Dear Santa:

As no doubt you have been monitoring my being naughty or being nice this year — which brings up a whole other thing about online and offline privacy, we can discuss that later though — I’d like to pose a question, does your standard for being good come strictly from the song, “Santa Claus is Coming to Town?” I ask because I want to be clear.

If this is the case, the concept of good seems to linked to the phrase “for goodness sake.” So, being good is good because it’s the right thing to do. Yes? The right thing to do?

In that vein, let me take this opportunity to talk to you a minute about your branding. Because why? Because it’s the right thing to do. continue reading …

Photo from StLToday.com

In New York magazine, restaurateur Danny Meyer talks about the differences between service and hospitality. He owns 10 dining spots. Even though I’m not in the restuarant business — wait, does reading waiterrant regularly count? — I think that this advice applies to anyone who works in with customers, customers of any sort:

It’s an important distinction. Service is delivering on your promise. Hospitality is making people feel good while you’re delivering on that promise. (link)

NPR published an excerpt of his book, Setting the Table:

Creating restaurants or even recipes is like composing music: there are only so many notes in the scale from which all melodies and harmonies are created. The trick is to put those notes together in a way not heard before. For us, the ongoing challenge has been to combine the best elements of fine dining with accessibility — in other words, with open arms. This was once a radical concept in my business, where excellent cuisine was almost always paired with stiff arm’s-length service. Sometimes, we’ve moved in the other direction, beginning with the casual atmosphere of a barbecue joint or a shakes-and-burgers stand, and then attempting to exceed expectations by employing a caring staff and using the finest ingredients. Our formula is a lot tougher to achieve than it sounds, but it can be applied successfully to virtually any business you can name. (link)

It’s especially not simple when this isn’t something that you’ve (read: I’ve) invested a lot of pre-planning into. For instance, one thing I haven’t thought about for the last four years is business cards. I mean I had Rx.com business cards once upon a time. Never received business cards for NCFH, my last job.

Marketing is such a strange animal. Marketing oneself is an even stranger animal still. Cold calling, direct mails, trade shows, conferences, etc. And when it comes down to it, you need need something to leave behind. Whether it be a card or a brochure or some other piece of schwag — not quite up to the task of building schwag for myself yet.

I guess the hardest thing for me has been figuring out how I want to concentate, which has led into another tract of conversation, involving the possibility of going back to school. As a writer, I feel like I need to. As a designer, I feel like I need to. But in the meanwhile, I’m going to try and eek out my student loan and truck payments trying my hand as a freelance designer.

My skills include:

My rate is $25/hour — though I have known to cut deals with people.I’ll just leave my card here and you can think about it.

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