Office Max is at it (meaning viral marketing) again this season with a microsite, elfyourself.com, where you can turn yourself into a dancing elf. (New this year: you can add three colleagues and create a quartet of dancing elves.) Don't feel elfish? No worries. You can choose to Scrooge yourself instead.

Flash animations seem very retro in these days of Delicious, Digg, Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, and the rest of the social networking alphabet. But that's just the point. Outside the tight circle of techno-geeks that some of us inhabit there are real people who have yet to embrace social networking.

They just want to have a bit of fun and they don't care what's cool and what's not. Of course, you can send the link to your dancing elf to all your colleagues -- even if you don't have a Facebook page to post it to.

As publicity guru Joan Stewart put it recently in her e-newsletter:

Some of the names look like typos

"I don't know about you. But when I read about all the opportunities to do social networking, I feel like a rat in a maze.

It's all I can do to keep up with the emails and invitations from my MySpace and LinkedIn friends.

Then there's Twitter. Gather. SmugMug. Wetpaint. StyleHive. ShoutWire. Furl. MeetUp. Frappr. Flickr. 43 Things. Ma.gnolia. WikiHow. Del.icio.us. Reddit. And Ning.

Some of them look like typos. Others I don't know how to pronounce. My eyes glaze over just reading the list."

- Joan Stewart, publisher of The Publicity Hound (Oct. 30, 2007 issue)

Where do you fall on the scale of dancing elves vs. twittering? Do tell.

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