a telemarketer?

To me, Facebook seems to be growing for growth's sake without a plan for making money. And that's really risky in a recession as bad as this one. Not only is Facebook faced with the prospect of ad spending declining this year; it also has to likely deal with the rising costs to manage the increased amount of data as it signs on more and more users. So while I applaud Facebook for its ability to attract a loyal base of users, I just don't get how it will ever be a financial success.

The Fortune story closed by saying that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg doesn't want to sell to Microsoft (MSFT,Fortune 500) because he wants to build the next Microsoft. But Bill Gates didn't become one of the wealthiest men on the planet by giving away operating systems for free now did he?

First Published: February 20, 2009: 12:20 PM ET

Comment: I, personally, am concerned about the gap between "knowing" another person as he/she wants to be presented on line and what it's like to get to know someone face-to-face. Second, I'm concerned about this medium, but even more that of MySpace, being used by sexual predators. Third, social networking is another fad. What happens to any company that doesn't make a profit? Fourth, what about a company that, after a public uproar, says, "You can maintain control of your data for the time being?" Are you sure they won't flip-flop upon the advice of lawyers or number-crunchers? Now, what do you think? Find this article at: http://money.cnn.com/2009/02/20/markets/thebuzz/index.htm?postversion=2009022012 Submitted by James McLellan http://www.crazyfoxes-marketing-group.com/programs.php?jcmcl812 Facebook Taking over our Lives

How Facebook is taking over our lives

President Obama used it to get elected. Dell will recruit new hires with it. Microsoft's new operating system borrows from it. No question, Facebook has friends in high places. Can CEO Mark Zuckerberg make those connections pay off?

By Jessi Hempel, writer

Part Three

The stream

Every user on Facebook has two feeds. There's a personal feed, which you'll find on your profile page along with your photo and list of interests. Every time you log a status update, comment, or video post, that interaction is captured and stored for your review; those changes also become fodder for a second news feed that runs on your home page, the first page you see when you log on to the site.

That feed keeps tabs on all the interactions your friends are having (and alerts friends to updates you've made on your personal feed). If your brother RSVP'd to a dinner party, for example, you might be notified about it, even if you weren't invited to attend. And if you change your profile photo, it may let your brother know. Like Facebook itself, the feeds are subject to the network effect: The more data you share and interact with, the more robust your news feed becomes.

Zuckerberg calls the sum of those interactions the "stream," and it's his newest obsession. Unlike Google, which uses complex algorithms to serve up advertisements based on what you search for, Facebook lets you help "curate" your feeds. The information that pops up is partly a result of controls you establish in your privacy settings and feedback you provide to Facebook. But Facebook also can track your behavior, and if the site notices you're spending a lot of time on the fan page of a certain movie star, for example, it will send you more information about that celebrity.

Needless to say, marketers would love to tap into that information. "If there are 150 million people in a room, you should probably go to that room," says Narinder Singh, chief product officer for Appirio, which helps big companies like Dell and Starbucks (SBUX, Fortune 500) find ways to connect with users over the site. "It's too attractive a set of people and too large a community for businesses to ignore."

Yet because businesses haven't yet effectively infiltrated Facebook, its users may be under the mistaken impression that they aren't under surveillance. "What I like is that it doesn't bombard you with advertisements, so it feels really personal," says Heather Rowley, a 35-year-old photographer in Berkeley. It seems inevitable that some members will feel betrayed or uneasy when ads based on casual chats with friends start to appear on their feeds.

Facebook already has had one brush with member backlash in 2007 when it introduced a feature called Beacon, which allowed members to see what websites their friends visited, and even showed purchases on e-commerce sites. Users protested vehemently - one even filed a lawsuit on privacy grounds - and Facebook apologized.

Now the company is trying a slightly different approach. A feature called Facebook Connect lets users log on to company websites using their Facebook logins. The system, which dovetails with Zuckerberg's vision of a Facebook account as a form of personal ID on the web (privacy settings and all), appeals to advertisers for a couple of reasons. When a user logs on to a third-party site using Facebook Connect, that activity may be reported on her friends' news feeds, which serves as a de facto endorsement. The tool also makes it easy for members to invite their friends to check out the advertiser's site.

Starbucks, for example, uses Facebook Connect on its Pledge5 site, which asks people to donate five hours of time to volunteer work. If you sign in using a Facebook account, a new screen, a hybrid of Facebook and the Pledge5 home page, pops up with information on how to find local volunteer opportunities. A tab on the page asks you to "help spread the word." Click on it and your entire address book of Facebook friends pops up, enabling you to evangelize Pledge5 with just a few keystrokes.

So far most of the organizations using Facebook Connect are social enterprises, like Pledge5, or news outlets, like CNN, soliciting members for discussion groups. Who knows how Facebook users will react when a brokerage asks a member to spread the word about its services. Of course, members can ignore the exhortations to invite friends, the same way they might decline to forward their 25 Random Things.

He also insists that marketing on Facebook isn't obtrusive, and that users can control what kind of advertising they see: Each ad contains a small thumbs-up or thumbs-down button. If a user finds an ad irrelevant, repetitive, or offensive, she clicks thumbs-down, and Facebook records her dissatisfaction.

Eventually the inappropriate ads will go away. And when ads are useful, many online users do click on them. Rowley, the California photographer who values Facebook's intimacy, says she recently clicked on a Virgin America ad for tickets to the East Coast when it popped up on her news feed. "I was going there, so it made sense," she says.

Still, the company couldn't have picked a worse time to start wooing marketers in earnest. Online advertising growth is expected to decelerate in 2009 from 17.5% last year to just 8.9%. And historically most of those ad dollars have flowed to portals and other online destinations, not experimental sites and social networks like Facebook. When Sheryl Sandberg arrived at Facebook, a substantial chunk of the company's revenues were still coming from a 2006 deal with Microsoft in which the software behemoth sold traditional banner ads on Facebook pages and the parties split the revenue.

But attempts to sell traditional online ads on Facebook and other social-networking sites have failed miserably: Banner ads can sell for as little as 15 cents per 1,000 clicks (compared with, say, $8 per 1,000 clicks for an ad on a targeted news portal such as Yahoo Auto) because marketers know that members ignore them.

Sandberg acknowledges that Facebook has much more work to do to secure advertisers. "What we have to figure out is, How do we build a monetization machine which is in keeping with what users are doing on the site?" she says. "It's about execution, doing things faster and better, getting more users and more advertisers."

Facebook's march to 200 million users began in earnest in January 2008. That's when the site made translation tools available to international users. Today more than 70% of Facebook users are outside the U.S., and most of them read it in their native language. But anecdotal evidence suggests that American baby-boomers have discovered Facebook in a big way: Some, like Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, use the site to keep an eye on their kids' online activities. Others are using it as a networking tool in a bad economy.

The fastest-growing demographic on the site? Women 55 and older, up 175% since September 2008. Cynics might say that if Granny is on Facebook, the site absolutely has jumped the shark. Quite the contrary: Having a broad swath of users is exactly what Zuckerberg wants. The arrival of an older, less web-centric crowd suggests that he has succeeded in making the site easy to use. And Facebook can't become a standardized platform if only cool kids use it.Besides, there doesn't currently seem to be another hot social-networking site that is drawing young users away from Facebook in large numbers.

But the Facebook juggernaut still could very easily go awry: Remember AOL's Instant Messenger? Teenagers lived on it and companies started using it in lieu of e-mail. But AOL never figured out a way to make money on it.

Facebook could meet a similar fate; indeed, it is a little worrisome that neither Zuckerberg nor Sandberg seems to feel any particular urgency about putting Facebook in the black. Zuckerberg prefers to leave the question of revenues to Sandberg, who punts: "I think what's really important is that we are able to fund our expansion, and we're very focused on that," she told me in mid-February. Investors seem pretty passive about it as well. Early board member Jim Breyer, who put in $1 million of his own money and $12.7 million from an Accel Partners fund, says that profits are "a secondary consideration in this stage of the growth." He wants to get a return on his investment, but he's not pushing anything now.

And then there's Microsoft, which is in the unusual position of being a Facebook owner, a partner, and, through its Windows Live social network, a competitor. Since taking a stake in Facebook, Microsoft has been working closely with the site to create links between Facebook and the Windows Live social network so that when members update their status message or upload photos on Facebook, that information appears on the Microsoft site too.

Facebook has influenced Microsoft in other ways. Its new operating system, OS 7, features a list of interactions, news, and information that happens to look a lot like Facebook's news feed. Could Microsoft end up buying Facebook outright? Both sides would have much to gain from the arrangement. Facebook investors could get their money out, and Microsoft, which has been searching for a way to deliver more of its software applications over the Internet, would own a viable online platform for selling a new generation of services.

But Zuckerberg, like that other famous technology-loving Harvard dropout, seems determined to create a business empire that touches virtually every computer user in the world. Zuckerberg's not interested in selling to Microsoft; he wants to build the next Microsoft. And with 175 million "friends," he's off to a helluva start.

REPORTER ASSOCIATE Beth Kowitt contributed to this article. Why relay this information? Because marketers need to know their target audience, so it's useful to study the demographics of each social network in order to appeal to them for residual income. You won't make money on the Internet if you don't. Businesses are to serve the public and give people what they want. Mentoring in a team is a powerful tool to pool resources and make faster progress! Reported by James McLellan

http://www.crazyfoxes-marketing-group.com/programs.php?jcmcl812

Facebook Taking Over Our Lives

How Facebook is taking over our lives