Of how many social networks can one individual realistically be an active and thoughtful participant before those networks (a) completely suck one’s life away or (b) spread someone so thin that one’s attention can’t reasonably be given to all the networks?

There’s probably some kind of research on this somewhere, but my guess is that the upper limit is three.

Of course, “active and thoughtful” are the operative words. It’s no trick to be a member of a dozen or more networks, accept invitations, scan postings occasionally and so on. But I’m talking about really participating, in a way that enables you to stand out to other members, to build a real network of contacts, to be a contributor to the community, not just a member.

Yep. Three. Tops.

Takeaway for marketers: If you’re thinking of developing some kind of new online community, it better be staggeringly compelling.

If I’m a sales rep over at Yahoo!, I’m pushing the fact that Sponsor Results on their pages doesn’t get snagged in the AdBlock net.

Then again, if I’m an AdBlock programmer, I’m trying to figure out how to snag Sponsor Results in my net.

Takeaway for marketers: And so it goes.

I use my AOL inbox for newsletter subscriptions and random administrative email. It’s also a magnet for a ton of marketing email, about half of which is outright spam.

I wind up deleting a lot of email.

Anyway, among the 732 emails I had yesterday there was one from Amazon that caught my eye. It told me I can download pilot episodes of four new NBC shows for free. Pretty good deal. Except that Amazon uses Unbox, which isn’t compatible with my iPod, so I’m not going to bother downloading them.

Hey, NBC: It’s fine that you want to stick it to Apple and deal with Amazon instead, but wouldn’t it be a bigger stick to them if you did it in a way such that with an easy workaround we could still watch the shows on our iPods? Amazon would get the traffic and the eventual payback from subsequent series purchases, you’d get the online viewers and incremental sales you want and Apple’s 160-gig iPods get filled up that much faster. It’s a win-win-win.

Speaking of win-win-wins, here’s a lose-lose for you. I thought I might try downloading a game to my iPod, so I went to the iTunes store and found a few that looked good. But iTunes won’t let me buy them: The games aren’t currently available in the U.S., it says (see the graphic accompanying this post). So why did iTunes let me add them to my shopping cart in the first place?

But wait, there’s more: iTunes won’t let me remove the games from my shopping cart, either. Same message. Now here’s the open question: If I buy a song, will I wind up also buying these two games that are stuck in my shopping cart that I no longer want? I’m not willing to try it to see if $9.98 filters into Apple’s coffers in error, so for now I’m not buying anything at all from iTunes.

No music for me, no income for Apple. Yep, that’s a lose-lose. I wonder how many other iTunes users are bumping into the same or similar issues that are preventing them from purchasing anything.

Takeaway for marketers: A lot of things can go wrong on the way to closing an online sale. What’s the weakest link in your e-commerce chain?

Confused by that headline? Let me simplify:

Ars Technica reports on a recent paper in the Journal of Consumer Research that looked into a sales technique called DTR: “disrupt then reframe.”

In short: If you want to maximize sales, state your value proposition to your potential customer in a slightly confusing way. Then restate the same thing in a simple way.

“The paper clearly supports the proposal that the combination of confusion and resolution reduces resistance to the sales pitch,” Ars writes, “but it doesn’t explain how.”

I think the explanation is probably (and ironically) quite simple: Craft your message so that it creates a subtle bit of pain in the mind of the reader, then immediately alleviate that pain. Voila! By taking the proverbial thorn out of the lion’s paw, you’ve made yourself a friend. Or a customer. Or at least won someone’s interest.

Takeaway for marketers: Eschewing obfuscation and circumlocuting the disingenuous in the service of maximizing a singular communicative notion that disseminates critical information with clarity can be a frustratingly brobdingnagian task. In other words:  Simplicity isn’t easy.

In the full panoply of business buzzwords, “viral” continues to hold and lengthen its lead as the most misused word in marketing today.

When a big-ticket agency presents a six-figure recommendation for online advertising and labels ads on blogs as “viral,” I just want to spend a few hours doing primal screams.

It bears frequent repeating: An ad on a blog is not “viral.” Posting a video on YouTube is not “viral.” Creating an interactive element is not “viral.”

Kevin Glennon explained it well a while ago. You can find a link to his must-read article, “Understanding Viral,” over here.

Takeaway for marketers: If you’ve been at the online game more than six months, you should know better than to try passing off a conventional online tactic by calling it a “viral” tactic. And if an agency is trying to pass something off to you as “viral,” know enough to call them on it.