Well, Corinne Edwards has been saying for awhile now that I am nebulous. While I blog here pretty much every day, no one really has the whole picture of what I am really all about. Today is Corinne’s lucky day – I’m doing what she wanted and I am telling you a bunch of stuff about, well, me. For future generations, I want to make clear that I am doing this because a friend asked me to. Generally, I find talking about myself to be quite intriguing, but not a spectator sport 😉 I found this old meme from years past, and then there’s some more stuff. That should be all you could ever need to know 🙂
Musings
The Value of a Liberal Arts Education
Sometimes, people ask me how I came to be a marketer when I earned my advanced degrees in Library Science and History. It’s a fair question. I mean, let’s face it, American Revolution to The Now Revolution is not exactly a straight line. Some people may assume that this was always my destiny since my family owns a marketing firm, but in fact, the universe was wide open for me to do something else, and still, I ended up working in (and loving) the world of marketing.
The funny thing is not that this is my story, but rather that most people I know have experienced similar things. A lot of people I went to college with majored in English, Theater, or History. A lot of them today are in banking or are working as lawyers. My friend Ryan, who gave me the idea for this post, went to grad school with me and earned an MA in History, and he now works in the insurance industry.
The not so funny thing is that these stories are I think influencing people to wonder whether a Liberal Arts education is the best way to go. I remember when I was working at the craft store between my senior year in high school and my freshman year in college, my old principal came in. He asked me what I was going to major in and I said History and English, and his response was that he’d see me at McDonald’s. Ouch.
You Can’t Judge A Person By The Numbers
As I was walking the streets of Evanston, Illinois on Friday night, a group of kids passed me by. As we were passing each other a voice shouted out, “God d–n you’re short!” Now, in the overall scheme of the universe, this inarticulate and really idiotic proclamation is less than a crumb in significance, but the fact is that people make these kinds of statements to other people all of the time. “Why are you so short?” “Why are you so tall?” “Why are you so fat?” “Why are you so darned thin?” All of these questions and mockeries revolve around our society’s obsession with numbers. There is a range of “normal” (although I’m not sure what that range is, per se) that you can fall into for height, weight, even body mass index. If your number is too big or too small, you will very likely encounter people who will point this out to you.
There’s no question, certainly, that things are moving fast these days. People want shortcuts for everything, including the analysis of other people. By looking at those numbers – height, weight, number of freckles, number of pimples – people can quickly sort you into interesting or … something else. The problem, of course, is that people are much more than just those numbers. I am more than a person who happens to be smaller than the average bear. You are more than whatever external characteristics you present in your everyday life. By judging people based on numbers, we miss a universe of interesting things about people.
A Family-Owned Business in the 21st Century
Lou Imbriano suggested I talk about how things have changed at our family-owned agency, Clayman Advertising, over the years. I am extremely fortunate to represent the third generation of my family in this business. My grandfather started the company back in 1954, my grandmother worked as the bookkeeper for the first 24 years,, my dad started working at the company about 35 years ago, and my mother has been working there for about 20 years, and I just celebrated my 7th anniversary (seems kind of pidley compared to those numbers!).
Of course, as you might expect, an awful lot has changed in our company, even just in the time that I’ve been there. When I started as a media buyer in 2004, the marketing world was still a bit tentative about website advertising because of the dot-com crash at the beginning of the century. My work was primarily in dealing with print publications. Google and Yahoo were cooking things that we really didn’t have a full grasp of yet (although it was already becoming apparent these were going to be forces to be reckoned with). My knowledge of web 2.0 was livejournal.com, and there certainly were not any cells of my brain thinking that business would have a place in that world. Twitter and Facebook didn’t exist yet.
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This is the dawning of the age of entitlement
My friend Ellen Cagnassola (aka @SweetSoaps) suggested I write something about entitlement. My friend Daria Giron has also been dealing with entitlement in a new series, and I wrote a bit about it after the Casey Anthony trial ended. Isn’t it interesting that so many of us have entitlement on our minds?
Maybe it’s not coincidental.
One of the most interesting things I’ve read lately has been the opening of Carol Roth’s The Entrepreneur Equation (the rest of the book is just as good, mind you). There, Carol suggests that maybe the American Dream as we have known it has passed away. The idea that you don’t just go from rags to riches but that you actually need to work your tail off to get there eludes a lot of people, or at least that’s the way it seems.
I think the online world makes this worse. We’ve seen a lot of success stories of enormous proportions, right? The person who started a Twitter account and immediately made a million dollars. The bloggers who get all of the income they need from their blogs (and they always seem to say it was a total accident or fluke). It’s easy to say, “Hey, why shouldn’t I get some of that?”
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Juggling Work, Life, And Everything In Between
Tanya Lavoie wanted to talk about that whole work/life/social media/everything else balance issue that so many of us are dealing with these days. I wrote a post awhile back about how to juggle the personal and the professional just in the online realm, but things get a lot more complicated when you start talking about your whole life. This topic seems to be surfacing a lot these days in the online world because of the rise of Google Plus. Even before that, my friends Ian Rountree and Nic Wirtz started HardRefresh.net in response to the onslaught of Social Media fatigue.
So what can we do about this problem? Well, I can only tell you what works for me, but it seems to work pretty well. It’s two tricks. One – allot segments of time that you want to dedicate to certain tasks. Two: try to set up a schedule, which can help you figure out where to fit in those allotted segments of time.
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