A study presented at the American Public Health Association’s annual meeting, found that 11 percent of Florida high school students and 4 percent of middle school students had smoked hookah at least once.

For those of you who don’t know, a hookah is a big water pipe that is smoked socially like the one pictured in this post. The practice is rapidly growing in popularity among teens and college students.

With so much talk about social networking and herd thinking, it’s not surprising that social smoking is in vogue.

Every time one door is closed on tobacco use, another opens. Socially, smoking a cigarette is becoming taboo, but the hookah on the other hand becoming accepted. The problem is that it’s worse for you than smoking a cig. The urban myth is that because the smoke passes through water, it’s less harmful.

Tobacco has always had a social element to its use. Smoking was considered cool. Cigar clubs abounded in the 1990’s. Now hookahs are entering into the most social of generations. Is it any wonder?

You Google childhood obesity and the first image that comes up contains your logo. You can just imagine the blame every viewer of this photo places on McDonald’s. Is it McDonald’s fault? It is if they do nothing about it.

To McDonald’s credit they have taken some initiative by offering healthful substitutes to the french fries it offers in Happy Meals and if you happen to have your laptop with internet access while you’re ordering, you can get nutritional data for the meal you select.

By the way, did you know a Big Mac, large fry and a medium Cokes comes in at over 1200 calories?

I suppose that by doing more they would be admitting what is patently obvious to everyone else and that is that their food…along with nearly every other fast food restaurant….can make you obese if you eat too much.

Yet they miss an opportunity to do well by doing good. If they would provide people with encouragement to make good choices from their menu, they’d find people making more good choices from their menu. I’m guessing that the profit margin on a box of lettuce is at least as good as the Big Mac.

Imagine, if they conducted a social marketing campaign that encouraged parents to fight childhood obesity by bringing their children to McDonald’s and serving up fruit burgers. Then they would actually change the eating habits of a generation and firmly plant themselves and their franchisees at the forefront of the new way. Their profits soar, stockholders are happy and the government stays off their back.

Just a thought.

The Net Generation has grown up with an ever expanding choice of products and services that results from the availability of products that the internet provides to consumers everywhere.  So they can buy a funky tee shirt from Des Moines, or a $300 designer brand few have heard of from Florence, Italy all from their desk top…even their phone.

If the Net Generation wants it, they Google it.  If your store doesn’t show up, too bad.   It’s easy for this kind of thinking to keep you up at night.

Here’s a generation that on the one hand has taken “belonging” to an entirely different level with thousands and thousands of social networks, yet expresses a need for extreme individualism when it comes to product choice.  They customize thier iPod, skin their Dell and trick out their Mazda to express themselves in ways only they can.

In the end, despite all the prognostication, Net Gen gravitates toward hub brands.  The iPod and iPhone still reigns supreme, they still watch American Idol despite having 200 channels to choose from and yet they may buy a download from a band so obscure that the band doesn’t even know its name.

As a marketer to the Net Generation, you have a choice.  Be a hub brand, or find away to prosper being an obscurity.  Both are possible.  Both fit with freedom of choice.  Pick your strategy and execute it flawlessly and you’ll do fine.

There have been two notable experiences in that past week that gave me some grins and perhaps a better understanding of the social nature of our marketing world.

Business books are a habit of mine.  I buy them, read them, listen to them, quote them and pass them along.  Last week I bought and read one that I thought was good money wasted on a premise meant to sell books and not to help marketers.  I had read the reviews on Amazon and all but one was positive.  So, my expectation for the book was fairly high.

After reading the book, I reviewed it on Amazon and added a negative review.  The first time I had ever done such a thing.  Then I forgot about it and the book.  A day later, an email from the thin-skinned author shows up on my iPhone.  From there came argumentative emails that were condescending and insulting suggesting that perhaps I wasn’t smart enough to know the “truth” as known by the author.  And that if I couldn’t see that he was “absolutely right,” well then…

Two things come to mind.  First, he could have a point about my intelligence.  Second, his response perhaps destroyed the intellectual ground on which he made the initial accusation.  As of this writing, I know of no marketing author, theory or practice that is absolutely right and his response really demonstrated a lack of understanding of the influence of social media.

The very next day, Wendy Gray, a friend of mine and the agency, emailed me because she had gotten an alert about my review.  She then sent me a link to another blog who had reviewed the book poorly and had gotten the same kind of response from the author.  I left a comment of common experience.

So now the guy who was “absolutely right,” had multiple people saying he was absolutely wrong.  And they were saying it more believably that he could ever claim to be “absolutely right.

All this guy had to do if he wanted to stop a negative process was to thank me for my review and my insight.  Tell me that he would consider my point of view in the future.  Ask me, to do the same and to watch for his next book.  An amazing difference.

I listened to someone I really respect say that she was afraid of social network media because she was out of control.  I thought back to the author.  He was not in control of how I felt about his book, but he was in control of how he responded to how I felt about his book.  And that my friends is the lesson.

Stop and think.  How many ways do you get information?  If we documented every method, it might surprize us just how much of an information junkie we have become.  And the same exists for the audiences to whom we market.

Here’s a hypothetical information half day in the life of a business executive.

1. Morning newspaper, or web site over coffee.  Good Morning America in the background.

2.  Check email on iPhone.

3. Satellite radio on the way to the office switching back and forth between CNN, FOX, Bloomberg, a local sports talk station, CNBC and POTUS.

4.  Checking email on iPhone while driving, also stock updates, Twitter and weather.

5.  Arrive at work, check email.  Scan Google alerts about clients, industries, social network marketing.  RSS feeds from bloggers you read. Visit ten sites that the alerts and briefs have highlighted.  Check news aggregator sites like Drudge Report, AAF Smart Briefs, Politico, Bloomberg.com, ESPN, CNN, Fox. Check on investments online, just in case something changed overnight.

6.  Visit Wall Street Journal’s web site, along with the New York Times.

7.  Check Facebook page, Summize and any message boards followed.

8.  Access Google Analytics to check web visits, where they’re from and who their from.

9.  Check snail mail.  Breeze any magazine received.

10.  Go to an association lunch to listen to a speaker. Check email, stocks prices, Twitter and Facebook from your phone during the talk.  Listen to ESPN on the drive to and from the office.

It’s now 1:00 p.m.

We have stopped thinking about mass media audiences and now think about our audience’s media finger print.  That is the revolution.