You gotta be kidding
Aug 22, 2008 work work work
Recently a writer pitched herself for a project I’m heading up for a client. Off I went to check out her clips site and get an idea of her skills and expertise. What’s the first thing I see? ADS.
What’s worse is that this person was using google adwords, which pulls keywords from your site to create ads specifically targeted to your audience. So she was asking me to check out her skills while hosting five ads that compete with what she’s offering.
So what first impressions did I get from a quick glance through her site?
- That she’s likely not all that savvy about marketing, which is a pretty big issue for a marketing job.
- That she’s not detail-oriented.
- That she doesn’t understand how the internet works.
- That she’s an amateur.
Would she put a bumpersticker on the front of the clips file she’s sliding across the desk to the HR person? Or stop a job interview to try to sell Tupperware? Then why does she think it’s a good idea to have ads on her “please hire me” site???
Argh. Now I gotta decide if I should say something to her. I mean, I’m not going to offer her work (I’ve already got people lined up) only sometimes when someone seems sincere but misguided I do try to tell ‘em WHY I’m saying no but other times I just don’t have the energy.
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Also, another speaking event
Aug 19, 2008 Blogging, work work work
I’d love to hit that drupal one but that’s my dad’s 70th birthday so we’ll be busy that day. Courtesy of the Fuse Factory!
Workshop 1: Introduction to Marketing Yourself on the Web
Instructor: Alison Colman
Date: Wed., Sept. 10
Time: 11:30am - 1:00pm
Location: GCAC conference room
Fee: Free
Workshop 2: Intro to Web 2.0: Building a Better Blog
Instructor: Dawn Friedman
Date: Saturday, Sept. 13
Time: 1:00pm - 4:00pm
Location: Junctionview Studios
Fee: $15
Workshop 3: Intro to Drupal
Instructor: Jennifer Deafenbaugh
Date: Saturday, Sept. 20
Time: 1:00 - 4:00pm
Location: The Vault (this will be part of the Independent’s Day festivities - visit http://independentsday.nu/ for more details!)
Fee: $15
Workshop 4: Intro to Flash
Instructor: Phong Nguyen
Date: Saturday, October 4 (Phong, plz let me know ASAP if you think this workshop warrants two sessions! This can be scheduled for both the 4th and the 11th)
Time: 1:00pm - 4:00pm
Location: Junctionview Studios
Fee: $25
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Tags: blog, drupal, Junctionview, marketing, my dad, Workshop
Yesterday was TERRIBLE and a good book
Aug 13, 2008 work work work
I can’t even tell you; it was just that bad. Today is better. It started off by getting a new client, it continued with a great phone call from one of my mentors, it went on with a well-deserved apology from my stressed but that’s no excuse husband, and right now it’s glowing with the quiet contentment of my two kids. Even though my childcare canceled (Gram Pam has a rotten stomach bug — send well wishes her way!), my late checks still aren’t showing up and I have this Great Big Hairy assignment due soon, I’m feeling a little more stable than yesterday.
Life is not easy, darn it, even when I wish it were.
There are things that make it easier. Things like friends on twitter who catch a grouchy tweet and lob it back with an offer of help. And things like friends via email who just so happen to ask how you’re doing when you really want to let loose. And another is commenters such as Cinnamon who may not like Columbus but who make great bags and turned me onto a really terrific, much needed book (The Boss of You). I wish I had this book a year and a half ago when I was just getting started!
What I love about The Boss of You is that it doesn’t assume that you’re in it to get rich, to make infromercials or to one day speak in title case To Show the World That You Are Here to Seize Control. In other words, it’s a business book for punk rockers, former and current riot grrls, crunchy granola earthmamas, feminists in sensible shoes and other women like us.
One of the biggest challenges I’ve had (and am still having to be honest) is moving around in the work-a-day world trying to grok the people who wear business clothes and speak in a language that doesn’t always make sense to me. (Although I was recently in a research study for seventy-five bucks and I said to the researcher, “I think this campaign is likely to go viral” and then “this ad copy doesn’t seem as sticky to me” so I must be picking it up somewhere.) Like all the people in marketing? They’re totally really fit. Like serious runners — marathoners, triatheletes. They have shiny eyes and friendly intensity. In fact, they make me want to have a bowl of ice cream and take a nap. I’m undone by such unbridled enthusiasm and intimidated by neatly pressed wardrobes. I’m not saying that I’m a slob but I’ve been known (as blog readers are aware) to use a stapler to fix a drooping hem and I’m prone to put off getting haircuts — the expense! — because I’d rather save that money for a rainy day.
In other words, I haven’t felt this out of place since about middle school.
Happily the people I’m meeting are much nicer than my peers in middle school so it’s not about that — it’s about learning to operate in a world that doesn’t necessarily share my values. Not like my values are all fired-up awesome or anything but they’re mine and I’m fond of them. Figuring out how to be me yet still communicate with people who are not much like me has been hard. And I don’t always do it right. Sometimes I think that’ll be the ruin of me but then books like this crop up and make it easier.
Once I was crying to Chris about this and I wailed, “But I don’t want to be a business woman!” and she shot back, “That’s because you have some crazy idea about what that means!” pointing out that maybe my prejudices were at issue and holding me back. It’s true, too, because I keep thinking I have to be my dad to be successful and while my dad has many things to teach me, I have to keep reminding myself that I can do it my own way. (I think. Yikes.)
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Tags: books, business, feminist, Friends, haircuts, marketing, mentors, my dad, success, work
The (temporary) end of an era
Aug 10, 2008 Family, work work work
Brett goes back to work tomorrow and he will be missed. Things I will miss most:
- His morning pancakes
- The way he brings me a second cup of coffee while I’m sitting at my desk
- Being able to start the morning at my desk undisturbed
- Knowing that he’ll run the kids to the park and/or library and otherwise fill their lives with wholesome activity
- His annoying singing in the morning
- Having him open the window I can’t reach above my desk
- Chatting with him over lunch
- Talking myself through writer’s block will he patiently listens
- Watching him serve dinner with a flourish and more singing
- All the errands he somehow finds time to run
Well, now I’m a little sad.
This has been a difficult year full of growth and struggle. I’ve learned more than I really wanted to know about the inner-workings of my financial fears and we’ve worked through so much as a couple. I’m excited about this next stage because I think it can get us where we want to be faster (mainly, getting Brett home again with a more stable budget — unless he loves his job so much he wants to stay there, too) and I’m also nervous about keeping up this level of work with a more challenging schedule.
The flipside of the challenging schedule is that I’ll be forced to leave work with work instead of carrying it along with me. I think if I drop most of my pro bono efforts that it’ll go a long way to freeing up my time. I also am going to do a lot less in-person networking and more working the network I already have (because I need to think about marketing, which always seems counterintuitive when I’m really busy but eventually the slow times will come back). And having the one car is going to be annoying. (There’s a bus that we think runs near his job but how near and the length of the commute have not been confirmed. We do know that it’ll be a trade-off: Having a car or having Brett home in a timely manner. It’s not economical to drive him myself gas-wise.)
I got most of my business systems worked out so that I can work more effectively and it’s going to be easier now than it was before Brett came home. (I wasn’t juggling nearly as much work then but what I was juggling I was handling badly.) Besides, it’s only seven weeks of Brett being gone days and then it’ll be a lot easier. (I do my best work in the morning and tend to burn out by about 2pm, which is when Brett will be heading out when his schedule changes.)
So we will be back to a 2-income family. I made a full-time salary in my ePreg days but since then my paychecks have been very much of the part-time variety so this will be the first time in quite awhile that our coffer will have the benefit of two folks throwing money at it. We’re thinking six to eight months and then we’ll reassess barring any exciting developments on my end.
I will also have less time to write for myself for the next two months, which makes me sad/frustrated. Thing is, it’s about long-term plans and knowing that it’s a priority for our future does much to ease my grousing.
Sometime I want to write more about how it’s been to change out our traditional gender roles (husband working, wife carrying for kids & home) and how it has and has not impacted our marriage. I will say that it’s been a bigger deal for people around us than for us although it did force us to confront some of our ingrained ideas about how our family works.
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Tags: Brett, budget, business, business systems, commute, growth, income, juggling, marketing, money, networking, salary, schedule, trade-off, work, writer
Inviting bloggers to the party
Aug 2, 2008 Blogging
You may not know this but Columbus is a major blogging city. It’s true — according to Scarborough Research, we’re number eight on the list (a list topped by not-surprising entrants like Austin, Portland, San Francisco, Seattle) sharing with those cities a tech-friendly environment and lots of internet access. Likely we skew higher, too, because OSU is the largest university in the country, which means we have lots of young adults with the blogging and the twittering and the myspace-ing around here.
The local marketing world has been paying attention (as have I, note: Open Book Strategies) and the other night the good folks at Experience Columbus invited the central Ohio blogosphere to check out their new ad campaign.
Now just like you probably didn’t know that Columbus is so bloggy, there’s probably a whole lot of other stuff you don’t know about us like we’re artsy as hell and incredibly gay-friendly (I’ve been told we’re the San Fransisco of the midwest) and pretty darn diverse. We’re a nice city (minus the humidity) — affordable, great housing, low traffic — and lately lots of different powerful folks have been wrestling around trying to figure out how to make sure you all know that. I’ve been in on a number of different talks about it lately and everyone has their own take. It’ll be very interesting to see where we are in ten years.
(Mind you, I’ve lived here for 25 years (moved here when I was eight, five years in Portland, OR — a city that really knows how to work their brand) and I’ve heard this noise before. I think sometimes the newcomers with the unbridled enthusiasm about our fair city don’t know the fatigue of living through the AmeriFlora debacle or being the subject of a critical documentary on gentrification. Sometimes the recently relocated aren’t so patient with us but they gotta appreciate our caution.)
There is much to love here but sometimes it seems like the powers that be are the last to know it. No wonder Columbus Ohio ends up being an insider joke on Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip. (One of the writers hailing from Columbus brings his folks in for a tour. When they meet D. L. Hughley the mother stumbles, “We love Sidney Poitier.” Because we don’t have black people in Columbus. Right.)
So the Experience Columbus planners have their work cut out for them. How to get past our mundane, farm-centric, cowpoke reputation? Especially when what’s unique about us somehow doesn’t seem bold enough to grab attention? (We do have some great attention-grabbing stuff though, most notably the Short North, one of our few attractions that isn’t beholden to a big corporation. And we’re also well known in the gay community as a terrific city having been touted in gay magazines since at least the early eighties.)
Their answer was to start a campaign about what we don’t have. Like we don’t have the Eiffel Tower or mermaids or mountains. There’s a really terrible youtube channel — the vidoes will evoke snickers in those of us who live in Columbus and get the joke but aren’t funny enough to forward (and also don’t tell us what is here, which is the flip side the campaign needs to emphasize). And a myspace, which weirdly is run by an imaginary 22-year old male although the target audience of this campaign is ostensibly conference planners. Ok, maybe it’s a real 22-year old intern. Happily the campaign does boast some pretty awesome t-shirts.
So I’m not crazy about the campaign although I think it could grow legs with a little tweaking (I do love the t-shirts — full disclosure, they gave us coupons to get one free) only I’m confused about why they brought the bloggers along.
It makes sense for them to get us to blog the campaign because it’ll likely be controversial to the folks who love Columbus and are already pretty dang defensive what with the Aaron Sorkin types who dismiss us. Maybe those people won’t get the joke so good thing to bring on the bloggers, ply us with the goodness that is Jeni’s ice cream (seriously, that salty caramel? If you haven’t had it, you haven’t lived) and then set us loose in a sugar-infused haze to blog it.
But then what? The campaign doesn’t have a lot of social media around it. They haven’t really come up with many ways to let people grab it and run. Jennifer Laycock has given ‘em a ton of free ideas that could help things along a lot but there we all were, sitting with our twitter accounts and blogs and they didn’t really figure out a good way to use us.
We’re talking about the campaign but we’re not really a part of it. If they grab Jennifer Laycock’s list, they could bring us on board a little more. There’s a lot of central Ohio pride among Columbus bloggers and some of us walk around with our cameras around our necks all the time (Kristen!) and our iPods ready to twitter (umm, me) and a bunch of us have tons of readers NOT in Columbus. You know, that target market of people not here who maybe want to come here. People like Kristen (just check out her gorgeous ComFest pictures), who genuinely love and celebrate Columbus can do a lot to change people’s mindset about it. Rather than invite her to a campaign about NOT in Columbus, I’d invite her to one to give her insider view about what IS Columbus. And then ask her to share.
In short (ha!) lots of bloggers already are changing people’s point of view about what’s here — use us for good instead of snark.
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Tags: AmeriFlora, Blogging, blogosphere, blogs, Central Ohio, Columbus, gentrification, Kristen, marketing, myspace, Open Book Strategies, OSU
