Citizen Marketer 2.1

Aaron Strout

7 Things You May or May Not Know About Me

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Thanks to friend, Lyell Petersen aka @93octane, for tagging me in the most recent meme floating around the blogosphere and by “thanks” I really mean “thanks for nothing.” 😉 But seriously, this should be fun so I don’t mind participating. Without further adieu, here are the seven things you may or may not have known about me…

  1. I’ve been to all but nine states in the U.S. Rather than list the states I’ve visited, I’ll mention the ones I haven’t: Alaska, Hawaii, Idaho, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Oregon, Missouri, North Dakota, and South Dakota. Now that I’ve moved (or am in the process of moving) to Texas, I will likely eliminate Nebraska and Oklahoma from this list soon.
  2. I have a tattoo of a thunderbird on my right hip. I went to get it with my good friend, Joe Maher (I’ve known Joe since I was seven years old). When we got the tattoos, we had to go to New Hampshire because it was still illegal to get them in Massachusetts at the time. That was back in 1992.
  3. When I was four, I spent a month in Oslo, Norway with my mother and father. While I was there, I cut my mouth on a glass that I bit into, was bitten by a horse and fell into a freezing cold river with my dad where we were lucky not to drown. I also had one of the worst earaches of my life. In spite of that, it was one of the most exciting times of my life.
  4. Blue Velvet (not to be confused with International Velvet) Good Will Hunting, The Matrix, Trading Places, Stripes, Beverly Hill Cops and Shawshank Redemption are my favorite movies of all time. The Office is the funniest show I’ve ever seen (shame on me for not realizing that prior to this year).
  5. My friend Scott Lareau who I served on the board of BIMA with is the reason I have an 18 month old daughter. Short version of the story is that my wife and I had two children already and at least I thought we were done. Following a chance meeting of Scott on a trip out to Jackson Hole, WY, Scott was telling me that he and his wife had just had their third child and that it was a mere speed bump in comparison to the other two. Coincidentally, his children were the same age (7 and 5) and sex (girl/boy) as our first two. I came home after that ski trip and said, “honey, I’m ready to have a third child.” Twelve months later, our third child, Audrey, was born.
  6. My musical tastes range from Nora Jones, Adele, Pink, Miles Davis and Jamiroquai to Beck, Tool, Rage Against the Machine and Seether. Yup, I pretty much like everything other than country.
  7. I’ve been to Russia AND the Soviet Union. For those of you not well schooled in geography/world history, Russia was in fact part of the Soviet Union prior to its fall in 1991 (that’s the Soviet Union’s fall, not Russia’s). First go around, I went to a city called Leningrad and spent two and a half glorious summer months learning about Soviet culture and furthering my Russian language skills. Second go around, I ended up in a city called St. Petersburgh that looked strangely similar to Leningrad only there were a lot fewer hammer and sickle flags and not as many statues of Lenin.
So that’s my story and I’m sticking to it. Now the big question is who will the lucky recipients of my meme tag be? I know not to choose friend and former colleague, Jim Storer, ’cause I’ve tried that before and he doesn’t play nice in the sandbox on things like this (oops, did I just call you out Jimbo?). Same is true about Jennifer Leggio whom I also love dearly. 😉
NOTE: As of 3:30 PM ET, I’ve dealt Jennifer in.

NOTE 2: On 12/26/08, my friend Ken Burbary brought the love back to me. Since I’ve written my post already, I’m noting this here.
How about:
In the words of the honorable @93octane, here are the rules:
* Link to your original tagger(s) and list these rules in your post.
* Share seven facts about yourself in the post.
* Tag seven people at the end of your post by leaving their names and the links to their blogs.
* Let them know they’ve been tagged

My Biggest Influencers (cross-posted from Mzinga.com)

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As I transition out of my current role at Mzinga, I’m selectively cross-posting some of my more memorable posts on this site. Don’t worry, I’ve obtained the blessing of the higher-ups at Mzinga (their a cool bunch). More to come!

Cross-posted on Mzinga.com (original post date, January 16, 2008)

Like Jake Mckee aka “The Community Guy, I too got tagged with a cool meme by my good friend, Mukund. As a result of being tagged, I’m now on the hook to share my life’s three biggest influencers. Not an easy excercise by any stretch but I’m going to take a shot. Here goes:

  • My Parents – I would be an ungrateful child if I didn’t include my parents in this list. I know, this list is supposed to be thought provoking and impart all sorts of wisdom to the people reading this blog post. But for this choice, I’ve got to stay grounded. My parents did a bang up job of teaching me life’s important values (respect, honesty, integrity to name a few) and for the most part, I think I turned out okay. As a father of three, I now have the pleasure of trying to figure out how I can do the same with my children. Any of you who have kids know that this is not an easy task.
  • L. Ron Hubbard – NOT! I couldn’t resist including him, especially given the leaking of Tom Cruise’s absolute whack job of a tape. This is a must listen if you haven’t heard it already.
  • Ms. Latin – Yup, she was my 11th and 12th grade honors French teacher. At the time, I hated her guts. As it turns out, Ms. Latin realized something about me early on i.e. that was that as much as I was a relatively smart guy — notice I said “relatively”‘ — but I didn’t apply myself to school nearly as much as I should. My reward for such behavior? Two to three hours of French homework EVERY night (on top of three to four hours of other homework.) Of course I bucked her every step of the way but as I close in on my 40th year on this planet, I can look back and appreciate the work ethic Ms Latin instilled in me. Most important (and impressive) was that she never gave up on me and for that I thank her.
  • Sean Belka – I met Sean at Fidelity Investments back in 1997. He was the head of our online partnerships group and I was working in the interactive group for Fidelity’s in-house ad agency. At the time, Sean was negotiating partnerships with the likes of companies like Yahoo! and Lycos (remember them) and my group was providing the online assets for these partnerships. I didn’t know Sean well at the time but I remember being impressed by his wit, humor and ability to target cutting edge companies for strategic partnerships.

    Fast forward to 2003 when I was re-orged into Sean’s group right after he was named the head of segment marketing at Fidelity. In no time at all, Sean resurrected a partnership group and tapped me as one of the leaders in the group. As a result, I had the rare opportunity to join Sean and our division president for meetings with luminaries like Eric Schmidt at Google, Jeff Jordan of eBay (he was the president of eBay U.S. at the time) and Dan Rosensweig of Yahoo (their COO.) These meetings left an indelible impression on me and I will be forever grateful to Sean for giving me that opportunity.

  • Barry Libert (I know I said “3” but I couldn’t resist) – Barry is our current co-CEO at Mzinga and my partner on the We Are Smarter project. I’ve worked with Barry for a little over a year and a half and I have to say that to know Barry is to love him. He’s hands down one of the smartest guys I’ve ever met and a more strategic guy you’ll never meet. He’s also very approachable which is one of the things I like most about him. I won’t lie, there have been times over the years that I’ve wanted to throttle him (I’m sure he’s felt the same way about me) but at the end of the day, he’s the guy that really pushed me into social media.

Who are your biggest influences? Let’s find out from Francois Gossieaux, Nate Ritter, Jim Storer and Dave Wilkins since they’ve all been tagged!

Francois Gossieaux, Nate Ritter, Jim Storer, Dave Wilkins, Pauline Brannigan

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