One of the odd consequences of living in Yosemite, and also of being part of the marketing department, is that my face seems to keep showing up in funny places. I get a chuckle out of it, usually. Part of me is certainly flattered at the attention, but it’s also hard not to be self-critical.

As part of a photoshoot I participated in while I was working at the Mountaineering School, my picture was taken while I was hiking – or pretending to hike, rather – out on Old Big Oak Flat Road with El Capitan in the background. That image, for a short time, graced the cover of the activity brochure, and is now on the front of several Pepsi vending machines. My Pepsi machines, my friends tell me, are in the Village Garage, at Housekeeping Camp and maybe some other locations. Unfortunately, I’ve never really liked that picture of myself, and it’s a little disconcerting to run into such a big image of myself. I’m glad that the two machines in front of our offices have pictures of other people.

While at YMS, I also had a chance to go snowshoeing with Tom Stienstra, an outdoor columnist for the SF Chronicle, TV personality and guidebook author. Between that and his continued close relationship with Kenny, who now works only 15 feet from me, he recently decided to publish a story about me in the Chronicle. It is a story about the accident I was in nearly 3 years ago, and my subsequent recovery. It was interesting to work with an experienced journalist and storyteller, and to see the process that he went through in terms of preparing for an interview and then writing a story. Unfortunately, the online article generated a bunch of pretty negative comments, which I thought were either petty, immature, uninformed or a combination of the three, but they still left a bad taste in my mouth.

Some nice things have happened as a consequence of that story too. One was that another writer, Bill Katovsky, who is working on a book entitled Return to Fitness, contacted me about putting a short sidebar about me in his upcoming book. Again, I had the opportunity to witness the writing process of a professional author. The methods and styles of the two men are very different, but each time I was amazed to see the sometimes subtle, sometimes sweeping influence on the story I would have told, making it more dramatic and/or fleshing out details.

Another thing that surprised me was that someone who had recently been in an accident and had injuries similar to mine contacted me to find out about my experience with recovery. I was happy to report to him that so many of my issues have gotten better over the years. But most interestingly, to me, was the number of old friends who got back in touch with me after reading the article. Reconnecting with them gets me thinking about other phases of my life, and the cool people I’ve met.

I’ve gotten back in touch with some friends over the last year, since my sister-in-law, nieces and nephew convinced Tom and I to get Facebook accounts. Facebook is kind of a strange service. On Facebook, I am friends with old High School classmates that I hadn’t been that close to, even then, and co-workers that I rarely interact with in real life. And when it comes to HS friends, the day-to-day updates don’t seem to come close to filling in 20 years of radio silence. Still, I love it. I love getting little messages about what people are doing – just random news and noise from their days.

And then there are the actual conversations! I just got back in touch with my orchestra teacher from high school and she reminded me that at one point I was upset that my dad wouldn’t let me get a job. “School is your job”. I don’t remember that at all. School is an awesome job. Getting to hang out and learn things all day – I wish I’d been more appreciative when I was younger. I wonder what else I’ve forgotten.

I wonder if some day I’ll stumble back across this post and think back. Oh yeah, remember those silly Pepsi machines with my picture on them? Those were the grand old days in Yosemite.

A while back, Tom turned me on to some great interviews on Mixergy.com, and in particular an interview with Tim Ferris – the author of The 4-Hour Workweek. One of the many great ideas that came out of that interview (just go listen to it), was the idea of exploring and using the least crowded channel for communication. Tim figured out that if he wanted someone’s attention, the best way to do that was to use a channel of communication that wasn’t already crowded and noisy. For example, if you want to establish a relationship with an A-list blogger, the easiest way to actually get on their radar is not by sending them an email. These people are getting tons of email. Instead, Tim made a point of attending conferences where there were a more limited number of interactions.

Of course, that doesn’t just apply to people on the A-list, or even the B, C, or D-list. And it also isn’t just that face-to-face meetings are better. If you’re meeting people constantly in real life, but you have a new account on Twitter, maybe that is the best way to approach you. I wonder if that is/was part of the beauty of Twitter – especially at the beginning. There weren’t that many people on it, and so it was an uncrowded channel.

Today, I had my own little Least Crowded Channel experience. I’m online. There’s Twitter and email and Facebook, and a woman today took the time to find my phone number. Huh. It’s not exactly like a face-to-face meeting, but I get fewer phone calls than I get emails, so it worked. She wanted to submit a testimonial to YosemitePark.com about her family’s long-standing relationship with Yosemite to celebrate her parents’ 69th anniversary (they honeymooned in Yosemite in 1940). Today. And she called me at 4:30 as I was starting to think about winding down for the day. But, she had such a sweet and beautiful story, that I couldn’t resist. If she’d sent me an email – I may have skimmed it before I left. Maybe. But I’m sure I would not have felt as compelled to stay a little late to put her testimonial up today – much less give it front-page billing.

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Other notes:

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Zappos. I’ve heard so much about their legendary service, and had a chance to experience it first hand today. The short version is that I bought a pair of boots there, that I’ve been dreaming about for years, and when I got them a zipper was broken. It was terribly sad, but you don’t find out about a company’s service until something goes wrong, and at that point Zappos transcended all my expectations.
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Predictably Irrational is a book by Dan Ariely that I have been absolutely itching to read for a long time now. Tom read it while he was in VT, so I’ve gotten a few sneak previews, and this most recent discovery on TED.com was the last straw. I’m ordering the book.

In the video, Dan Ariely talks mainly about cheating, and about some of the surprising discoveries that he made about how much people cheat and ways that you can encourage or discourage cheating. What is the difference between taking someone else’s can of soda, vs taking a $1 bill lying in the refrigerator? Nothing, and everything. What difference does it make what sweatshirt someone is wearing when he/she cheats? And, how does this relate to Enron? It’s a fascinating talk, even if you never plan to read the book, but it also makes for a great teaser if you’re interested in things like this. (Don’t forget to visit the TED.com site for more fascinating talks.)

Other interesting topics that I’ve heard are covered in the book include the power and perception of things that are ‘free’, and the difference between social value and market value. I can’t wait to read the full descriptions and other interesting studies/conclusions for myself. And if his list of current projects is any indication, I’m going to be in for quite a treat.

I just finished listening to Buyology by Martin Lindstrom yesterday morning while I was running on the treadmill. A decent book, but this kind of book is really better to read in a paper version so that it would be easier to flip back, and look through the interesting bits again. Having gotten to poke around a friend’s Kindle, in some ways *that* would be ideal – a place to take notes and write in the margins without actually having to write in the margins.

The most interesting part of the book, for me, was the concept of using fMRI (functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging) to look inside the brain for activity in various regions, to gain some insight into the ways people are really responding to your input and how they will behave. Unfortunately for me, the science was ‘popularized’ for the book, and so I ended up having a lot of questions about methodology and the interpretation of results.

It’s a little sci-fi big-brother creepy to find out that in many cases looking directly at brain activity can be a better predictor of someone’s behavior than what that someone actually says they will do. But Martin suggests that by knowing how your brain responds to various inputs, will at least make you aware of the tricksy things that Marketers are trying to pull.

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Seth Godin is my marketing hero. The author of a dozen or so books, including “The Dip” and “All Marketers are Liars”, Seth’s books and blog have been a constant source of insight and perspective since I first started looking into his stuff. One of the concepts I picked up out of the many ideas in his book, Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us, was this idea of leaning in or leaning back. It’s not even one of the big ideas in that book, but you never know where you’ll find something you can use.
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The Ahwahnee hosts a number of special events during the off-season. Vintners’ Holidays is the first, and brings top wine-makers from around the country to showcase and give seminars about their wines. The event is capped with a gala dinner in the vast and sweeping Ahwahnee Dining Room, that, as one Vintner remarked is strongly reminiscent of the dining hall in Hogwarts (for you Harry Potter Fans) minus the owls.

And on Nov. 6, Tom and I got to go.

Couldn’t possibly market something that you don’t know, right? That was the previous excuse, but this time, I was selected to sit in front of a video camera because…?  Because I sit in the same cubby room as the guy who makes the decision about who sits in front of the video camera.  Too sweet!

Of course, dress up events aren’t exactly things that Tom and I participate in frequently, so there was a some stress leading up to the day of the dinner.  I borrowed a super cute outfit from my chic neighbor, Josie, right down to the shoes and matching purse.  Tom located the bag with the one suit that he owns, but was chagrined to find, the night of the dinner, that there were no shirts and only one dress shoe in the bag. The left one, I think.  We found a solid colored work shirt that was made passable with a few sweeps of an iron, and made a sheepish phone call to a similar-sized friend for shoes.

Vintners was amazing. Not being a real foodie, just playing one on TV, literally, I don’t have the rich foodie vocabulary to describe what I was tasting in terms of the food or the wine. But, I’ll tell you this much, a few Vintners’ Holidays, and a Chefs’ Holiday under my sleeve and I’ve gotten hard to impress. The presentation, and flavor is hard to beat.

There’s so much to know, about just the wines, or just the food, but there’s also something to be said for just pure enjoyment. In fact, another friend had the pleasure of sitting next to a real connoisseur, and he even recommended against analyzing the wines you really enjoy. Just enjoy them. And so we did. It’s a tough job, but someone’s got to do it.

Think of all the things that I have to be grateful for.  Family. Friends. Health. Fun work, and great co-workers. Enviable lifestyle. I live in Yosemite National Park, after all. The list could go on and on.

Tom shared a great audio interview with the sucessful copywriter, Ted Nicholas , with me the other day. In addition to imparting other good technical and attitudinal advice for writing copy, Ted recommends developing an Attitude of Gratitude by starting each morning with being thankful.  He spends 15 or 20 minutes every day just to get started with a postitive mental outlook. He even writes them down in a list and strives to add at least one new thing every day. Who, after all, can write powerful, moving copy when grouchy, dispirited, and dissatisfied?  And even if I don’t plan to write anything, who wants to be grouchy, dispirited and dissatisfied, anyway?

I stumbled on (that’s a little S) a great blog, called Zen Habits just before I heard the Ted Nicholas interview, and one of the first articles I read there was on ways that being grateful can change your life for the better. Would taking the time to remember how lucky you are to have a person in your life change the way you treated them on a daily basis? How about remembering the the huge favor your co-worker did for you, before you confront them about a mistake they made? Would it change the tone of the conversation?

I haven’t started making a list of things that I am grateful for yet. But I carry the thoughts around in my head, and it makes a difference.

The last few weeks have been extraordinarily heads down as I prepared for a Marketing Summit presentation that was going to be given to all Parks & Resorts marketing staff in Tenaya Lodge. Fortunately, it seems to have paid off. Not only was my talk well-received, I made a couple of really great contacts at that meeting that will hopefully come in really useful in the future. Plus, thanks to a tiny and very scary piece of climbing gear, I also managed to win a 4GB iPod nano.

Although I had been warned that Deb Collins was planning to ask me to speak at this summit, I didn’t get the official request, or the topic of my talk until only 2 weeks before the Summit. Other projects came grinding to a halt as I tried to gather my thoughts and put together something interesting to say on the topic of “Stewardship and Interpretation on the Web.”

As I thought about it, I realized these were thoughts that I could really get excited about. Stewardship is GreenPath and taking care of the park and its community, and Interpretation is the art of sharing your love for a place – creating connections between people and the park. At the end, I got a lot of positive feedback on the talk, almost all of which revolved more around the presentation style rather than the content of the talk. My friend, Stan, was right – ultimately the reception of my talk depended more on me than on what I had to say.

As another part of the Marketing Summit, we were all asked to bring an item from our property which we felt represented our property/park to us. I brought a Realized Ultimate Reality Piton with me. Designed by Yosemite legends, Tom Frost and Yvon Chounaird, in Yosemite specifically for Yosemite’s big walls it really represents the core of Yosemite climbing. It is a part of Yosemite’s bold, cutting-edge climbing scene, and also connects climbers with the rich history and spirit of Yosemite climbing. Near the end of the meeting we all voted for ‘best icon’. Brian tells me that I won by a landslide. Kenny thinks that it may have been because Brad A. also got me to tell my squishy story – but I prefer to think that it was the inspiration of Yosemite climbing rather than any kind of pity vote that convinced people that the RURP was a great icon.

One March adventure down, and one more to go. Now there is just one week before I head off to NYC and the SES conference, and there is more than enough work to do.