Hoo boy. Some days, the heat and light around next-generation press releases, effective communications with bloggers, and all the rest of it are enough to blind you and leaving you dripping in a dazed sweat. It’s important, but as is so often the case, a certain proportion of the self-styled experts in this field are, I might venture, all hat and no cattle.

Valleywag today chose to lay into one of my fellow PR professionals for an unfortunate misrepresentation: conflating social and business time in a disingenuous way. Now, I know work and personal time - and contacts - are getting very blurry everywhere; and that is certainly the case here in the Valley. But if you are going to extract professional or commercial value out of spending time with me, I will appreciate your honesty in characterizing the proposed interaction that way; and I will extend the same courtesy to you. In my experience, journalists, bloggers, and human beings of any occupational stripe seem to appreciate this no-bullsh*t approach.

I don’t want to be too hard on this seasoned and accomplished PR person - she appears to have done some interesting and innovative work - but look at the pitch note Valleywag printed. In addition to asking one of her blogger contacts for hotel recos - which takes a certain chutzpah, although it’s harmless enough - she asked him/her to spend “’social’” time with her. Yup, social was in quotes. So does that make it really social? Or a trojan horse for a pitch to be soft-peddled over candlelight and absinthe? The quotes say it all, or at least make an unsavory impression. There was a different, better and more honest way to propose this very interaction, but it’s too close to quitting time on the Friday before a long weekend for me to figure that out. There was definitely, however, a better way.

I’m all for greasing the wheels. As my buddy Steve Kerns has memorably said in so many words, “free sandwiches and beer help when you’re networking.” But as a businessperson - let alone a PR person - I have always found that the most effective business partnerships emerge when both parties understand (at least at a high level) one another’s motives and the possible tension between them. You see this in New Yorkers arguing about a restaurant choice. Self-interest is presented nakedly and accepted without judgment, and a mutually acceptable choice quickly emerges. This is incidentally one of the things I love most about New Yorkers (although you’re welcome to ask me again if you ever run into me at 3am in Chelsea).

For the benefit of any blogger or reporter contacts I may be so lucky as to have reading this blog: if I ever propose “social” time with you, it will be really social, and it won’t feel forced, and you will have met me in person before. In the interim, I’m happy to give you a great scoop or a creative pitch over a few beers I buy with the company credit card, we’ll understand one another, and it will be a nice way to kill an afternoon. Have a great long weekend - and enjoy your social time.

Sometimes the most amazing things happen right under our noses and we miss them because we’re not in 4th Grade.

Take a stroll down the aisles at your local Target, Walmart, Walgreens or Rite-Aid and you’ll notice an interesting phenomenon — pre-paid gift cards for as many as 26 virtual worlds. Let me try to explain what this means (if you have a 4th Grader, feel free to skip the next few paragraphs).

There are roughly 100 million people in virtual worlds at the moment and the vast majority of them are kids and teens. These worlds, which in general are rather simple looking, allow kids to hangout together on the web. Jeff Yang of Redpoint ventures, a prominent investor in a variety of these worlds (he was also the sole Venture Capitalist behind Myspace) likes to call these worlds the “New Mall”. Collectively, the kids in this “mall” are spending over $1.5 Billion on avatars, clothing, pets and the like. That’s real money on virtual stuff.

Now here’s where the cards come in. While these kids have a seemingly endless appetite for virtual goods, they don’t have credit cards. Even if they did, the stuff they’re buying costs between 20 cents and $5 — creating a problem when the cost of clearing the transaction is greater than the value of the item. The cards solve this by allowing a parent to buy their child $10 or $25 worth of virtual currency. The card company takes a fee off the top, generally somewhere in the neighborhood of 20% (nice business model, huh?) and the rest goes to the kid to spend at the virtual mall.

Now I’m guessing a few of you are wondering why on earth anyone would spend real money on virtual stuff. Let me try to explain this in truly simple terms, because I think it’s a really fundamental concept, no different than what goes on when we buy stuff in the real world.

First of all (and this is beyond fascinating), teenagers view their avatars, or characters in virtual worlds, very differently than adults. While you or I might refer to the avatar as “my avatar”, a teenage just calls it “myself” or “me”. Perhaps an equivalent for us older folks is that we’d never ask someone if they received an email from our “email account”, we’d simply say “did you read what I wrote you?” So these teens see their avatars as themselves, which makes sense when you’re spending over an hour a day communicating through that character. And when that’s the case, how your avatar looks is critical to the way in which one’s social status is perceived. So virtual goods become the markers of social hierarchy — we are social creatures after all (even non-4th graders) and that stuff really matters.

If you’re still thinking “This is beyond bizarre”, let me leave you with a little thought experiment. How much does your average pair of jeans cost? The truth is that if you bought jeans based simply on utility (in other words, discounting social perception to zero), you would spend $10. This means that the difference between what you really spend on jeans and $10 is the value you place on what other people think. In my case, it’s embarrassingly high — over $100.

Guess those 4th graders spending $2 on virtual bling aren’t so crazy after all.

Eric Caoili over at Worlds in Motion was among those picking up today’s big MoU staffing announcement: adland veteran Brian Dunbar, most recently with Goodby, Silverstein in SF, joins us as EVP for Client Services. Read all about it here.

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Last Friday we had a BBQ out at Paradise Beach in Tiburon so, of course, I had to bring my camera along (reposted from my videoblog).

OK, so the seasons here in Northern California are much milder than what I grew up with in New Jersey, but there’s still an optimism and general sense of rebirth that happens every year around this time.

For me, this year is especially poignant — we’re pulling up on our 2nd anniversary as a company and looking forward to the next year. While we began as a company building presences in Second Life, we’re now operating in a wide variety of worlds, building worlds from the ground up for major entertainment companies, creating Alternate Reality Games and asking ourselves, “What do we want to be when we grow up”? Will we continue to focus on connecting the real world and the Internet? Or maybe go more broadly into Social Media? Or maybe all of the above. It’s Springtime after all, and these questions seem normal and healthy.

Second Life has a new CEO — as Mark Kingdon’s start date approaches, we’re curiously watching, wondering and wishing well.

I’m mostly happy to be back home — for the last two months I’ve been traveling at least 2 days every week. It’s so nice to be able to take a deep breath now and spend a couple months (semi) stationary. We’ve got some big announcements coming out in the next few weeks, so that’ll keep things interesting. Aaah Spring.

Any Summer predictions?