I’ve been a BzzAgent since shortly after the service began in 2001. Yesterday, I received an email asking me to join a new campaign. Typically this means completing a brief survey and then receiving materials in the mail. In this particular case? Well, here’s some text from page one of the survey:

To participate in this BzzCampaign and start receiving customized complete nutritional support, there is a fee of $129*. Through this campaign, you’ll save over $400 (a discount of 79%) on the Code Nutrition MyCode DNA Test™, Personalized RDA Report and 3 months of personalized supplements.

If this program is really worth more than $500, then you need to prove that to me first. Don’t ask me to dig into my wallet and grab my credit card when you’ve given me nothing but the broadest idea of what I’m getting for my money.

Takeaway for marketers: Price without context is pointless.

Like many Web marketers, I’m on a ton of mailing lists. While I’m not too fond of receiving 10 or 12 emails a day for pet nail trimmers and I have all the ink and toner I need, thank you, I like to see what email marketers are up to.

Every once in a while, though, I try and unsubscribe from an email list. Sometimes it’s because the list owner is just relentless and others it’s to see how smoothly the unsubscribe process goes. The last couple of times I did this, I wound up with error pages like the one you see above.

Which means one of two things. Either the list owners are terribly bad at maintaining those Web pages that help manage their lists or they’ve stumbled onto the great secret of email list deniability.

Think about it: You never have to take anyone off your email list because the unsubscribe function doesn’t work. (But hey: The unsubscribe link is there in the email, so at least it’s CAN-SPAM compliant.) Then if anyone manages to go through the effort of actually identifying who you are and complains? Oops! The page broke — don’t worry, we’ll fix it.

Meanwhile, your list never shrinks.

Sounds far-fetched? Maybe. But given the relative popularity of black hat SEO tactics, I wouldn’t be at all surprised to learn that a significant number of people handle their lists this way.

Takeaway for marketers: If your unsubscribe page is broken, fix it. If you’re playing games, stop it.

Bruce Clay Inc. has posted an article entitled The 7 Deadly Sins of Social Media that is a good read (and reality check) particularly for the CMO who wants to get involved in these sorts of online marketing tactics but doesn’t really quite know what’s involved.

Takeaway for marketers: There’s a lot more nuance to navigating social media than most people realize.

Everyone is waiting to see what the convention bump is in the various polls for John McCain and Sarah Palin. I’d love to know, though, what the traffic bump is for sites like Andrew Sullivan’s Daily Dish and Alaskan political blog Mudflats .

I’d also like to know why the Obama campaign, which in almost every way has been so smart about using the Internet and new media, hasn’t jumped on their paid keyword buying yet. I Googled "Sarah Palin" several times this morning, and each time I got one ad result — placed by the McCain campaign.

Takeaway for marketers: Keep an eye on news events: They might suggest smart modifications to your media buy.

SEPTEMBER 6 UPDATE: Well, duh. I could have answered one of my own questions if I’d paid closer attention to Sullivan’s site: He has SiteMeter installed. The answer: The traffic bump is friggin’ huge … which makes the Obama camp’s lack of presence in AdWords all the more surprising.

Omgili is a specialized search engine you might want to add to your Web toolkit. As they explain on their about us page (where they don’t address the phallic nature of that second "i" in their logo design), Omgili "focuses on ‘many to many’ user-generated content platforms such as forums, discussion groups, mailing lists, answer boards and others."

Takeaway for marketers: Omgili isn’t the only place to go to see what people are saying online about your brand, but it’s not a bad place to start.