The Pew Research Center reports that 79 percent of Americans say it is.

By comparison: 52 percent say having an abortion is morally wrong, 50 percent view homosexual behavior or smoking pot as morally wrong and 35 percent say sex between unmarried adults is morally wrong.

Meanwhile, the Oklahoman recently reported that a hefty 89 percent of those surveyed say that no amount of tax cheating is acceptable.

However, there may be some hypocrisy in those survey results: Wikianswers estimates that between 30 and 40 percent of taxpayers cheat on their returns.

A flash mob promotion in Belgium for a reality show.

HuffPo’s report.

Absolutely brilliant.

As I noted the other day, Twitter isn’t the Holy Grail of marketers. Despite all the brouhaha, it’s just one piece of the overall online marketing communications puzzle.

This morning, I log into my Protopage tech page and see a headline from iMediaConnection: “How Social Media Can Resurrect Your Brand’s Reputation.”

I think to myself, “that’s not right, a brand’s reputation is what it is based on providing a good product or service at at good value, with solid customer service to go along with it. If your brand’s reputation sucks because you’re lacking one or more of those elements, no amount of Twittering is gonna help it.”

So I click to read the article and … dead link.

Maybe they’re reworking the article because they feel the word “resurrect” in the headline doesn’t play well a day after Easter. Maybe they thought twice about the ideas in the article and just decided to pull it down. Whatever the case, I hope they put it back: I’d like to know how a brand that’s gone to seed can get its groove back through social media.

Takeaway for marketers: If your brand’s gone to seed, you probably want to make a few significant changes before diving into the social media warters, otherwise it’s bound to get pretty ugly.

It’s Easter, which of course means it’s time for Peeps.

The results of the 2009 Peeps diorama contest are in; see them here.

There are plenty of Peeps videos, of course. You can find tons of them on YouTube. My favorites are the ones in which Peeps reimagine classic movies like Jaws and King Kong.

There’s a lot of Peeps Research going on, but I have concerns — if you click that link, you’ll see that studies measuring Peeps reactions to cold and heat, Peep fear responses and more were made with purple Peeps and not the traditional yellow Peeps. This could significantly skew the results.

Here’s a page that may be the ultimate collection of Peeps-related links.

Enjoy the day!

I don’t think so. Marketers create desire. Customers want the best price. If customers can get what they want for zero price, all the better as far as the customer is concerned. I think these are pretty much givens.

Still, a comment by “Scrawler” on Nikki Finke’s blog post about the Wolverine movie being leaked online makes for some thought-provoking reading:

And finally, for all the people saying that downloaders should be condemned — grow up and step into the real world. Studio marketing departments spend tens of millions of dollars trying to convince the audience that they absolutely MUST see a movie as soon as possible (meaning opening weekend). In this case, ASAP was much earlier than the studio planned. If you build a Pavlovian response into the audience to chase after your bone as soon as they spot it, you can’t be shocked when they do exactly that.

Ultimately, I think the movie and music industries will come to accept the fact that a certain level of digital piracy is simply the cost of doing business, just as a large retail store assumes a certain level of theft into its business calculations. And from time to time, we’ll be seeing high-profile cases as people are turned into examples to help minimize the overall downloading.

(Of course, the industries will conveniently ignore studies like these showing that digital file-sharing actually increases sales.)

Meanwhile, HuffPo is reporting that arrests have been made in in the case.