Your Passport(护照)Please!

Mr. Hill arrives at London Airport at the end of a three-week holiday in France. Usually he wears a beard(留胡须). Since it has been hot there, he has taken it off(剃掉). But his passport photo shows him with his beard.

An office looks at the photo for a moment and says：“Will you excuse me? Please sit down. I won't keep you long.”With this, he walks away, shows the photo to a second office and says:“I know that face.” The second officer looks at the passport and asks where Mr. Hill has come from. When he hears that Mr. Hill has arrived back from Paris, the second officer smiled and says: “An Englishman with a beard stole a painting in Paris on Friday, and that man just looks the kind of man ...”

Suddenly it comes to the first officer who Mr. Hill is. He returns to him and asks: “Did you teach at the No.2 . High School?” When Mr. Hill answers in surprise that he did, the first officer smiles and says: “I thought so. I'm Jack Smith. You taught me French. You haven't changed a bit.”

We spent a day in the country and picked a lot of flowers. Our car was full of flowers inside! On the way home we had to stop at traffic lights, and there my wife saw the bookshelf.

It stood outside a furniture (家具) shop. “ Buy it,” she said at once.“ We'll carry it home on the roof rack (车顶架). I've always wanted one like that. ”

What could I do? Ten minutes later I was twenty dollars poorer, and the bookshelf was tied onto the roof rack. It was tall and narrow, quite heavy too.

As it was getting darker, l drove slowly. Other drivers seemed more polite than usual that evening. The police even stopped traffic to let us through. Carrying furniture was a good idea.

After a time my wife said,“ here's a long line of cars behind. Why don't they overtake?”

Just at that time a police car did overtake. The two officers(警官) inside looked at us seriously when they went past. But then, with a kind smile they asked us to follow their car through the busy traffic. The police car stopped at our village church(教堂). One of the officers came to me.

“Right, sir,” he said. “Do you need any more help now?”

I didn't quite understand. “Thanks, officer, “ I said.“ You've been very kind. I live just down the road. ”

He was looking at our things:first at the flowers, then at the bookshelf. “Well, well,” he said and laughed. “It's a bookshelf you've got there! We thought it was...er, something else. ”

My wife began to laugh. Suddenly I understood why the police drove here. I smiled at the officer. “ Yes, it's a bookshelf, but thanks again. ”I drove home as fast as I could.

The rough guide to marketing success used to be that you got what you paid for. No longer. While traditional “paid” media such as television commercials and print advertisements still play a major role, companies today can exploit many alternative forms of media. Consumers passionate about a product may create “earned” media by willingly promoting it to friends, and a company .may leverage “owned” media by sending e-mail alerts about products and sales to customers registered with its Web site. The way consumers now approach the process of making purchase decisions means that marketing’s impact stems from a broad range of factors beyond conventional paid media.

Paid and owned media are controlled by marketers promoting their own products. For earned media, such marketers act as the initiator for users' responses. But in some cases, one marketer’s owned media become another marketer’s paid media for instance, when an e-commerce retailer sells ad space on its Web site. We define such sold media as owned media whose traffic is so strong that other organizations place their content or e-commerce engines within that environment. This trend, which we believe is still in its infancy, effectively began with retailers and travel providers such as airlines and hotels and will no doubt go further. Johnson & Johnson, for example, has created BabyCenter, a stand-alone media property that promotes complementary and even competitive products. Besides generating income, the presence of other marketers makes the site seem objective, gives companies opportunities to learn valuable information about the appeal of other companies' marketing, and may help expand user traffic for all companies concerned.

The same dramatic technological changes that have provided marketers with more (and more diverse) communications choices have also increased the risk that passionate consumers will voice their opinions in quicker, more visible, and much more damaging ways. Such hijacked media are the opposite of earned media： an asset or campaign becomes hostage to consumers, other stakeholders, or activists who make negative allegations about a brand or product. Members of social networks, for instance, are learning that they can hijack media to apply pressure on the businesses that originally created them.

If that happens, passionate consumers would try to persuade others to boycott products, putting the reputation of the target company at risk. In such a case, the company’s response may not be sufficiently quick or thoughtful, and the learning curve has been steep. Toyota Motor, for example, alleviated some of the damage from its recall crisis earlier this year with a relatively quick and well-orchestrated social-media response campaign, which included efforts to engage with consumers directly on sites such as Twitter and the social-news site Digg.