Oh, goodie.

In a national poll of 1,200 registered voters conducted this past weekend, 52.5% percent of all respondents say that social media are harmful to the social development of today’s youth. More details here.

The New York Post was one of about a zillion outlets that reported the other day about Ashton Kutcher’s Twitter gaffe, in which he wondered to his 8.2 million followers why Joe Paterno was fired as Penn State coach.

Assuming that Paterno was fired without knowing the circumstances of arguably the biggest sports story of the century was stupid enough. I mean, if you’re a big enough sports fan to care about Paterno, how can you not know about the Penn State story?

But let’s focus on the followup to the foolishness. According to the Post story, Kutcher wrote on his blog:

“Up until today, I have posted virtually every one of my tweets on my own, but clearly the platform has become too big to be managed by a single individual.”

Ummmm … what? The size of Twitter itself has absolutely nothing to do with whether you’re able to tweet for yourself or not. Zero. Less than zero. Yet, as the Post reported:

An embarrassed Kutcher announced yesterday he would be handing his Twitter feed over to people at his production company.

Hey, guess what: That’s exactly what people using Twitter don’t want to see: celebrity handlers tweeting for celebrities. That undercuts the whole notion of openness and authenticity and transparency that helps drive Twitter in the first place.

Back to Kutcher’s blog:

“When I started using Twitter, it was a communication platform that people could say what they were thinking in real time and if their facts were wrong the community would quickly and helpfully reframe an opinion. It was a conversation, a community driven education tool, and opinion center that encouraged healthy debate.

“It seems that today that Twitter has grown into a mass publishing platform, where ones tweets quickly become news that is broadcast around the world and misinformation becomes volatile fodder for critics.”

Hey, Kutcher: The conditions haven’t changed, the size of your audience has changed. Twitter is still a platform that allows people to say what they think in real time.

Tweeting about Paterno the way Kutcher did? It was dumb, but the tweet itself was nothing close to, say, what Imus said about the Rutgers women’s basketball team.

What’s really beyond dumb is Kutcher’s overreacting, his absurd explanations and the handing off of his personal Twitter account to others. He’d have been far better off with some apologetic tweets followed by some self-deprecating tweets and keeping his feed his own.

Sorry, Ashton: You and Rick Perry both stepped in it pretty good last week, but Perry did a far, far better job of scraping his boots clean.

Social Media Examiner presents an excellent post by Phil Mershon, 26 Promising Social Media Stats for Small Businesses. It’s not the stats that are the meat of this post, though, it’s the key takeaways, especially this one: “Be sure to integrate your social media efforts with your website and mail efforts (online and offline).” Spot on.

ZeroChaos is, according to their website, “ a full-service provider of high-quality contingent workforce solutions.” I do some work for a client through them and was having some issues this week that required dealing with their customer service department, so I wound up spending some significant time on their site.

They’re doing one thing right on their home page (and throughout their site): They have links to their Facebook, Twitter and blog feeds.

They’re doing three things wrong on their home page (and throughout their site): They have links to their Facebook, Twitter and blog feeds.

Click on the Facebook link and get to a dead Facebook page with no content.

Click on the Twitter link and get to a list of ZeroChaos associates which isn’t really helpful if you’re looking for official news and information, and possibly a customer service channel, for ZeroChaos.

Click on their blog link and get a 404 error page.

That’s 0 for 3 … 0 as in zero … zero as in ZeroChaos having zero clue about social media.

(If you want to count online customer service chat as social media, then I could make an 0 for 4 argument, but I don’t want to be accused of piling on.)

Seriously, putting one’s social media icons front and center, but then offering absolutely nothing when the user clicks on them is about as shabby as it gets. Is no one at ZeroChaos checking their own site? Is no one there charged with maintaining their social media presence? At the very least, pull the icons and links off the site entirely so you don’t look like a completely clueless company.

Takeaway for marketers: You set up the blog and the Facebook and the Twitter 18 months ago … do you have any idea what’s happening with them today?