7 Things Strikes Again

I’ll be the first to admit I’m skeptical when it comes to memes.  I’ve got to be honest that I am not a huge fan, but on occasion they can serve a good purpose. ”Meme” has “me” twice in it – which can be two times too many – and like many I’m not always comfortable talking about myself. (Bryan Person did a great job adapting this particular one to talk about others, but I’m admittedly not that clever.)  To start off 2009, I’ll give this one a shot. 

Good friend Len Devanna once described memes in a positive light:

It helps strengthen the online relationships I’ve established. It puts me in a position to share something I otherwise wouldn’t – which helps to provide some context around who I am – especially for those who only know me through an online relationship. It also helps create new relationships.

Very true words.  Thanks to Ken Burbary, Marc Meyer and Eric Guerin each for taking the time to tag me and write some great posts – this has been a great experience to get to know them better and I hope this reciprocates. Without further ado…7 random facts about yours truly.

1. I stole a lawn gnome and took it across the country. In the summer of 1995 two friends and I took a 50 pound cement gnome (actual picture) from a random house in a New Jersey suburb and took it all the way to the Redwood Forrest and back.  You know those Travelocity commercials?  They were based on us.  Loosely.  Very loosely.  Well, I don’t know if we were the first to do it, but we definitely were legends in our own minds.  We took pictures everywhere with the gnome and mailed postcards back to the house we stole it from, authored from the gnome.  At the end of the trip we returned the statue with a stack of pictures, a large foam sombrero from Taos, NM, and a huge map tracing the journey.  We never met the family as we were afraid of the consequences.  Is there a statute of limitations on that stuff?
2. I am a sucker for the Muppets. I haven’t bought the entire series on Time-Life DVD (yet), but I have a renewed appreciation for the adult humor sprinkled throughout.  The best part is that my 3 boys, ages 7, 5 and 2, are also now hooked.  The kids watched all of season one during the Thanksgiving road trip from Boston to Philly.
3. I’d rather have a week of skiing than a week on the beach for vacation. Before kids I would get close to 20 days a year on icy slopes in New Hampshire and Vermont.   Nowadays the 3-4 times a year will have to do, but I long for the days of the week-long family trip to Vail.  The back bowls above the tree line are perhaps my favorite place on earth.
4. I graduated college not knowing what I would do for a living. When I started college I thought I would be an attorney, but after working for a summer at a corporate law firm in Manhattan I was not enthused.  I was a Political Science major, but I interviewed with Andersen Consulting (now Accenture) in the weeks after graduation and was hired for one of the last two spots that summer in Boston.  Now as a partner at Rosetta, I can reflect fondly on the two months I had no idea what I was going to do with my life.  The panic was a growing experience.
5. I spent 5 summers as a camp counselor at the overnight summer camp I attended as a kid.  Camps Kenwood and Evergreen, in Andover, NH, have been the summer homes to me, my sister or both every year since 1985.  Today my sister is the head counselor for Evergreen (the girls camp), and her husband is the same for Kenwood.  I am in denial that my oldest son is a couple years away from actually attending.  While somewhat hokey, the movie Indian Summer really nails the overall feeling of summer camp.  Hard to explain to someone who didn’t go.
6. I have retired from the game of golf three times. I am consistently inconsistent and it drives me crazy. What can I say, I have moments of glory followed quickly by the agony of despair.
7. I seem to gravitate toward change. I like project based work that has measurable outcomes and doing my best to influence the outcome.  I also like new or fresh starts, especially once I can get past that point about a month or so after you start anything new where you quite suddenly realize how big the task is at hand.  This goes for everything, from a job change to starting in social media.  I like the challenge but it is, well, challenging.  Seth Godin talks about it well in “The Dip,” which will be the subject of a future blog post.

Thanks for reading, and if you are interested in learning more about some fascinating people I know, here are the folks I have tagged.  I’ve tried to provide a representative cross-set of connections who have provided valuable insight and perspectives (and as far as I can tell haven’t been tagged yet):

• Michelle Boockoff-Bajdek (aka MichelleBB), CMO for marketing firm Quaero and fellow member of Forrester’s Technology Marketing Executive Council
• Eric Glazer, VP of Marketing at Cambridge Healthtech Associates, expert on communities in healthcare, and my son’s soccer coach
• Colin Browning, former head of business development at Mzinga who recently joined Chris Brogan‘s New Marketing Labs team
• Connie Bensen, community guru and social media teacher extraordinaire, whom I’ve started to get to know through social media and hope to meet one day this year
• Erika Watters, a retail marketer who has really found a great storytelling voice at her personal blog
• Sean Bohan, self-described “renaissance caveman” – a social media consultant who just “gets it” and has real experience to back up his insights
• Beverly Cornell, Director of sales and marketing for Iterotext, who connected with me after seeing me mention the agency I work for, Rosetta, on Twitter (subsequently we had a laugh when we realized she thought I was talking about Rosetta Stone).

Please join me in encouraging these folks to keep this one going, we can all learn a bit more about each other.

The rules:

• Link to your original tagger(s) and list these rules in your post.
• Share seven facts about yourself in the post.
• Tag seven people at the end of your post by leaving their names and the links to their blogs.
• Let them know they’ve been tagged