The Pro Shop

We’re a nation that enjoys controversy: public option healthcare or not, Team Edward vs. Team Jacob, Jay or Coco, dogs or cats. We enjoy choosing up sides, whether or not we have anything to gain.

Now a promotion has tapped into one of the great unresolved issues: tissues. The bathroom variety, to be exact. In a phrase, Cottonelle wants to know, America: Should the toilet paper go over the roll or under? more

Getting featured in the Bloomingdale’s holiday catalog as a “Chic Treat Under $100” is just the kind of present every up-and-coming clothing designer hopes to find under the tree.

But the fashion line Boy Meets Girl, whose $78 “Coco” decorated hoodie has been so favored this year, hopes to leverage that good fortune even further by offering a virtual version of its real-life shirt in an online world.

It’s an interesting experiment in whether digital exposure can drive real-world sales. If it works as planned, girls will be able to dress their avatars in Fashion Fantasy Game in a digitized version of the same clothing they’ll ask their friends and relatives for at the holidays. more

Okay, the headline’s an overstatement—but not by much. Microblogging platform Twitter has recently taken action against a promotional idea that went over really well with its current users, to judge by the metrics—but that might, if allowed to propagate, put a major hurt onTwitter’s ability to attract a growing audience, or to monetize those users once they get them.

The promotion in question relied on “hashtags”, those phrases that follow “#” in tweets and that are used to identify a thread, so that users can search for and sort the jumble of disjointed 140-character conversations that can swirl around a topic on Twitter. more