Ah, the beauty of the empty email inbox. I need to see this view before I get on a plane so that when I’m away in a beautiful tropical paradise, I can relax into *that* view and not worry about what’s happening back at work.

If all goes well, by the time you’re reading this on Monday morning when I’m setting this blog post to publish, I will already be two days into my Ashtanga yoga retreat at an undisclosed location in Mexico. (Even though I don’t have cell connectivity here and there is only limited wifi, I know my colleagues will find a way to find me if I tell them exactly where I am – so we’ll leave my location as undisclosed. ).

Anyone in a fast-paced job knows that enjoying vacation time away from work requires at least three key actions:

• Saving up.
• Planning ahead for the trip itself.
• Getting everything at work in order before getting on that plane.

This post talks about that third component – the mad rush that allows us to take some much needed R&R – specifically, what I do in the week or so prior to a vacation. I’m sort of an organization geek (in case you couldn’t tell), and I would love to hear how you stay organized, whether at work or at home. What are some of your organizational solutions for heading out on vacation?

10 days ahead of departure: Start to think about whether I need to work with my colleagues on a project hand-off for clients for whom I’m the main account executive.

Martin Waymire is a small, full-service public relations and marketing communications firm, so we all carry a lot of responsibilities. I think through the following:

• If there is a crisis communications situation, does my client know how to quickly reach other team members on the account? It’s not often that all the key contacts for a client are off at the same time, but if that is the case, then arrangements are made to ensure that there is someone handling any crisis situation that comes up. (Although situations requiring crisis communications don’t come up too frequently — thank goodness! — part of being a responsive public relations firm means always being ready for one.)
• Are there social media accounts that I admin for my clients that need to be turned over to someone else?
• Are there assignments or projects in progress that won’t be finished by the time I leave? How will those be handled?

One week ahead of departure: Notify my clients about my time off.

I’ve learned that telling clients – who are always so busy themselves – too far ahead of time isn’t as useful as telling them the week prior to leaving. With my time off on the horizon, they’re able to check their calendars and see if they know about anything they might need while I am away that they haven’t notified me of yet. (The exception with this is that if I’m involved in a big, complicated, long-term project with the client, then more advance notice may be required.)

Three days ahead of time: Making that staff meeting list

If I’m going to miss a staff meeting, I try to list out what I would have needed to discuss, and I ask a colleague to take it to staff and share for me. I could do this via email, but I figure this saves everyone another email to try to keep track of — because we all know if there’s anything we’re never short of, it’s email!

Two days ahead of time: Empty the inbox

Speaking of email, as a rule, I try to keep my work email inbox at zero at the end of each day. There are times, however, that this is nearly impossible. In those cases, I try to get that inbox at zero by the end of the week. This past month has been particularly hectic, and I’ve had to let my inbox go for a couple of weeks instead of my preferred day or week. In cases like this, I make sure that two days before I’m scheduled to be on a plane, I’ve cleared my inbox. It makes it so much harder to catch up with the emails that stack up in your inbox while you’re away if you left a big stack there before you headed out.

I also create Outlook rules so that certain types of emails — such as news summaries, which will be so dated when I get back and therefore useless — go straight to certain folders or get deleted outright.

One day ahead of time: Unhook social media notifications.

Because social media strategies are so critical to the communications strategies that Martin Waymire account executives recommend to clients, we manage quite a number of accounts. Each Martin Waymire staffer has a different system for handling all the important social media notifications we need to see; some rely on mobile notifications from native apps like HootSuite.

I mainly rely on emails that are sent to my personal gmail account. This can get unwieldy when I’m away, however. So what I do is have notifications sent to a dedicated gmail account that exists solely for this purpose. I then, normally, have all the emails that go to this account forward to my main gmail account. When I’m about to go on an extended vacation —in this case, one week – I go into my gmail settings and stop the forwarding.

I guess I could write more, but I leave in about 32 hours, and I haven’t started to pack yet. My friends know that I’m the worst packer in the world. If only organizing my suitcase were as intuitive as organizing my work and digital life!

Empty inbox before a trip, good! Empty checked luggage before a trip . . . um, not so good.

Yesterday, we looked at how brands will have a field day with Vine, Twitter’s new looping video app.

Today we’ll take a look at how easy it is to get started on Vine. Currently, Vine is only an iOS app (requires version iOS 5.0 or later), which means it is only available to iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad users. Android users aren’t too happy about this, but there is an Android app called Vine Flow that allows Android users to view Vine videos — they still can’t create videos, but they can view the loops.

If you’ve got your iPhone ready, search for Vine in your mobile app store and install it:

You have to be 17 or older:

(About that age 17 requirement? Well, Vine had a bit of a problem with pornography when it launched, causing the app to have to implement the 17+ rule.)

Sign in with Twitter or Facebook:

Determine if you’d like to set a location:

The ability to geotag, by the way, is what could give Vine a competitive edge over other video platforms such as Vimeo and YouTube when it comes contests and the like.

In the upper left is the home menu. Click on that and you’ll get:

If you select “Explore,” you’ll be able to search people or tags or pick from pre-selected topics:

You follow people the same way you would on Twitter, Tumblr, etc.

To record video, touch the video icon in the upper right-hand corner and you’ll be directed to hold your finger anywhere on the screen to start recording. To stop recording, you simply lift your finger. This ability to start and stop allows you to weave together shots to achieve GIF-like videos. If you choose to keep your finger on the screen for the entire six seconds, you’ll get a regular, straight-forward video. The bar at the top tells you how much more time you have:

Once you’ve finished recording, you can share your video on Vine only, or to Twitter or Facebook as well.

The Vine stream looks like an Instagram or Tumblr stream — one looping video after another. The loop starts to run if you pause on that video, and that loop goes away when you start scrolling again.

A few tips:

• Remember that there is audio, so even if you’re doing a GIF-like image (drawings, etc.), it will be recording sound.
• If you’re watching a Vine video on your phone and you don’t hear any sound, check to see if your phone is on vibrate. (It sounds obvious, but you’d be surprised at how easy it is to forget this.) And even if your phone is on vibrate, it will be recording sound.
• You need to shoot vertically. (You can shoot horizontally, but the loop will also show horizontally.)

The app maker wanted simplicity above all else, which is why Vine doesn’t have a play or pause button:

Vine is a video service without a play button. This was intentional. Old things are beautiful, but new things should look, well… new. That’s why Vine doesn’t have a play button. It also doesn’t have a pause button, a timeline scrubber, a blinking red light, or dials and a brushed-metal finish to give you the impression that you’re using a dusty video camera.

I think they’ve achieved the simplicity they were looking for.

I wasn’t very intrigued when Twitter announced its new Vine app late last month. “Six seconds of video?” I thought. “What’s so special about that, when smart phones have great video capabilities?”

I’ve now had the chance to play a little bit with Vine, and not only am I impressed — it’s a blast — but I’m psyched (really, I’m psyched) to see how creative individuals, organizations and brands will get with this platform.

What it is

Vine has been described as Instagram for videos, but I don’t think that captures what makes Vine appealing. The app makes it extremely easy to either:

• Create fast-action, GIF-like looping videos, or
• Record video straight-up.

Here is comedian Jimmy Fallon — I’m a big fan — using Vine in straight video mode:

This example of Vine in GIF-like mode, from Gap Canada, shows how brands are already using Vine:

From the past to present, the labels tell the story of our 1969 jeans.#denimevolved vine.co/v/bvP0zgpe9Oa

— Gap Canada Official® (@GapCA) February 12, 2013

A member of the Twitter family, it’s of course a cinch to share your Vine creation on Twitter — and anyone reading that tweet on Twitter.com will see the looping video in action.

A field day for creative brands

Ad Age suggests five ways brands can use Vine:

Behind the Scenes
Many brands already have different versions of the same video ad for different formats (such as a shortened pre-roll ad for Internet video edited from a longer-form TV ad). Vine can further complement this by making snippets of behind-the-scenes footage available where appropriate.

Location
One of the biggest advantages of Vine over other video platforms—most notably YouTube—is that it more easily adds geo location data to posts. This can get real interesting for local restaurants or other vendors looking to Vine as a way to draw in customers in the immediate vicinity… something to keep in mind when creating a Vine video.

Contests
Release new ads or other long-form videos in 6-second teaser segments unlockable only after certain follower or retweet milestones are met. This can be done as a ramp-up to the premier of the ad, particularly for marquee ads (like those unveiled during this last Super Bowl) or for other types of announcements.

User-generated content
Ask customers to submit Vine videos of themselves using your product, and perhaps even compile the best into a longer-form ad used on another platform.

Product demos
Short, how-to videos for products that can use either an extra hand in educating the public on how it’s used, or to showcase creative ideas for how to use a product that may not come immediately to mind.

What about super short (well, six-seconds’ worth) news-style “interviews” with adults and kids? Or the-making-of type videos for artsier products (less behind-the-scenes and more about seeing a work coming together)? Lifestyle-related outlets and brands will be able to show looping video of new recipes and crafts. And we all know that it won’t take long for looping videos of cats to inundate our Vine streams.

In short, there’s no shortage of what can be done with Vine.

A look at General Electric on Vine

Perhaps the best example of a brand already using Vine creatively is General Electric. Here, General Electric celebrates National Inventors’ Day with this take on Harlem Shake:

Thanks to everyone who helped reinvent the Harlem Shake. Happy National Inventors’ Day! #IWantToInvent vine.co/v/bvdXevrLW5p

— General Electric (@generalelectric) February 11, 2013

General Electric has also used Vine to add some spark to its annual #IWantToInvent campaign:

Inventions are built one piece at a time. #IWantToInvent vine.co/v/bn9PXmAFej6

— General Electric (@generalelectric) February 8, 2013

I see a lot of potential with Vine helping companies that need to liven up their brand’s personality, or to reach a younger audience. The platform simply makes sense for any brand with a quick story to tell — it spices up Twitter’s 140 characters like nothing else has been able to do so far, and I’m looking forward to trying to find ways to use Vine for client campaigns.

Metrics

Social media metrics are notoriously hard to pin down, but there’s already a free service — SimpleMeasured — to provide a sense of engagement levels on Vine.

See tomorrow’s post for how to start using Vine.

Next post>>How to start creating looping video using Twitter’s Vine app  

What does it mean to tell a story in our digital age?

This is what it means for The New York Times in its recent project detailing the horrific avalanche in the Cascades, located in Washington (click on the screen capture below and then scroll down the page):

For one journalist, it means working in partnership with Prairie Public Broadcasting, the Association of Independents in Radio (AIR), and Zeega, an interactive storytelling platform, to produce Rough Ride. Rough Ride uses a documentary-style approach — it’s best watched in full screen on your computer — along with first-person video and interactive graphics.

For the online music magazine Pitchfork doing a feature profile of Bat for Lashes, it looks like this (I love the featured playlist and the near flipbook effect you get scrolling down):

I would argue that the technologies used in these examples enhance the purpose of that particular piece. You get a closer look into the lives of people who are strangers in your world. You hear their voices. You watch them move.

Taking ‘show’ to the next level

I attended journalism graduate school before the explosion of YouTube, Vimeo, Facebook, Twitter, Storify, and all the social media channels that give digital storytelling in 2013 so much potential. “Show, don’t tell,” my instructors would always say. They meant, of course, writing compelling scenes by weaving together telling details.

Words still matter — they always will. (And I actually think the single hardest social media platform to tell a good story through is Twitter, with its 140-character limit. That’s why tweeters who can hook you in and entice you to click on the link to read more — like Meegan Holland of MLive.com and Chris Gautz of Crain’s Detroit Business, just to name two local journalists out of many — get so much respect from me.) But words (say, song lyrics) combined with interactive tools have the potential to take storytelling to fascinating depths.

Back in 2010, the MIT Media Lab held an event called Story 3.0 to explore critical questions related to storytelling. Not surprisingly, the rise of these digital tools for storytelling raises some concern among journalists, and projects like the Harvard University-based Nieman Journalism Lab do an excellent job of tracking trends and spurring discussions. I care about how people’s stories are told and preserved — it’s why I went into my first career of journalism — and I think this is a healthy and important discussion to have.

But right now, at the beginning of a new year and lucky enough to work with colleagues who share my enthusiasm for digitizing communications with purpose and integrity, all I can say is that I am genuinely excited for what the innovative storytellers of our time are up to.

Here in the Martin Waymire Advocacy Communications office, we’ve been hearing the Detroit Free Press  helicopter hovering over downtown Lansing all morning. With reports of this potentially historic day as protesters gather to fight passage of right-to-work legislation, we’re finding it hard not to be drawn to all the activity at the Capitol building, located just two blocks away.

A Free Press story this morning put this way:

This one is going to be huge.

And so are the consequences.

There have been plenty of rallies — big ones, in fact — at the state Capitol, including the 5,000 or so people who descended on Lansing in 2011 for a protest against the state’s former emergency manager law.

But the predicted crowd of up to 10,000 people from inside and outside Michigan will be just about the biggest crowd the Capitol has seen as conservatives, union members and the news media flood the streets of Lansing to protest, applaud and record the actions expected to be taken today on controversial right-to-work legislation.

Cars with license plates from Florida, Georgia, Virginia, Minnesota, Indiana, Ohio and Illinois sat in the Michigan AFL-CIO parking lot Monday, just a few blocks from the Capitol.

Half of us in this office came from the newspaper journalism world, so the pull for us is more about old habits dying hard. After wrapping up some client work I need for a meeting later today, I took a quick walk around lunchtime to see the action  On Feb. 15, 2003, I was in New York City covering an event that drew protesters in the six figures. But back then, people weren’t on smartphones taking photos and videos, tweeting and Facebooking. Journalists weren’t microblogging their reports using Twitter hashtags.

With social media now a key part of participating in, and covering, major events, it’s as interesting to me take a walk to the Lansing’s Capitol lawn and see the sights as it is to follow the  #RightToWork hashtag, where I can see what the state’s excellent crew of political journalists are reporting from the House and Senatechambers to what protesters are tweeting.

Martin Waymire is a nonpartisan public relations and marketing communications firm that takes on issues and coalitions but does not represent political candidates. Our most recent fight, which we are proud to say we won, was about defeating the dangerous so-called two-thirds ballot proposal on last month’s statewide ballot. Even though we aren’t representing either side of this fight, our location and our staff’s passions are certainly coming out today. We don’t internally agree about politics, but we each truly care about what happens in this state.

CNN ranks among the many media outlets camped out on the Capitol lawn. Here, Poppy Harlow of CNNMoney interviews firefighters Ted Copley of Detroit and Scott Ziegler of Highland Park.

 By Rose Tantraphol
Oct. 19, 2012 

Martin Waymire Advocacy Communications is proud to be a sponsor of the annual Aubrey’s Butterfly 5K – and while we’re excited for it, we can’t believe it’s just a couple of days away! Race organizers — including our very own Andrea Ness — and the entire Dimondale community are ready to help find a cure for Epidermolysis Bullosa (EB) by taking part in this inspiring event that draws participants from as far away as Texas.

Children born with EB are often referred to as “butterfly children,” because their skin is as fragile as butterfly wings. EB is a rare genetic skin disease that causes the skin to be so fragile that the slightest friction can cause severe blistering-inside and outside the body. The worst forms of EB lead to eventual disfigurement, disability, and often early death. Aubrey Joy was born with EB on Oct. 6, 2010 in Lansing and passed away just six weeks later . Many others in Michigan deal with the constant pain of EB each day, constantly in-and-out of hospitals fighting for their lives, while spending thousands of dollars each month in woundcare supplies. There is currently no cure for EB.

The race’s debut last year raised more than $10,000 — through participants and from online donations — for Dystrophic Epidermolysis Bullosa Research Association (DEBRA) of America, to research a cure for EB.

The event — emceed by Jake Dunne of WLNS and Aimee Rau of WLMI – takes place this Sunday, Oct. 21, at 10 a.m. in Dimondale:

Lion’s Park
300 W. Jefferson St.
Dimondale, MI 48821

If you haven’t registered yet, it’s not too late. You can register at the following times this weekend:

Saturday, October 20, 2012
9 a.m.– 1 p.m.

Sunday, October 21, 2012
8 – 9:45 a.m.

Martin Waymire staffers will be volunteering at the event. If you’re there, please stop and say hi!

If you can’t attend, you can also donate online.

If Prop. 5 passes on Election Day, 13 legislators could block a policy supported by the other 135 members of the Michigan House and Senate.

By Rose Tantraphol
Sept. 14, 2012 

Who doesn’t love the story of David and Goliath? In politics, the deep pockets of a billionaire with an agenda can make an issue appear to be over before it starts, but what an opposing coalition with far fewer dollars in the coffers can do is to engage the community on the facts — one column, one poll and one Facebook post at a time.

That’s what the Defend Michigan Democracy coalition has been doing over the past couple of months in trying to fight the so-called two-thirds ballot proposal, or Prop 5. Prop 5 is financed by a single Detroit billionaire – Matty Moroun – and seeks to take control of tax policies in the Legislature by giving all the power to just 13 state senators.

You won’t see that number in the materials of supporters of the proposal. They just want to make it impossible to raise taxes to balance the budget, pay for better schools and roads, lower college tuition or even just to create a better tax system by cutting some taxes and raising others. They want a “supermajority” to deal with tax matters.

But catch phrases — like a “supermajority” – can be deceiving, because what would actually result would be to install super-minority rule in the Michigan Legislature, letting a handful of politicians create legislative gridlock by overruling the majority on tax issues.

The “two-thirds movement” or “supermajority” scheme would mean:

• Even if all 110 members of the state House of Representatives vote in favor of a tax, closing a tax loophole, or ending a tax break
• And even if 25 of the 38 members of the state Senate vote in favor of the tax as well,
• Just 13 senators could vote against it … and block it.

A new Detroit Free Press/WXYZ TV-7 poll this week finds opposition to Proposal 5 growing and support dropping across the state – which means that the facts are starting to chip away at this intentionally deceitful ballot proposal. The poll found support for Prop 5 has dropped nearly 15 points since a Detroit News survey was published in late August.

Gov. Rick Snyder, other leading Michigan Republicans, the Michigan Democrats, business, labor, police, firefighters, hospitals, mayors, teachers, school managers, human service providers, senior citizen organizations, universities and colleges … all agree “VOTE NO ON PROPOSAL 5.”

The state’s leading business organizations — no fans of taxes, for sure — are also opposed to Prop 5. Just this week, the Michigan Chamber of Commerce has joined in the chorus against Prop 5. According to Paul Egan of the Detroit Free Press:

 

Even the board of the Michigan Chamber of Commerce — not known as an advocate of tax and spend policies — voted to oppose the measure at a meeting Wednesday, said President and CEO Richard Studley. The board believes the proposal is poorly drafted and could hamper future tax reform, Studley said.

The Michigan Alliance for Prosperity — an alliance supporting prosperity for a limited few, first and foremost, billionaire Moroun — said in the same article that TV ads (those are expensive, as everyone knows) are coming.

This week’s poll showed critical progress. In the fight against Goliath, all David had was a rock. The Defend Michigan Democracy coalition, a Martin Waymire client, has the support of hardworking citizens who care about this state and don’t want to see it become an ungovernable place like California, where gridlock rules, and important decisions about the business climate and economic vitality, infrastructure, public safety and all the rest get overtaken over by a minority set of lawmakers.

In short, Defend Michigan Democracy has you — please help spread the word by sharing Facebook posts, retweeting tweets, and by joining this fight.

Prop. 5 is bankrolled by a lone billionaire trying to hijack the Michigan Constitution.

By Rose Tantraphol
Sept. 13, 2012

I spent my entire morning today at the Lexington Lansing Hotel attending an excellent forum about community health needs assessments (CHNA) and how they affect Michigan hospitals. (I’m not sure the public realizes how much of the public relation world involves the same type of work many of us at this firm used to do as newspaper reporters: researching, attending events and interviewing experts to get a better understanding of an issue.)

One of the requirements of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) signed into law in 2010 stipulated that tax-exempt, 501(c)(3) hospital organizations:

• Conduct a CHNA once every three years;
• Make it easily available to the public; and
• Adopt an implementation strategy to address identified needs.

The session, run by the Michigan Health & Hospital Association — a long-time client of Martin Waymire Advocacy Communications — drew representatives of hospitals from the Upper Peninsual to Southeastern Michigan. Because these requirements are written into the IRS Code, the session was also a draw for those in the accounting field. I was there to get a deeper understanding of the CHNA process as our agency gears up to assist hospitals with the communications aspects — and there are many — of the CHNA process.

In addition to sessions like these, the MHA offers an online resource hub for all things related to the CNHA process. This resource space will continue to grow as some current proposed regulations become codified.

MHA members who could not attend today’s session and need more than the online resources have the option to jump on a webinar a week from today. I’m sure that session will be highly attended because the stakes are high when it comes to the CHNA. It goes without saying that the overarching goal of the CHNA is an important one: To ensure that hospitals are meeting the real needs of the community. But the stakes can be high financially as well, especially for smaller hospitals, given that fines of $50,000 can be levied for non-compliance.

And the clock is ticking. These regulations go into effect for a hospital’s effective tax year beginning after March 23, 2012.

Getting to delve deeply into an issue was one of my favorite jobs as a reporter — and as a public relations professional. It will be interesting to see how Michigan hospitals fare with this new requirement.

(Photo credit: Welch-Allyn Harvey Elite Stethoscope via Zpeckler, used under a Creative Commons license.)

What? Is there something wrong with my swing?

By Rose Tantraphol
July 16, 2012

At staff this morning, we discussed our plans for tomorrow, when we’ll shut down the office for a few hours in the afternoon to head over to the beautiful Forest Akers Golf Course on Michigan State University’s campus for some golf instruction. We rarely shut down the office — even for a few hours — on non-holidays, but we’re making an exception this time, because high-quality golf instruction like the kind we’ll be receiving from PGA member Bryan Harris feels nothing short of being strategically critical to our firm.

If it sounds like I’m using fluffy business terms to justify our golf outing, please be assured I am not.

You see, we think we do a ton of things well when it comes to being a public relations and marketing communications firm — and we have the awards to prove it. We even joke around here that we’re the best-looking PR firm in town (before you guys at other firms protest, take a look at this cute face and tell me there isn’t some truth to that).

Where we don’t excel is . . . the golf course. Yes, we win awards — but of the “worst team” kind (not kidding). There is actually one person in the firm who plays golf quite well and actually likes it — and he’s one half of the dynamic duo who founded the firm. (His partner in crime would rather be fishing.) But these days, he doesn’t have time to get to the course much, between client work, being a good family man, raising a puppy (well, in the office we still call her a puppy, even though she’s technically not a puppy these days), and nursing his Martin obsession.

The rest of us? Amy could train a dog to kill you, if she wanted to (luckily, she doesn’t want to); Andrea can create a website and save the world in the time it takes the rest of us to take a good night’s rest; Naomi can out-cook, out-design and out-dress anyone; Scott is a black-belt in Okinawan karate and could mess you up if he wanted to (whether he wants to or not probably depends on your taste in music); Stacy is an Army mom who knows enough about explosive ordnance disposal (EOD) training that you wouldn’t want to get on her bad side (really — I don’t recommend it); Adrienne, our student practitioner this summer who commutes to our Lansing office from Ann Arbor four days a week, writes a weekly opinion column in The Michigan Daily and helps staff her family’s flower shop.

I’m a yoga instructor who practices yoga six days a week. I don’t bike, I don’t run, I don’t do cardio machines at the gym. I practice, teach, blog about, and travel to trainings specialized in Ashtanga yoga, which looks something like this.

The point is — like the rest of you, we are all really busy people. When we’re not at work, we’re doing something we’re equally passionate about. Golf happens to not be a passion for any of us.

But we know that when you work in the state’s capital on Capitol-related matters, it’s almost a matter of course that you’ll have to hit the course a few times during the warm months for various golf outings. Don’t get us wrong — we love our clients, colleagues and friends, and we want to support all their golf outings. The problem is, except for Roger, we so — um, don’t excel at golf — that we don’t know if we’re helping or hurting the cause when we step on the fairway.

So, to prove we’re a full-service firm, we want you, our clients, to know that we’re trying our best.

And Bryan, sorry man — you’ve got a tough job ahead of you tomorrow.

On my way back to work after a lunch stop at home yesterday, I paid a visit to a lemonade stand in my new neighborhood, handed over two quarters for a double-shot (Dixie cup style) of the sweet yellow potion, and started walking back to my car. But James, the enterprising young man running the stand, wasn’t going to let me go that easily.

“Wait,” he said. “Take a flier.” He rifled through a small stack of papers he seemed to work diligently on during periods when customers were scarce, and handed me a torn-out sheet of art book paper. The multicolored, handwritten flier notified me that for just 25 cents a cup, I could get lemonade from A, R, and J’s Lemonade. And not only that, according to this flier, I could expect:

Contests by the hour!    

Half the money goes to a charity!

Every day at the Martin Waymire office, conversations run the gamut from pop culture (“The Newsroom“: Great new HBO show, or a bust?) to food (“Who the hell can stand raw fish?” vs. “I could eat sushi every day!) to news of the weird (like today’s unbelievable story out of Jackson about the woman who kept her dead male companion’s body in her house, to a point where it mummified).

Most of the time, though, we chat about journalism, politics, public relations, marketing and social media. This afternoon, Andrea has spurred an email conversation on Facebook’s promoted posts and how one of our clients is using them with excellent results, and in the back room here, Naomi, Adrienne, Scott and I have been kvetching about the pros and cons of PitchEngine, the social media news release platform.

All the while, this lemonade stand flier is sitting on my desk, and you can already tell this kid has what it takes for the marketing, advertising or communications world. Who knows what television, radio, online and social media technology will look like by the time he actually enters the workplace in a decade and a half, but does it matter? He’s got a great combination of strategic thinking, work ethic and earnestness – and that’s so important in a professional. One of the things that drew me to this firm was how much enthusiasm and passion – it’s the kind you can’t fake – each member of the Martin Waymire team has. In droves. And about different things.

Well, it’s back to work for me, but if I get out of work in time, I might swing by A, R and J’s Lemonade Stand again today. Maybe I’ll even win something, since James runs contests – every hour!