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.

In the past few days, we’ve gotten blog hits from every continent except Australia and Antarctica. We’ve been visited from Hawaii, and just about every mainland U.S. time zone. And the other day we were hit from an island in the Indian Ocean, off of Africa, which I had never heard of (somebody interested in the post about “Wearing somebody else’s clothes”). I get to talk to folks I will never meet, in places I will never visit. And if I use the right search words, I might get visits from even more folks. Stuff like dune buggy, locust infestation, rat pack, brat pack, and free-for-all.

Just imagine how far people would travel to hit this blog if it were a big important blog by somebody like Alan Greenspan or Clint Black. Humbling to think about, really.

Let’s see who has spiders…

UMPQUA, Bank of America, Proctor and Gamble, Microsoft, Barack Obama, Chiat/Day, Carolina First Bank, PUBLIX, BMW, New York Times, Washington Post, Dick Cheney.

It’s 11:09 by my count. Let’s see what happens.

They never showed up this time. Guess they’re onto me. Cried “Umpqua” one time too many.

One thing seems to secure a bond like nothing else—sharing a secret.

We asked a vendor for some help the other day. She said she would help us, but that we couldn’t tell anyone, or she would have to make the same deal for her other clients. Then she asked us for some insight into a specific issue, on which we have some special information.

We gave her the insight. But, of course, we did so on the condition that she not share the secret information with any of our competitors or their clients. She agreed.

Now we have a stronger relationship than ever with that vendor. She knows something about us that she can’t tell. We know something about her that we can’t tell. We’re kinda stuck with each other.

Wish I could say more. But, of course, it’s very hush hush.

We had a really nice phone interview with a young graphic designer from Wisconsin. Like all young graphic designers from somewhere else, she is looking to move to Greenville, South Carolina for all kinds of reasons having to do with her life. But she will come here and fall in love (with the place), and there is a better than 50/50 chance she’ll still be here 25 years from now. After all, we do have that bridge.

She is pretty good, judging from her work, which is nice to see. But what was really refreshing was that she is a really nice person. Very smart. Loves to learn. And LOVES to do graphic design. I remember those days…waking up in the morning daydreaming about the next big campaign, the shoot, the music, the roar of the grease paint, the smell of the crowd. It’s good to have young, excited people around.

Looks like we’ll be meeting this young woman again soon, this time face-to-face. That will be good. You can learn a lot about someone by what their face says right before their mouth starts talking. I’ll try to keep you posted.

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.

As cool as Umpqua is, it must really grate on them that they don’t have umpqua.com. To get the great and powerful umpqua, you have to enter four extra letters: umpquabank.com.

By the way, isn’t fly fishing a beautiful sport. I mean just a little less boring than watching paint dry. But beautiful nevertheless.

I just love to do that from time to time. Then sit back and see how long it takes the Umpqua spiders to hit the blog. Amazing, really. They certainly have it going on with that!

Wrote this between 5:20 and 5:26 on June 16. I’ll let you know how soon they arrive.

They arrived at 5:26:29. Remarkable!

Business is not a philosophy class or a smoke filled dorm room in the middle of the night. It’s really pretty simple. Do you offer something people want at a price they want to pay? If so, say so. If not, change your price, change your offering, or fold up your tent and go home.

We have been enjoying working with a new brand concept for a few months now. They are great folks (and that is not something you can ever take for granted). But what makes it really enjoyable to work on their business is that they know what they stand for. They are out there on a limb, saying, “people are willing to pay for a really awesome steak!” If they’re wrong, well, they are out there on that limb. But if they’re right (and it’s looking as if they are), they have that limb all to themselves.

Funny, isn’t it, that a you can go back about fifty years, and walk down a street in a pedestrian neighborhood in Brooklyn, and bump right smack into a breakthrough 21st century brand concept. Great piece of meat. Knowledgeable, friendly service. Some good stuff to go with it, to round out the meal. Seems like a no-brainer, which is a pretty good indicator that either it has already been done (which does not appear to be the case) or it’s a sure winner.

We will see.

We’ve made an interesting discovery about web perusers. They like to look at people. We consider ourselves pretty ordinary looking people (with one or two exceptions). And we feel like some of our offerings, case studies, and insights are pretty unusual. Yet, the most viewed section of our web site is the people section. I guess we’re just naturally social, and we like to look at each other…just like they said in ad school.

It’s a conversation we sometimes have with technical clients. The temptation is to think that when you do something technical, that you are an exception to the whole people appeal thing. It’s tempting to think that you need to show your technology, to think that technology people are interested in technology and don’t care about looking at people. Well, we have not found that to be the case. In fact, our friends at AMAMCO Tool seem to be having great results with their people-oriented approach. And they’re aerospace…technology…custom tooling…defense contractor types. If anyone is immune to people appeal it ought to be those guys. Not so.