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?

When we talk to teens, and we talk to them a lot, they tell us their biggest motivation for doing anything is fun.

They go to shopping malls for fun.  Football games for fun.  Facebook for fun.  MySpace for fun.  YouTube for fun.  They watch fun television programs.  Like fun movies.  Come to think of it, it’s not much different for adults.

Nothing supports the need for a fun factor more than social networks and YouTube is a prime example.  Marketers lust after the views that amateurs get by accident.  The “Charlie Bit Me…Again” video above had 118 million views.  But not all amateurs are any more successful than the pros who think they can make their YouTube channel the next NBC.

Without fun, your video will be limited by those searching expressly for you.

Facebook is much the same.  Take the State of Nebraska’s Facebook page.  It has 1,587 friends and fans.  Not bad.  But when you look at the page it is a never ending list of governmental announcements.  Should Nebraskans be interested?  Probably, but it’s not fun.  Contrast that with the fan page for Nebraska Football.  It has over 52,000 users who access the page at least once a month.  Fun, as well as life and death.

The fun factor influences our job satisfaction, life, marriages and leisure.  It’s why we spend mone on vacations, dining, dancing, concerts and sporting events.  It’s why we celebrate when we win and cry when we lose.

If we can harness fun in our communications, they become far more effective. Hopefully, Charlie helped this post be a little more fun.

Remember the Borg?  It was a race on Star Trek that assimilated worlds into a collective intelligence to conquer the universe.  It used the thoughts of billions to outsmart the thoughts of millions.  They collaborated throught telepathy.  Well, substitute digitally for telepathy and you can start to wrap your brain around the collective intelligence of the Net Generation.

The Net Generation lives in a world where it can collaborate with its members spontaneously.  Want to know about life at a university, find a FaceBook page on the university.  Go to Youtube.  Look for student produced videos.

Insert any product that the Net Generation is interested in and you’ll find a collective intelligence about that product.  You’ll find ideas to make the product better.  And you’ll find members feeding off one another to brainstorm and develop better products.

If two heads are better than one, are two million heads better?  Maybe when it comes to creativity.  If you believe one creative thought leads to another, potentially better creative thought than maybe two million brains working on a problems is better than two.  Regardless, marketers can use this drive to collaborate to their advantage.

We’re doing market research using social networking sites as a platform to involve respondents and it’s working very well.  The involvement of our respondents is deeper than typical focus groups, we’re not bound by a 90 minute time frame and we don’t have to sit behind a mirror eating Peanut M&Ms.  We’re exploring brand identities, testing strategies and learning better ways to engage this audience.

If you’re selling to the Digital Borg, otherwise known as the net generation, they will gladly help you improve your product, communications or service delivery.  All you have to do is tap into the collective intelligence.  You may not immediately know what they’re thinking, but you can beam yourself in digitally.  But remember, Captain Picard always won.

Live long and prosper.

Remember “Bait and Switch?”  An advertiser lures you in with a fantastic price only to tell you they are out of that particular item but they have something much more expensive that would fit your bill.  That hacked everybody off to the point that it’s a pretty rare occurrence today.  If a marketer does that today, they get skewered by ratings and social networks.  Pretty painful penance.

The bar for business integrity gets higher still when marketing to the Net Generation.  Not only do they expect more, they know how to complain by attacking the business where it hurts…in the cash register.

On the same hand, have integrity firmly on display in your day-to-day dealings, and you could create a customer for life…even an evangelist.

As you think about touting your brand, make sure you live your promise.  As you think about running your business, make sure you do it as green as possible.  Do what you say you will do and put the customer first and you’ll have loyal Net Geners as customers.    Pretty simple.

Last night, my 26 year-old son, home from a Miami Ad School gig with Crispen Porter Bulgoski told me that he was reviewing the Xbox 360 games I had been playing in my man cave in the basement.  I have to admit, I go in an out of mild addiction to video games.  He proceeded to tell me that I was missing some of the most highly rated games.

Then he asked me if I knew what E3 was.  To which I said of course I do (I didn’t).  Then he proceeded to tell me that Blizzard Activision was coming out with some outstanding games and that EA Sports had totally ruined the NCAA 2K basketball series by coming out with a boring 2K nine version.  He told me that he totally opposed the practice of EA buying up franchises so that other game makers couldn’t improve on the games.

Whoa…too much information about video games.  I thought he was supposed to be learning how to be a great copywriter.  But it did give me inspiration for this post.

My son’s pretty normal.  Or at least as normal as anybody who wants to be an advertising copywriter.  When he’s interested in something he spends time researching about the product and what people are saying about it.  While he looks to opinion leader, when he publishes ratings he becomes an opinion leader.  And when he discovers a great product, he’s more apt to broadcast his opinion.  Likewise, when he gets burned by a bad product, he gets even.

I really don’t know much about EA Sports strategies.  But I do know that they have an image issue with gamers…at least one anyway…that will affect their sales to some extent.

The time Net Geners spend scrutinizing their next purchase should cause all marketers to develop strategies to deal with both positive and negative reviews.  If you don’t join the conversation, your ears will ring with this audience talking behind your back.  That said, if your policies offend them, if your product doesn’t meet their expectations, or if it’s just a product that doesn’t perform, no amount of conversation will change their opinion.