Keywords for Life

What are your keywords?

I've spent the better part of the last few days brainstorming keywords for the www.imaginepub.com website in an effort to boost our search engine optimization, or SEO. It's part of the way that search engines, such as Google, find a website and list it/rank it.

The whole point of keyword selection is to think about how your customers or your audience would search for products, services or information that you provide. Sound easy? Not so much. You're faced with the fact that a lot of other companies already may have optimized their own websites around keywords/phrases that you'd like to use.

To use a fishing analogy: You cast a wide net; then you dump out most of the fish that may belong to someone else or are too small to keep anyway.

Then, you work with what's left: Keywords that accurately describe your offering, which also are not used by a bunch of your competitors, which also happen to be words/phrases that your potential customers actually search on.

I'm totally into this project.

But I started thinking: what would my own keywords be? Michelle O'Hagan's keywords?

What would yours be?

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Viral Marketing - Don't Vote

I just came across this video. Titled Please Don’t Vote - Tell 5 Friends, its content is clever, funny, urgent and--best of all--relevant. It also contains no fewer than three calls to action.

It is the definition of viral marketing.

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So. Wrong.

A really, really pregnant Amy Pohler raps with the best. And shoots a moose.

All the mavericks in the house, put your hands up.
All the plumbers in the house, pull your pants up.

http://www.hulu.com/watch/39808/saturday-night-live-update-palin-rap

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From Wrigleyville to Logan Square

The second-to-last sentence of my last post, Mister Manners, may have given you the idea that I don't enjoy living in Chicago. Nothing could be farther from the truth.

In fact, when I met Patrick, I was one of those Chicago transplants who was still--five years after moving here--giddy-infatuated with our fair city. I did what most young(ish) people do when they move here: I got an apartment in Wrigleyville, bought a bicycle to ride by the lake, left my car parked on the street and rode the el to my job downtown. At the time it all was very exotic: City Life.

I'm a big fan of city life, probably because I grew up in the south, where big cities still are viewed with suspicion by a lot of folks who think it's weird that so many people would want to be in such close physical proximity to other people who don't look or act anything like them. And I always thought they were weird for wanting to live on giant pieces of land with so much space between them and other people who looked and acted exactly like them.

You can keep Los Angeles; San Francisco is beautiful; St. Louis is nondescript; and Miami is too humid. But more than once in my life, I thought I'd move to New York. I thought New York was my favorite city until I moved to Chicago.

Like most new residents, and all the tourists, I marveled at how clean Chicago is, how efficient it is, how it "works." And that is true much of the time ... if you're downtown, or near downtown. However, if you venture a little further west and north away from the tourists, you'll discover neighborhoods of people, residents who've lived in Chicago their entire lives.

And guess what? Everything is not shiny and clean. Lifetime residents of Chicago know that many things don't really "work" they way they're supposed to. Corruption in city government is rampant and--worse--incompetence is standard operating procedure. I have friends (also transplants) who defend this situation by way of explaining that corruption is a fact of life in every city government and incompetence is a way of life for some people. That may be true to a certain extent. But in Chicago, the corruption and the incompetence are in, your, face.

And this causes lifetime residents to view the rest of us ("blow-ins" is how Patrick refers to us) as a giant pain-in-the-ass. Lakefront liberals who are so damned impressed with the flower-boxes and wrought iron fences downtown that we enable and even promote the current corrupted condition by continuing to vote for the very people who are doing the corrupting. And after nine years here, I'm coming around to that line of thought.

I still love Chicago for all the reasons I loved it when I moved here nine years ago. The architecture. The lake. The neighborhoods. The food. The culture. The shopping. The attitude. The people. And I absolutely wouldn't want to live anywhere else. But my enthusiasm now is tempered by the fact that I'm a permanent resident, with a family to raise and property taxes to pay. I see things I didn't see before, when securing a parking space in Wrigleyville on game-days was my biggest concern.

To be continued. :-)

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Mister Manners

It's been really difficult to keep my political thoughts to myself this election year; but for the most part, I have.

First: My husband and I agree to disagree on many things political, and that's O.K. Interesting, even. And 99% of the time, we are polite and civil about it.

Second: The older I get, and the more my own life changes (having a couple of kids will do that to you), the more my own views--about politics and what's important--evolve. And that's a good thing, I think.

Third: I came really, really close this year to wanting to vote for a Republican.

Mike Huckabee, to be exact. I'm from Arkansas, and so is he and, for me, he's a known quantity. He's not Baptist-scary to me at all (and those people really freak me out) and I actually think he's quite funny. But mostly, I found him to be a thoughtful, measured speaker, a moderate, centrist-Republican who can speak and behave like a grown-up (as opposed to a smart-aleck, with-us-or-against-us frat boy). Ahem.

And that is exactly the same quality I admire and like about Mr. Obama. Sure, I've lived in Chicago for the last nine years, but that doesn't really color my views about him because, honestly, I knew very little about him before this election season.

I'm just tired of angry and snippy and snide and sarcastic. All around. We have enough problems as a country and as individuals, and we don't need a leader who comes in on day-one angry at half the world. I'm just tired of it.

I want to be inspired. I want someone who makes me want to follow him. I want someone optimistic about our country and our future. And I want someone who can disagree with others in a civilized, even gentlemanly, way. I want someone with manners.

In this age of dust-ups and bared souls and hearts-on-sleeves, manners may seem quaint; but we forget the real purpose of manners.

We use good manners in order to make other people feel comfortable, not to make ourselves look good. Therefore, people who don't use manners in their language or their actions really don't show any consideration for others around them. They make people uncomfortable. And I've had enough of that. It hasn't gotten us anywhere and it's time to try something else.

I'm ready to take a chance and trust someone that perhaps I know little about. What I do know about Mr. Obama doesn't scare me. It inspires me and makes me feel like someone in this world is worth getting excited about.

There, I did it. It's very doubtful I'll speak of national politics again in this space.

But the City of Chicago pisses me off almost every week. Stay tuned.

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Promises

Right behind Patrick and my kids and my job, chocolate is one of my favorite things. Especially dark chocolate. Or semi-sweet chocolate. Especially chocolate made by Dove.

Dove chocolate has a smooth, creamy consistency; almost like eating a stick of real butter (nope, I haven't done that). Dove makes these little, harmless lumps of chocolate called "Promises." When I need a fix, I can just pop one or five into my mouth and feel satisfied.

The only interesting thing about Promises is that when you unwrap each lump of silky-smooth chocolate, there is a pithy saying written on the inside of the foil. Something meant to assuage any guilt you may feel for indulging in such a practice as eating chocolate all day at work.

Recent pithy sayings:

"Make the most of today."
"Put your feet up and unwind."

And my favorite:

"Don't judge others or yourself."

What a load of CRAP. I'll never stop eating Promises, never, unless the doc tells me they cause some dread disease, and then it's probably too late anyway. But, seriously: "Don't judge others or yourself"???

Shame needs to make a comeback, people. Watch 10 minutes of daytime television (Maury Povich, Jerry Springer, The View) and you'll know I'm right. For wa-a-ay too long, everybody's been telling everybody else that anything anyone does is OK.

And it's not.

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On Ceiling Fans and Looking Like Crap

No matter your feelings about our Presidential candidates, this one is kinda funny. According to a recent post on "The Swamp," a blog from the Tribune's Washington bureau, Mr. Obama was knocking on doors in Holland, Ohio, "making his way through a neighborhood of modest ranch and split-level homes."

Having a presidential candidate knock on your door (when you're actually at home) might be akin to having Nielsen Media Research ask you to install a meter on your TV. It happens to people all the time, but it doesn't happen to me.

Anyhoo, it turns out that Sue Sekel, a 43-year old healthcare worker dressed for a day of Sunday housecleaning, opened her front door to discover Mr. Obama on her doorstep.

Later, Ms. Sekel told reporters it was "the one day I come home to clean ceiling fans and look like crap, and then this happens."

What woman doesn't relate to this? It was your big moment, and you weren't wearing mascara. Or a brassiere. Or shoes. Or whatever. I love Sue Sekel for putting it all in perspective.

Because really, what's more memorable ... having a meaningful conversation with (perhaps) the next President of the United States, or the feeling of a missed opportunity to wow the guy? ;-)

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Anticipation

Even though we have precious little summer weather here in Chicago, and even though the first crisp breath of autumn weather means full-blown winter might be less than a month away, I still love fall. The feeling of anticipation is one I recognize and fully enjoy every year, but I rarely analyze it.

So this morning, my two young sons were piled into the back seat of my car and I drove them to preschool, as I have nearly every day since each of them was 3 months old.

My oldest son, who now is 3 years old, was dressed head-to-toe as a firefighter. (There was even an under-the-helmet head-scarf and fire-engine underpants involved.) He and 19 classmates were off to a firehouse today for a field trip, and ODS (oldest dear son) was about as into this outing as anyone could be.

When I was a kid, fall signified field trips, school plays, new clothes and lots of holiday breaks from school. For most of my adult life (before kids), fall meant new clothes, sitting in bars drinking and watching sports, enjoying the smells and sights and sounds outdoors, and radiators that hissed and clanked for the first few days of operation.

And Thanksgiving--I always went home for Christmas, but Thanksgiving was a great excuse to spend four uninterrupted days with my best friends: cooking, drinking, watching TV and generally doing nothing productive while feeling not the slightest bit of guilt.

And now, with two kids, I get to enjoy most of the aforementioned and more. Well, not so much the drinking or hanging out with friends; and our condo doesn't have radiators, much to my chagrin.

Still, fall signifies so many possibilities right around the corner: Patrick and I attend field trips with our sons; we help them choose Halloween costumes. We will attempt trick-or-treating with our boys for the first time this year.

Thanksgiving no longer is four days of slothful behavior but it is a few days with a big family who knows how to dress a TurDuckIn.

Fall is Notre Dame football. (Other schools have football teams, too.)

In an election year, we all have a chance to stage an autumn do-over, and that's cool.

And even though it really bugs me that their preschool stages a Winter Musical instead of a holiday-themed (religious or not) gala, the boys still get to be on stage, singing and shaking it for the cameras.

Of course, Christmas takes on a whole new dimension for parents with kids young enough to really, really believe in Santa and reindeer and The Grinch.

Fall rocks.

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