I’ve been tagged by Yvonne DiVita and Sherrilynne Starkie in the latest rendition of the “things you don’t know about me” meme, and am struggling to think of some. I’ve been active on the Internet for 15 years, and I can’t think there’s much you don’t know about me. That I am willing to share that is. But I’ll give it a try.

1. I was born in Munich, Germany. Except when I was born, it was still called West Germany.
2. I love Christmas music. I’ve mentioned this on blogs before, but never here. For the latest, read my Christmas post on Snapshot Chronicles.
3. I’m a pretty good cook, even without a recipe to hand. I love to bake, and spent the last week making five different kinds of holiday cookies.
4. I spent my junior year in high school in Rennes France and a semester in college in Paris. My French is no longer fluent but I still occasionally dream in French and can get by pretty well in French-speaking countries.
5. I’d like to visit Australia some day.
6. If I had to live somewhere else in the world besides New England, it would be a toss-up between Brittany, in the West of France, and Scotland. Clearly,  I am not a sun-worshipper.
7. My husband and I celebrated our 10th wedding anniversary two weeks ago.

I’m supposed to tag seven other people, but I’ve got a better idea. Instead of me tagging you, please tag yourself. If you are reading this post, haven’t been tagged yet and would like to play, please consider yourself tagged. Leave a comment below so other readers know that you’ve tagged yourself.

And thank you!!!

What changes do I think the Obama administration will bring? That’s the meme with which I was recently tagged by David Wescott.

Hopefully, there will be a slew of political and policy changes that will make this country a better place to live and less of a joke overseas. Hopefully, we will edge closer to universal health care. Hopefully, the badly-listing ship that is our economy will right itself, the slip-slide of the Supreme Court to the far-right will be reversed and we’ll find a way out of the Iraqi conflict sooner rather than later. But those are all simply hopes for change. There are many more factors at play than one man, one administration and a stirring call to change, “Yes we can.”

What interests me from a marketing and social media perspective is a fundamental change that has already happened that makes these hopes realistic. As David says in his post, Obama understood that the instant communication and connectivity made possible by mobile and social media technologies fundamentally changed the nature of the game:

President-elect Obama didn’t create this change. He’s said so himself. He simply understood its existence. He used the tools people use today to communicate with each other, and by doing so he convinced us he knows politics is not a lecture.

Now he has to prove he gets it, and I’m not just talking about social media. We’re long past the point where you convince people you get it by publishing a blog or putting together a spiffy YouTube channel. They’re just tools. He’ll have to listen and respond. (emphasis mine, not David’s)

Ah, that’s the key. Use the tools to listen. And respond. Not simply to broadcast your point of view.

That’s the real interactive change I see in an incoming Obama administration. The key players — all the way up to the man himself — actively use the tools themselves. One of the top transition stories this week has been whether Obama will be able to keep his beloved Blackberry. An NPR segment yesterday described Attorney General designate Eric Holder as a “technology junkie.” It’s been widely reported that Obama intends to have a laptop in the Oval Office, another first.

Contrast that to an increasingly disconnected, soon-to-be-former President GW Bush who admitted in 2003 that he doesn’t read newspapers and the stunningly uninformed Sarah Palin who couldn’t recall the name of a single newspaper she reads.

This means that there’s a better than average chance that the incoming administration “gets it,” that they understand that our democracy requires a conversation with the American public, not a benevolent (?) dictator deciding what is best for the American public.

It isn’t that they used Twitter in the campaign or that the weekly address to the nation will be archived on YouTube. Both of those things are cool, but politicians have been embracing online tools, with varying degrees of success, for some time now. That’s not the change.

The change is that these communication tools, which are so much a part of our lives, are also part of theirs. These tools that we use to stay informed, to collaborate, to converse, to respectfully disagree, to battle it out, to reach consensus, to connect are their tools too. They don’t cut themselves off from the rapid flow of information. Like us, they revel in the hum of the Blackberry that says new email has arrived.

For all these reasons, I want to believe, I really do, that the first and most important change of an Obama administration is that the President-elect understands that the President is the representative by, for, and of the people. Our proxy, not our replacement.

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Final snarky aside: Of course, it helps that Obama was actually elected president, versus being named president. I can see how the Bush administration got confused there.

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Oops. Forgot to tag some others. I’d like to read what KD Paine, Elisa Camahort Page and Doug Haslam think. What changes will an Obama administration bring?

Average Jane was kind enough to include Marketing Roadmaps on her list of most excellent reads in the meme started by Kayla at Project Mommy. The terms and conditions of the award, as with most memes, are pretty simple: pass it on and link back to the originator. You can repeat blogs that have already been awarded, but I think it is a cop-out to include ones that are on the same list as you, which is why you won’t see my list below repeating a good chunk of Average Jane’s even though I regularly read many of these same blogs and consider them most excellent.

Rules say award at least 10 Excellent Blog Awards, so here are 10 (out of the 500+ feeds in my feed reader) that will give you an excellent reading adventure. In alphabetical order by blog name:

1. Communication Overtones
2. Galactica Sitrep
3. It’s Not A Lecture
4. Mary Schmidt
5. Mom-101
6. mothergoosemouse
7. Motherhood Uncensored
8. Murphy’s Law
9. Occam’s Razr
10. PR-Squared

And if you’ve got a few extra minutes, please check out three blogs that I recently brought online for clients:

• Notes of the Urban Blues – all about the blues, with an emphasis on the Chicago urban blues
• Business Forward – a podcast for small and medium businesses
• For the Face of Your Business – thoughts on sales, service and leadership from my client Caras Training

Tags: excellent blog awards

Todd Defren tagged me in the "08 for 08" meme. Tell eight things folks don’t know about you and then tag the requisite eight more folks. Now, at this point, after blogging for three years, I can’t imagine there is much you don’t know about me.  For goodness sake, just look at the masthead of my photo blog …

However, since I haven’t had time to write anything serious in 2008, I figured this was as good a chance as any to get something on the boards for the year.

1. As a child I hated athletics. I much preferred to read a book. The one time I went downhill skiing with family friends (in 3rd grade) I managed to fall down, ski under a picnic table and collide with a garbage can. Or at least that is how I remember it. As an adult, I’ve taken up downhill skiing, cross country skiing, snowshoeing, hiking, aerobics and have a treadmill that I use at least every other day. Go figure. 

2. I’m trying to find time to write a book. And start a software business.

3. Of all the things I do professionally, public speaking is just about my favorite. Okay, if you know me this isn’t MUCH of a surprise, but gimme a break, eight things people don’t know is bloody hard when you’ve been active online since 1993.

4. I’m a really good cook and have subscribed to Bon Appetit for more than 20 years. Nearly all of those back issues are in the basement. Ref. item 3 above, one of the things you’ll find if you "google" me is a recipe for German Chocolate Cake I posted in a newsgroup in the early 90s.

5. I got a Canon Digital Rebel for Christmas. And Santa brought the family a Flip camcorder. This is not news to folks who read Snapshot Chronicles as I am already inflicting my videos and pictures on them.

6. I just started working on a very cool project that will take me to the Sundance Film Festival later this month. More next week.

7. I love Christmas. Everything about it, including Christmas Carols. This year we had three full-size Christmas trees — two at home and one at our vacation home in Vermont where we spent the holiday. My husband thinks I need professional help I’m not sure whether he means to put up and take down the trees, or something else … Pictures on Flickr.

8. Speaking of my husband … While I write about my son often, and occasionally mention my mom, I rarely write about David here because he is a very private person and  prefers to stay in the background. So, you don’t know, until today, that without his love and support, it would have been very difficult for me to achieve what I have professionally, both in my past life as a software company executive, and now with my businesses, and still have a family and five dogs and three cats and everything else that we work so hard to enjoy.

I suspect that most of the people I would tag have already been tagged in this meme, so if you haven’t and you’d like to tell us eight things for ’08, consider yourself tagged.

Happy New Year.

Tags: memes

Kami Huyse tagged me in her Thanksgiving meme: "Who had a big influence on you and how did that affect the direction of your life or career?"

Like some of my fellow "taggees," a few of the major influences on my career weren’t terribly positive. Rather, it was my response to a negative or messy situation that moved me forward or helped me make an important decision.

Let’s get these out of the way first, shall we. No names. If you are reading this and think it might be you, it probably is.

Thanks to the editor in my first job out of college who told me I couldn’t write. Gave me the kick in the pants to evaluate what I really wanted to do. I got a new job and embarked on a career in marketing. And here I am writing. Nearly every day. Hmmm.

Thanks to the various managers in various corporate jobs who suffered from varying degrees of sexism and found it hard to promote me to the next level. No matter how good the performance or results. Especially the one who hired a super-duper idiot to take over a job I had been doing for years. Each and every time, I moved on to something better.

Now for the positive influences.

First and foremost my family, and most especially my mom Sandra Getgood. From her, I learned that there was nothing I couldn’t do if I set my mind to it.

I had lots of wonderful teachers in high school, college and my MBA program, but three stand out: Jean St. Pierre (Andover), Jill Morawski (Wesleyan) and Cornelia Eschborn (Rivier).

Thanks to all the printers, advertising, marketing and PR folk who shared their expertise with me as I learned on the job, especially in the early years of my career.

Thanks to everyone who has ever worked for me for the privilege of working with you, learning from you and hopefully teaching you a few things as well.

Thanks to Gene Mehr, now a client, who years ago recognized that I had some talent and treated me like an equal when I was just a twenty-something who thought she knew more than she did. I still have the four-star "marketing general" helmet.

Thanks to Scott Murray, former CFO at The Learning Company, for re-assigning me to the Cyber Patrol unit in January 1999. And thanks to Greg Bestick, who worked with me to sell the Cyber Patrol business in 2000 for nearly 10x what TLC had paid for it in 1997. Managing the business unit and my involvement in the whole sales process, from road show to due diligence, was one of the highlights of my career. Maybe I’ll do it again someday.

And finally, thanks to you, the readers of Marketing Roadmaps, for reading, for commenting, for making me part of your online conversation. You inspire me to be better.

Kami didn’t specify how many others we were supposed to tag, so I’ll just wing it. I’m tagging David Wescott, Christina/A Mommy Story, Kelly/Mocha Momma, Julie Marsh, Tom Murphy and Katie Paine.

Happy Thanksgiving!

UPDATE:

David Wescott writes about campaigning for Steven Tolman for state rep nearly 20 years ago and how that influenced the way he approaches his work.

Julie Marsh says she "learned the most from those who played the part of supporters when
times were good, but were nowhere to be found when times were bad."

Katie Paine, back from Thanksgiving in Islamabad, writes about how she became a "genetically unemployable serial entrepreneur."

Kelly (Mocha Momma) tells us what led her down the path to becoming a high school dean.

Christina (A Mommy Story) tells about women who have been positive role models for her: her aunts, mother and grandmother.

Tags: Kami Huyse, Thanksgiving meme