Smart little brother is back in town. Could you feel the lift in the median IQ of South Carolina about 7:00 this morning? He said the secret conversations with those people about that thing are going well. Nuff said.

We’re off to American Grocery. I’ll give you a review. Yeeha! Good times.

So, we met last Saturday about 7:00 in the morning at Miss Anderson’s house, to head off for our annual adventure at G-Hills. The trip was pretty uneventful—if a 7+ hour trip with a van-load of fundamentalists can be uneventful. We stopped on our way out of town to pick up some hymnals at the chapel. Interrupted Stan’s prayer breakfast, which gave Stan the opportunity to come out and wish Maxine a happy week. It was sweet.

Got our hymnals and got on the road. Made the obligatory Starbucks stop in Bristol, VA (just across the boarder from Bristol, TN, where the speedway is). Learned that Cheryl doesn’t drink coffee, but to be social she gets hot chocolate whenever she goes to Starbucks (I honestly didn’t know Starbucks had hot chocolate, but it makes sense). About two-thirds of the way we stopped for gas and lunch—a fateful stop in my opinion.

Pumped gas into the giant van. Got rhino-virus on my hands. Insufficiently washed hands before eating lunch. Got a sandwich at Arby’s, rather than a salad (increasing the likelihood of mucous. Sat in the over-cranked air conditioning, breathing truck-stop air. By the time we were back on the road I was feeling fatigued. By the next day, my throat was scratchy. Then it moved to a full-fledged sore throat…then chest congestion…then head congestion. Ended up laying out of meetings for a whole day. We blew off the camp food for the second half of the week, so we could stock up on the good greens. Began to fight back. Feeling somewhat better now. Somewhat.

The speakers were awesome. My good friend Alan Gamble, from Glasgow spoke on Nehemiah. Great lessons in leadership and nation building. His wife Elizabeth played the piano for several meetings—she’s really good. They call it the two-for-one deal. While we were there, G-Hill traded their grand piano for a digital. If you can’t say something nice about a piano, don’t say anything. So I won’t.

Also, got to hear Bruce Hulsheizer and John Gordon for the first time. They were pretty good—Bruce in 1 Tim. and Johnny in James.

We also, of course, had side trips. We went to Gettysburg for tea. And we visited the round barn—got an apple cider vinegar remedy that is made about 20 miles from here (discovered that later). And we went to a place called Ollie’s, which I guess is the Yankee equivalent to Big Lots.

Ride back took forever. It always does. Stopped at a little town in VA—Buchannon I think. Ate at a family diner. They tell me the sweet corn was awesome, and they wouldn’t lie about sweet corn.

It’s good to be back.

We have a young friend, the 13-year-old daughter of our neighbors up the street, who is a very promising runner. She is already the fastest girl on her high school track team in the mile and 2-mile races. AT 13! So, just to improve and train, she has to find people to run with. She used to run with the boys. But now, she’s faster than the boys. Sometimes she runs with one of her coaches. A while back, she got to run as a guest (I think in the marathon world they call them “pirates” or something like that—people who run the course, during the race, even though they are not registered) with another team, on which two of the state’s top runners are members. I understand she fonud that to be a cool challenge.

We have another friend, a 21-year-old woman, who is a very accomplished runner. Runs track and cross country for a college in North Carolina. Wins a lot of medals and stuff. We’re hoping to introduce our two friends. We think Dana (the older one) would be a great influence on Caroline (the younger one)…in a lot of ways. And being able to help a younger girl might also be very satisfying to Dana.

I hope the whole thing works out, because they are both very special people. I know this, because I have observed them (partially through the eyes of both sets of parents). But what’s really cool is that neither Dana nor Caroline seems to see anything particularly interesting or unusual about herself. To both of them…it’s just running. I know one thing; I could train for a year and get a quarter-mile head start, and they would both still leave me in the dust. Probably you too.

I was just looking at some web statistics and noticed an interesting trend. I noticed there are big jumps in hits to this blog on certain days. So I went back to the blog to investigate what days those hits occurred, and guess what I found. On days when I write a blog post, people come visit.

Sometimes its obvious. I wonder how many other marketing situations this applies to. You run an ad, people come to your store. You put a sign in your window, people buy stuff. I guess Claude Hopkins had it right.

Took about as long as it took James Joyce to write Ulysses, but our new site is up. Go check it out. Let me know what you think.

Okay, you might say I’m getting carried away with this whole ukulele thing. But I think it’s a rich vein. Here at the headquarters, we’re always looking for shorthand ways of talking about personalities, styles, capabilities, aptitudes, and stuff like that. We talk about the quintessential/exceptional paradigm, in which greatness falls into one of two categories (Michael Jordan is quintessential, Dennis Rodman is exceptional). We have a whole alphabet soup of Meyers-Brigs and HBDI language (I am an INFP, quadrant B resistant, D-C…of course).

Well, I believe I have discovered a breakthrough in personality pidgin-holeing (pun intended). I call it the Jake/IZ continuum. The whole idea is that the extremes are represented by Jake, the totally awesome, rhythmically sophisticated, precise, accomplished virtuoso of the ukulele. IZ is the other extreme—the primitive, self taught, inventive, one-of-a-kind charismatic dynamo of the ukulele. With these as the ends of the rope, we can create a continuum. Zero is boring…right in the middle, not all that accomplished, not all that charismatic, but safe. A J10 would be extreme mastery and virtuosity (Mozart). A IZ10 would be an extreme innovator, driven by invention, spontaneity, and charisma (Jim Cary or Dexter Gordan, maybe).

As writers go, I would consider myself about a J8. I used to work with a savant named Terry Doyle, who talked in headlines. He would be like an IZ7 or IZ8—his stuff always worked, but he couldn’t really tell you why or reconcile it to the strategy.

The coolest thing about branding is getting to know people from other places and learning about their cultures. The other day I was on YouTube, watching and listening to IZ videos. If you’re from Hawaii, you know what that means. If not, search YouTube for “IZ,” and treat yourself to some practical Aloha. This gentle giant’s sweetness came out through his voice and his ukulele playng (oo-koo-ley-ley). I get emotional over music sometimes. And there I was with my headphones on, tears welling, listening to this 800 pound man sing “White Sandy Beach,” “Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” “What a Wonderful World,” and “Hawaii ’78.” I even liked Pearl Jam’s version of “Hawaii 78.” Something I’m learning is that there is a lot more to Hawaii than meets the eye.

We talk about this a lot. The thing is, agencies are willing to go to great lengths to get business from clients that fit. But all too often, a new business pitch becomes a fishing expedition, in which the client doesn’t get the information they really need, yet the agencies take valuable resources away from current clients in order to impress prospective ones. Anne Peck Gibbons shot me an email today with these 21 points for choosing an agency and cultivating the relationship. I thought you might find this helpful.

1. Decide what kind of services you are looking for. (Marketing? Research? Full-service? Media? Branding? Project work? Creative-only?)
2. Conduct an online search with a view to your strategic need.
3. Thoroughly review agency websites. (Review staffing experience, work samples, and client list.)
4. Check to see if they have prior experience in your category, or comparable.
5. Narrow the list to a dozen agencies.
6. Talk to their people. Over the phone, discuss the scope opportunity to see if they’re interested.
7. Ask around. Check out their references.
8. Whom do you feel comfortable with?
9. Find out how busy they are.
10. Narrow your list to five prospects.
11. Visit their location, if possible. If not, ask them to visit your’s.
12. Ask them to show you their best work and their worst work. Discuss why.
13. Ask for a rate card or samples of previous efforts, with costs associated.
14. Meet their top executives.
15. Give them a plan of what you’re thinking. And make sure you are both on the same page.
16. Make sure you have a good idea of the budget and schedule, in hand.
17. National, large clients conduct a pitch to see what the agency offers (either paid or unpaid). Small ones sometimes pay for sample work, or issue an RFP.
18. Choose your agency.
19. Hold them to their deadlines.
20. Love your agency and let them love you, by giving them strategic, rather than executional, direction.
21. Give yourself a 6–month clause, just in case you want out.

Very cool word. We like hearing it. We should say it more often. That’s it.

Thanks.

Just got back from Hawaii, where we were doing a lot of interviews and photographs for a communication audit for a client in Honolulu. More on that later.

I was blown away by one high-ranking individual who used much of my one-on-one time with him to educate me on the “spirit of Aloha.” Of course, everyone knows that Aloha means hello and goodbye. But when the Hawaii license plate refers to the place as “The Aloha State,” it’s not saying that it is the “hello, goodbye state.”

This very kamaaina gentleman explained to me, with great passion, that the spirit of Aloha includes things like loyalty and generosity. But those are fringe components. At its heart, the spirit of Aloha is “love, responsibility, and doing-the-right-thing.” It is not a balance of these things, mind you. It is all three, all the time. It is love always. It is responsibility for what you say and what you hear…out of love. And it is doing the right thing…not necessarily the popular thing…out of love and responsibility. What a great and profound learning this was!

I love these people! Mahalo! And Aloha!