Is this thing on?

I had an epiphany back in 2001, when I had the luxury of time on my hands, that my personal and professional lives would have to--and should, if I was going to get anywhere--merge a bit more. I had always tried to keep them separated, figuring I didn't want to talk too much shop at dinner with friends or be passing out business cards at the local anti-war protest.

With the dot-com bust and my resulting free time (with severance), I did a brief recap of my life to date and saw a couple of common threads:

--green stuff (summer stint doing remediation, mostly at gas stations where "product" was floating on water tables; canvassed for PIRG in Chicago, mostly on wetlands restoration post Mississippi flooding of '93; brief stint at Demand Management Corp. right before it was bought by Honeywell, working on Greenlights, the commercial precursor to the ENERGY STAR program; volunteer chair of the SF chapter of Surfrider Foundation for four years; all into that recycling thing and a "small footprint," in part because that's all I could afford in SF);

--technology (six years in high-tech PR, four at Blanc and Otus, and ENERGY STAR was about energy efficient products, which is tech, if not high-tech); and

--public affairs (UNDP internship in '92; internship with Burson-Marstellar in '93, trying to stay away from missiles and cigarettes and steer towards green stuff with EarthShell and a local "green dump"; citizen lobbying with PIRG on renewable energy, national bottle deposit and wetlands protection; started working on an intro of the Bush admin to Silicon Valley in 2000 with Hill and Knowlton's DC office headed by Torie Clark, before she went over to the Pentagon and I was laid off).

On a plane over the Atlantic en route to a college buddy's wedding in Norway, I had the epiphany that "sustainable technology marketing" was my sweet spot. Upon returning from Europe, I grabbed a job working on ENERGY STAR with the Feds, which lasted four years. The company I was with, D&R International, never got it together to have enough to sell on the "Strategic marketing" front, most of that work went, deservedly, to Marketing Drive, sister company to Interbrand, which managed the overall ENERGY STAR brand. And I looked around at most of the companies we were working with, The Home Depot, Lowe's, Sears, Whirlpool, GE, Sylvania, etc., and while they took guidance (and a bit of brow-beating) on marketing plans from the Feds, it was still either in-house marketing folks or general marketing agencies that got to do the bulk of the "green marketing" work. So, I struck out for a general marketing agency, whose services I could sell to "sustainable technology" companies, which are now more commonly known as "cleantech" companies.

As a marketing consultant, I'm constantly consuming media and looking for spots to squeeze my clients into or trends to stay ahead of (or at least comfortably drafting off of others). What better way to keep my mind focused on my priority, cleantech, while still doing my day job that includes a lot of non-cleantech stuff.

This blog will be my public gathering place for all the things I come across that seem worthy of sharing or gathering for future reference.