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Rachel Thebault owns Tribeca Treats in New York City. Follow the link to smart thinking about how to react when the corporate giant casts its shadow in your neighborhood. Hint: Kids’ lemonade stands may be a cliche for entrepreneurship but they’re not reality in business.

Rachel Thebault: Bring on the Lemonade Stands

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Once upon a time, newspapers did not have advertisements on the front page. Now they do, though generally, the ads are small and near the bottom.

Headlines and news attracted the reader and, engaged, the reader would discover ads and wonderful and all new stuff for them to buy inside the newspaper.

Confusing

How often when you search or Stumble! or just find a web page do you encounter a wall of advertisements like this?

Pretty intrusive? It’s thus that people are trying to monetize their web sites. This technique, thankfully, appears to be saved for blog sites and not news or corporate sites, which have different monetizing strategies than whether someone, some how clicks on an ad link to create a micro-payment to the blog author.

Frankly, it’s horrid and I can’t think of much reason to do this other than some interpretation someone is getting on short-term click results. These set my intuition reeling.

And, I look no further. I don’t even scroll down. I leave. Sometimes, I thumbs down the site.

That’s a hard line perspective and derived from my bias toward editorial content. If content is king, as we’re still told, then why is it buried here?

What about you?

Are clever and best related to the product. Like this:

Caroline McCarthy (RSS) has a cautionary story about the explosion of social media experts in her CNET blog, the social. A sample:

… marketer related that she once met with a media property in the health sector to discuss how it could have a presence on social-networking sites. The potential client was skeptical, since its marketing team had previously met with a social-media consultant who suggested the best strategy would be to create a Facebook app that let members give their friends virtual venereal diseases. The client, it seems, was left a bit horrified.

A keen point: Put social media in the hands of people passionate about the brand and not just passionate about Twitter, Facebook and the rest of Web 2.0. Of course, who is talking for you?

Jack