A Marketing Career

Years ago I wanted to get into “Sales and Marketing” primarily because I felt that the opportunities to earn what you truly deserve are more prevalent in sales positions than in traditional corporate management positions. Plus, sales is very optimistic, upbeat, forward thinking and you when you make a sale it is reason to celebrate your accomplishment. In corporate management, it is a lot of negativity, screwing people over and self serving. The only real reason a CEO has to celebrate is receipt of a fat bonus check earned off the sweat and sacrifice of all the worker bees.

In the early days when i was exploring the sales and marketing route, I asked a lot of my contemporaries, including other successful sale people and vendors, “What is the difference between “sales” and “marketing”? None of them gave me a good answer. It was only on my own exploration of the sales process and corporate structures that I discovered and embraced marketing. Over the years I’ve mastered quite a bit of the marketing principles and techniques in a variety of corporate settings. Now I am ready to step into the new millenium and learn more about internet marketing and search engine optimization.

Obviously I will make use of the internet for a lot of this effort. I have found some good articles about search engine optimization and internet marketing. One interesting aspect of the new marketing is that most of the traditional marketing logic does not apply. You have to shift mental gears into “geek think” instead of what works in the real world, because often they are very different and mistakes on your website can prove very costly and difficult to correct or overcome.

If you don’t have the time, energy and resources to learn all the search engine optimization techniques, hiring a consultant will at least get you started in the right direction. Many successful Search Engine Optimization consultants are very willing to share what they know and make the effort to communicate the internet marketing process into plain English instead of lots of geek speak mumbo jumbo. For example, take a look at some of the blogs on their sites. This is where the actual people you’ll be working with or learning from have the opportunity to express themselves in their own words – not the professional copywriter’s ad-speak.

Tuna

Tuna fish to me always meant a small round can of flaked, beige fish meat packed in oil or water that strongly resembles cat food. You used a can opener to go around the top edge and after the top clicked loose, you left it on the can so you have someplace to place your fingers and squeeze when you carry the can over to the sink and tilt it to drain off the liquid.

My mother made tuna by adding Kraft Mayonnaise, chopped white onion, chopped celery and bottled sweet pickle relish. Heap it on fresh white Wonder Bread and put a few leaf pieces from a head of iceburg lettuce. Serve with potato chips.

My stepmother had her own idea of tuna. She used Hellmans mayonnaise, if she used mayo at all. She preferred the sweet-sour taste of Miracle Whip. She chopped up one or two hard boiled eggs to add to the tuna, along with some chopped onion. I don’t recall any pickle relish or celery, but to be honest, I hated that tuna recipe and would do almost anything to avoid having to eat it, from I’m not hungry right now to I don’t want to spoil my supper when I get home (to my real mom after the Sunday child custody visitation was over).

Now I celebrate the diversity of tuna and enjoy it with a variety of add-ins, including sweet pickle salad cubes or chopped “bread and butter” pickles, a slice of American cheese of top or shredded any mix of cheeses stirred right into the tuna. Onions in or out. Add anything crunchy that you like. Put it on any kind of bread or roll you want, and put any kind of lettuce – or not – on it.

The only place I draw the line is that IF you include mayo, it MUST be Kraft real mayonnaise. Any other brand of mayo or “salad dressing” ruins it for me.

They Call It “Blue Love”

Summer means weddings and if you have a lot of relatives like we do, chances are that you will have to attend at least one wedding this summer. To be honest, we got married in the summer, too, although it was many many summers ago! We wanted to have an outdoor wedding, but here in the South it can get pretty hot and there is always the chance of thunderstorms which would ruin everything, so we decided to have the ceremony indoors and have the reception at the country club, where the main reception stuff like the DJ and the cake, could be in side the clubhouse, under rood and with plenty of air conditioning, but we would also have the use of the patio and, god willing and the creek don’t rise, we could spend most of the time outside.

So we have a family wedding to attend the last weekend of the month. My brother will be a member of the wedding party and is in charge of the bachelor party. So he called and invited me up to be part of the bachelor party in a couple weeks. That sounds like fun, so I’ll be going to that.

My brother also casually mentioned that he wants to give the groom a couple of viagra pills so they can have plenty of “blue love” on their honeymoon. So he asks me if I have any that I can contribute to the cause. Now, I don’t know why he thinks I would have any on hand and I wonder if I should be insulted. But I think he is sincere in his effort, so I’ll let it slide. Because actually I could probably round up a few if I needed to, and I know a couple people well enough that I could ask. We actually had this conversation out on the golf course a couple weeks ago. I guess I have to accept the fact that I am getting older than I want to admit to myself if I can casually discuss ED on the golf course with some guys who happen to be paired up with me in a foursome for the day.

Turns out one of the golf buddies for the day is a podiatrist. Now, I don’t have foot problems and have never been to a podiatrist, but as it turns out a podiatrist sees a lot of older patients. He even makes rounds at two of the local upscale nursing homes every week. And I don’t know why, but it never occurred to me that a podiatrist could write a prescription for Viagra or Levitra ( I just love that name, Levitra – it must be latin for “levitate that Big Boy”). And now that we are deep into the subject, let’s not leave out Cialis.

Come on now, you’ve all seen the commercials for each of these. You know what they do. But if you have a need for one, here’s a tip from my golf buddy, the podiatrist. Get your prescription filled from an online pharmacy called “eDrugStore.” The prices are really cheap and you have all the privacy in the world because no one standing in line behind at the local pharmacy will overhear you or see what you are getting.

Geneology

I’ve always counted on my younger sister to keep track of the family members. She keeps a list of everyone’s address, their birthdays, anniversaries and handles all the general family duties. She has even started researching out family tree and has been compiling names and contact information for lots of great aunts and great uncles and cousins removed and all that.

One side of our family includes the Scottish clan MacKenzie, and sis has been collecting information about the design of the tartan and other interesting tidbits of our geneology. She even came across a very old prayer evidently from hundreds of years ago that gives you pause to reflect on how life was back in the day:

The MacKenzie Clan Prayer

Bless a’ the MacKenzies an’ a’ the Mackenzie childer; their sons
an’ son’s childer and their dochiter’s for a thousan’ years to come.

Be Ye gracious an’ send doon mountains o’ snuff,
an rivers of whiskey.

An’ oh lord send doon swords an’ pistels an’ daggers
as monie as the sands on the seashore
to kill the MacDonalds, the Clan Ranalds, and the Campbells.

An oh Lord, bless the wee coo, an’ make it a big coo.

An oh Lord bless the sucklin’ and make it a grand board.

An oh Lord, bless the wee bairns, yon Angus,
Alex an’ Bessie an’ Maggie an’ Florrie.

An oh Lord, build up a great wall between us an’ the Irish,
an’ put broken bottles on the top, so they cannae come over.

An’ oh lord, if ye hae anything gude to gie, dunna gie it to the Irish,
but gie it to your chosen people, the Scots,
especially to the Clan MacKenzie an’ a’ their friends.

Glorious ye are for ever more.

Home Decor Includes Clocks

The wife says we should be getting our “economic stimulus” check from Uncle Sam just about any day and has been day dreaming about what we should spend it on. Last night we surfed a few web sites and did a little shopping to make up a wish list and budget our anticipated money.

One site that I particularly liked was 1-800-4clocks which is all about clocks, especially grandfather clocks. I never realized there were so many different kinds of grandfather clocks and so many different things to consider before purchasing one.

First of all, there is the clock maker to consider. The long established and top brand names include Howard Miller, Hermle, Seth Thomas and Bulova. Of course there are others, but those are the ones that I recognized right off and the ones that I focused on shopping.

Then you have to choose the clock cabinet style and type of wood finish or metal color. Then there is the clock face to consider and you also choose the chimes. On the 1-800-4clocks website they have a little button that lets you listen to samples of the different chimes. That is a nice feature, because I wouldn’t otherwise know the difference between the different ones, although once you hear them you think, “Oh! Of Course!” because you do recognize them after hearing them.

The website even has a blog that is a collection of short articles relevant to grandfather clocks. I read the post titled, “Grandfather Clocks Help Define Decor” and knew right away that we should go ahead and make buying our new grandfather clock a priority, and it appears the wife agrees!