Salem drivers aren’t as safe and mild mannered as I originally thought. Truthfully, they may rival Arizona drivers for craziness. No near misses thus far, but I’ve noticed there have been quite a few incidents of speeding and pulling out in front of me on roads I thought were supposed to be a little more laid back on (like the one leading into my apartment complex).

Work has gone well so far. It took me until week 2 to get all of my gear, but I am set up really well now. I’m actually typing this blog post on my 17 inch Mac Book Pro. I’ve got all my software, mouse, monitors and even a company issued iPhone 3Gs. It only took – well, FOREVER – for that to happen at my last job. It is really nice to not have to fight with your IT department or justify the software and hardware you need to do your job. So, thats an overwhelmingly major improvement for me.

The highlight so far of my new job was going to visit one of our retirement communities. I had a great time playing bean bag baseball with the seniors there. It put a smile on my face to see so many of them truly happy, not to mention the direct feedback that they loved the staff.

We signed a rental agreement for our new place here in West Salem but so far have not found tenants for our own house. Unfortunately, that is the one thing keeping Kelly from moving out here which, well, sucks. I am starting to feel irritable about her not being here. Of course there isn’t anything we can do about it. We actually had a registered sex offender apply to rent our place. So, it is just a balancing act of finding the right person to rent it. I just don’t feel like i can relax and really begin to enjoy my surroundings until she is here.

Aside from that, a lot of WoW with some of my friends which has been a good way to just keep my mind off being separated from my wife. As works though kicks in I will need to put that aside to focus on other things.

Come on everyone! You need to CRUSH IT!

Kidding. You won’t read any bullshit “shamwow” speech here about making it rich with a 200 dollar flip cam and a YouTube account. Truth is, the power of social media is including everyone else and using their collective creativity to build something new – not just talking about yourself. Being a self promoter doesn’t make you a social media expert. No, it makes you a good self promoter.

It kills me how many people just don’t get it. However, when your follower count on Twitter approaches the 500k mark I could see where it would be easy to get a big head about yourself.

But, but – all it takes is transparency!

Not really. Not only are there lots of things that companies should NOT share (or individuals for that matter) but there are lots of things that just aren’t really that important to share with the public. Raise your hand if you care that Tony Hsieh accidentally filled his car with premium gas instead of plain old unleaded? I like Tony, but that tweet didn’t sell any shoes, nor did it really make him or his brand any more interesting. Transparency like that is really fucking boring.

I still rarely if ever see anyone actually using the creations of others (or even ASKING fans/customers) to create something on behalf of a brand. Today I read that Flickr had its 4 billionth photo posted this past weekend. How many business owners have gone to Flickr and looked for interesting photos that fans of their brand have taken. How many have you commented on, or asked for permission to use in your own online or offline marketing? If there answer is none, you really ought to go out to sites like Flickr, Vimeo or even YouTube and see some of the AMAZING things ordinary, non blow hard people are creating daily. I think you might be shocked at what you find.

I am going to explain something – marketing is an iterative process. This is especially true with internet marketing. Things like, search engine optimization, or pay per click search. Your always repeating a process, learning from your mistakes and making improvements. Most of the time, by the time you have launched a campaign you are already planning out the next version (iteration) of it.

Basically, your job is never done in marketing. There is always something to improve, and if you are afraid to make changes and are just satisfied with leaving things “as is” then I am afraid you aren’t going to be a very good marketer.

Search engine optimization example – I wrote a blog post about Facebook Business marketing on our company blog. I posted about it here on this site yesterday. Anyway, one might think that “hey, that blog was written so no need to go back and edit it.” That is a waste, really. Sure, it is a blog, but that doesn’t mean you can’t improve it. Remember, blog posts, like site copy, have the potential to hang out on your site (and the web and search engines) for years. When we redesigned our work site, we kept all of our old blog posts. So, literally we have 2 years of blog posts still on our server being indexed.

So, it makes sense to go back and polish old blog posts, especially if you think you can improve them. I monitor search rankings on the terms I optimized the post for and have seen steady ranking improvement since I started doing that. Since the post was really a guide for newcomers to Facebook, it is content which can have legs so long as I keep it updated.

I guess what I am saying is that I am iterating on the post. I keep trying to improve it. I haven’t discarded it. Everything can be made better with a little work.

I just wish people understood that concept more.

Is change.

People come and go – in life, and at work. Its usually tough to accept the fact that people move on, either by choice or necessity.

I was chatting with a coworker yesterday about the friends you make and the inevitability that one day something in their lives change and you fall out of touch. This has happened to me a lot. Most of my friends from childhood went on to other colleges, or now live on the east coast. That’s one nice thing about Facebook — that you can keep in touch or even rekindle those old relationships.

Same thing with work. For 7 years I worked with the same two guys. I have talked about it on my blog a lot. Now we’re all in the same town, but working at different jobs. I still think about them all the time – often times reminiscing about old times and how things used to be.

I don’t think the magic is there to recapture though. Those relationships grew under certain, unique and irreplaceable circumstances. They were the product of a certain dynamic environment. Could I go back to Tampa and expect friends from grade school to be exactly as they were?

Times change I guess.

Its about 12:20am here and I’m sitting in the dark, with head phones in as to not wake my wife sleeping in the other room. I’m still working – my eyes actually tearing up from staring at a screen all day. Buried in an excel document that is now giving me a splitting headache and all I want to do is go to sleep.

But you know what? I feel great.

This is a blog post about work ethic. Some people just have one, others aren’t as fortunate. Some others still learn to develop one. Thats where my story begins.

Almost a year ago now I was laid off from my job. I had been there seven years and I’ve got to be quite honest — i was bored of it. Looking back now, it was a blessing in disguise to be laid off. First, it came before the economy went to shit. Second, I was looking for job already but only half heartedly. Doing the same thing for that long, with the same people, just wears on your after a while.

Anyway, so I was called in to my bosses office and told my position was being eliminated. I was surprised, but only that he was laying me off and that he wasn’t in fact telling me he was moving on. I always thought I’d outlast the majority of the folks at the company, but obviously I was wrong.

Being laid off, at least then, was like a slap in the face with a glove full of lead. It hurt and I was pretty angry about it.

For about a month and a half I thought long and hard about what I wanted to do. I put together my resume pretty much right away, and started sending it out. My strategy in the job search was to put out the very best resume I could, and hope to get someones attention.

Week after week passed – and while I got a lot of interviews, very few companies were biting.

I remember walking at night, as I often did back in those days, thinking that if I ever got a job (and I knew I would eventually, maybe I as just being dramatic) that I would not coast again. I wouldn’t just be happy to be there, but instead work really hard and attempt to prove myself every day. And if that job ever got boring to me, I’d move on to something else, and not stay for years and years.

It feels good to be doing an all nighter tonight working on client work. Whys that? Because I work at a place now that values hard work and the work itself is fun and challenging. There is very little about agency life that is status quo.