The Soapbox

Due to a recent downturn in the economy and the needs of running a public business Yahoo! has decided to eliminate 10% of its current positions, or 1500 members of the Yahoo! family. I have always been proud to be a Yahoo!, as I know many of the other 1499 who got the news were as well. As of February 13 I will no longer hold that title, however I will take the lessons I have learned there with me throughout the rest of my life. Yahoo!’s are a hard working, hard playing bunch, and they know how to get the job done when the job needs doing. I will never forget the three years I spent there, as they were great learning experiences preparing me for whatever comes next.

Speaking of what comes next, that’s what this post is mostly about. While I value the time I spent at Yahoo! I am ready for the next challenge, and am currently researching companies and positions towards what best suits my skillset and my career goals. While I spent the last year filling more of a technical role at Yahoo! helping to maintain the sites hosted there and educating clients on tools and website creation I am first and foremost a marketing professional. I spent the first two years at Yahoo! learning the ins and outs of the online marketing business, and became enough of an expert I was tapped to train new employees as well as participate in a pilot program which took a more personal style when educating clients as well. My heart lies there and that’s where I’ll be pursuing new opportunities for excellence. Specifically I am looking to bring my expertise in online marketing to a borader advertising company where I might be able to learn about different forms of advertising, thus expanding my skillset while adding value to my new place of business. I am placing my resume at the end of this post, so if my skillset sounds like something that your company could gain value from I would love to hear from you.

AARON KRUG

___________________________________________________________________________
22812 SW Forest Creek Dr.
#201
Sherwood OR 97140
aaronkrug2@yahoo.com

Summary:

Skilled Marketing Management Professional with extensive experience in online advertising. Proven track record of building solid, long term client relationships that exceed sales expectations. Adept at offering new products to clients. Creative, goal-oriented, and efficiency minded. Strengths include:

· Planning online Advertising Campaigns based on the needs and budget of the client

· Needs Analysis and Evaluation for clients based on the type of business they have and the advertising initiative desired

· Market Research to determine the most effective and economical way to launch a successful advertising campaign

· Internet based Product Development for clients in situations where an online presence does not currently exist

· Training Design and Implementation involving both planning and facilitation of new products and procedures

· Online Documentation Design including technical writing and website design

Professional Experience

YAHOO! INC., Hillsboro, OR

2006 - 2009

Small Business Associate
Responsible for the maintenance and development of websites and email servers hosted by Yahoo!

• Achieved recognition from VP of Small Business for efforts in matching specific customer needs with the correct products
• Assisted in development of quality guidelines for phone support and training documentation for it
• Worked with many high value websites with revenues up to 5 million/yr.
• Partnered with new site owners to develop their site toward their stated goals
• Trouble-shot specific issues clients experienced with their websites on a day to day basis

Account Executive
Managed advertiser accounts to garner the highest return on their investment through online advertising

· Recognized by the Director of company training worldwide for efforts in hiring and training new employees

· Pioneered development of new advertising interface for customers

· Increased new client satisfaction by 50% by piloting new method for guiding and developing new accounts

· Resolved issues clients experienced with their accounts

· Educated clients on the operation of their accounts and marketing campaigns

WELLS FARGO BANK, Hillsboro, OR

2005 - 2006

Card Services Representative
Solved customer related issues and processed customer requests in the credit card division

· Consistently achieved highest sales marks for the team

· Selected to personally care for the needs of several high value accounts

MCDONALDS, Walterboro, SC

2000 - 2003

Shift Manager
Managed the day to day operations of a restaurant.

· Supervised many employees to ensure the most efficient operation possible

· Implemented scheduling procedures for crewmembers

· Accounted for the operating funds of the restaurant

Education
Currently pursuing a BS in Business Administration and Creative Writing at Portland State University with a GPA of 3.84

Recently an event occurred which got me to thinking about a number of things. Two days ago I got into an argument with my friend Thomas Hawk (one of the best photographers I’ve ever had the pleasure to see the work of) over a bit of commotion that happened on Flickr. The issue was the deletion of his friend Pierre Honeyman’s account being deleted for being abusive to the staff. Now I’m not going to go into all the details of why they deleted his account or who was right and who was wrong, mostly because I already had it out with Thomas on both FriendFeed and Digg about the subject, and that’s not what this post is about. In arguing with Thomas I got to thinking about how people act in online communities, and how different that is from the behavioral expectations in face to face experiences.

There are several great things that are exclusive to an online community as opposed to a face to face community, the greatest of which being that cliques are actually a good thing. You add or follow or subscribe (whatever they call it where you hang out online) to whomever you like and interact with only those people. Through this model each individual can build their own customized view of the community at large, making for a happier populace who only hears the voices they want to. You can add and subtract people at will, meaning if you want to sample a person’s offerings and decide its not for you, that’s ok too. This makes everyone much happier, as the ‘noise’ that often occurs in online communities is greatly reduced. This leads me to the point of this paragraph, which is:

Blocks aren’t bad.

Whether getting blocked or blocking someone else, one of the greatest advantages of participating in an online community is the block feature, or the ability to block out any of those participants who you’ve decided don’t have a place in your bubble. Its no big deal, it just means that you and that particular person just weren’t made for each other. In face to face communities everyone deals with everyone else, like it or not. When you go to your local Barnes and Noble or Starbucks (I assume people still go there) and have a seat to enjoy some lively political conversation with your friends there is no way to turn off the annoying lady who is really certain the person she is with is so deaf that she needs to talk about her last doctor’s visit in the loudest voice she can muster. In the same vein there is no way to stop the guy that decides you and your friends could benefit so much from his opinion that he just has to share it with you. Now some people might go in for this sort of thing, I don’t, and that’s why I enjoy online communities more. If I am having an issue with a person where their noise is annoying me or they are constantly butting into my conversations adding nothing and only being inflammatory (trolling) I just set the block and move on. This doesn’t mean the person who has been blocked is bad, it simply means that we don’t get along. In order for the block feature to be used to it’s full advantage it has to be completely ok to block as well as to be blocked. Flickr are you listening? Any community that would delete a user’s account for having too many blocks renders this valuable tool completely impotent and the entire community is the worse for it.

Another great thing about online communities is that there is always someone somewhere who wants to talk about the same thing you do. There are so few times in life I find someone face to face who wants to discuss the finer points of Nietzsche, however I can always find someone online. The problem comes when too many subjects interweave themselves into my community, then it loses its identity in my mind. This turns my community into the Wal-Mart of interesting subjects, where I’m getting the cheap watered down version of every conversation I want to be a part of. A solution which I have found to work beautifully is the ‘lists’ feature in FriendFeed. I can keep all of the subscriptions I want to, and separate them out so I can take full advantage of each person’s main offering in an arena that complements it by placing them side by side with others who generally talk about the same thing. Any community developers out there looking for great features, this is it.

Well I’m already halfway into this post and I have yet to explain my title. Anyone who has seen even one episode of Deadwood can attest to the extreme level of profanity that can be strung together in one sentence. Similarly, anyone who has had the misfortune to peruse some of the more tasteless YouTube comments knows that the kind of profanity used in the lawless time known as the Wild West has carried over into online communities. Now this isn’t the case for most people participating in online communities, but as usual a few foul mouthed denizens can ruin things for everyone, especially if a community has already made it so that the block feature is a bad thing. Some people don’t mind the uncouth language and rampant profanity, and to be honest it doesn’t really bother me all that much, but others who don’t want to see or hear that sort of thing shouldn’t have to. This means that if you want to be profane prepare to be blocked, and don’t take it as a bad thing. They just aren’t into you. This, however, cannot be carried over to members of the staff, whom should always be treated in the highest respected position; the host of the community you want to be a part of. I don’t care who you are or how well loved in the community you have become, in my humble opinion the first time you are abusive towards a staff member your account should be deleted. Period.

When I was still a wee one cutting my teeth on the internet in place like IRC we revered moderators and ops as demigods. Those who had helped to build the community we valued or those who were so valued by their contributions that they were granted admin access themselves were seen as leaders of the community. The latter group was always my favorite because I aspired to be like them, to give something so great to the community I valued that they felt the need to reward me with such an honor. Those days seem long gone, as evidenced by Pierre Honeyman’s less than subtle departure from Flickr. This is something that needs to come back in a big way, and we as users need to be the ones to spearhead that. We need to start valuing the caretakers of our communities again, and make sure they receive the proper level of respect their position warrants. I’m not saying you can’t disagree or bring those disagreements to light, what I am saying is that if you choose to do so in a manner that is abusive or disrespectful I hope your account gets deleted as soon as they have read what you had to say. Staff doesn’t get the ability to block users, they aren’t that lucky.

Community managers, the burden of acting respectfully towards your staff doesn’t lie completely in the hands of community members. Your community needs to have a clear Terms of Service that states in no uncertain terms that this type of activity will not be tolerated in any way, and you need to stick with that axiom from day one with zero tolerance. Any deviation from this only invites more of the same. Again, I want to make clear I don’t mean the people who disagree with you or your rules, I mean the people who choose to be outright abusive in communicating with you. Don’t make it so no one can disagree, that’s the fastest way to getting a stale and unused community. Make it so that all ideas are tolerated in an open atmosphere with the 900lb gorilla in the room being the Terms of Service. Teddy Roosevelt said "Walk softly and carry a big stick", and this phrase applies to all community managers. Walk softly, making it so that any disagreements can be brought to you without fear of repercussion, and carry a big stick, making it known how those disagreements need to be brought to your staff and never deviating from that. This means you always take the high road too, the instant one of your staff is abusive to a community member that trust is broken and all the work you’ve done to foster a community of tolerance is broken as well. Make it fair across the board; if a staff member is abusive either reassign them to a non customer facing position or let them go. These staff members aren’t doing you any favors anyway, they are destroying your community.

In closing, as long as everyone decides to act with maturity about situations that might occur in your community, you shouldn’t need to exercise these rules all that often anyway, which is what being completely clear about what will happen to abusive members will foster. Also, Pierre, I had a chance to see some of your work and I must say I am impressed. I wish you luck and hope you continue to post photos, whether under your new Flickr account or over on Zoomr with Thomas. I hope that you’ve also learned that being abusive in your community only hurts you and the community you were a part of.

So of course there’s been a lot of talk lately about the big bailout, that 700 billion dollar gorilla in the room that everyone wants to talk about. Everyone wants to weigh in on whether or not we should do it. Should we let the banks fail for making bad decisions? Should we bail them out? What’s the better plan? Well, there are several plans out there, and my friend Jason Carreira actually turned me on to my as yet favorite plan, modeled after Sweden’s crisis of the past. While this plan has some flaws in it that I think are made worse by our particular situation, its far better than Paulson’s plan, especially given the dangerous and far reaching implications of Section 8 of said plan. In this post I want to focus on part of the plan I feel is being completely ignored; a part that should be at the forefront of our leader’s minds and is not.

Now I promised Robert Scoble I was more of a tech blogger than a political blogger so he would put me on his tech blogger list (which he still hasn’t yet), and I still hold that to be true. I plan to write that Apple post next, and hopefully this last political one will get it out of my system, but something has to be said and it seems like no one is saying it, so it falls to me. Why, after jumping from a Democracy to an Oligarchy to a Police State (that last one starts on Oct. 1, for more see my last post), why are we now practicing selective socialism? If we are to use $700b of taxpayer money to bail out the financial industry (and I’m not the only one thinking in the end its going to cost much more), why are we only focusing on them? The other half of the equation is the citizens being foreclosed on, the folks who are losing their homes and their cars because they cannot repay the debt they have gotten themselves in.

While I really want to play hardball like Allen Stern and say that bailing these people out is no lesson to teach my kids, I realize that there are other lessons for my children here. First, I want them to help people even when those people don’t deserve it. I don’t believe, as many others do, that all of these people who are losing their homes and their cars purchased these things knowing beforehand that they couldn’t afford it. I believe that most people are doing exactly what I am, which is making the best decisions they can at any given moment. Some of these decisions are always wrong, but then again hindsight is always 20/20. I’m sure some people took advantage of the lending spree, as there are always a few folks like that, but you take the good with the bad, that’s just how it works. I think many of these people saw an opportunity to improve their lives and the lives of their loved ones, and they took it. Big deal, I’ll go toe to toe with anyone who says that’s wrong (ask Jason C.).

But I digress. The second lesson I see here for my children is that when you do things you do them as fairly as you can, and that is not what is happening here. Our government, which is supposed to be supremely focused on helping me ( I’m an old fashioned guy, I still believe that’s what government is for), saw this crisis, like everyone else did, forming way back earlier in the year, but back then we called it ‘the housing crisis’. When it was just ‘the housing crisis’, and the only people affected were individual citizens, there was no talk of anything like a bailout (unless you count that $600 I got from Uncle Sam). Now that the situation has come home to roost and big business is in jeopardy my government is falling all over itself to help out.  That just goes to show you who my government cares about. My point here is that while my government is scrambling to help big business out of the mess they created for themselves there is no thought being given to helping out the people who are defaulting on the loans. Think of it like a classroom. If one or two students fail its the students, if its most of the students its the teacher.

I don’t want to encourage fiscally irresponsible behavior in anyone, and I’m sure no one else does either. My family and I live in a condo instead of taking one of the many loans offered to us during the lending heyday because we knew that we couldn’t afford it (thank you to my dear wife, who helped me keep my head firmly planted on my shoulders and out of the clouds). I would love to have a house with a garage and a yard for my kids to play in, but we’re just not there yet (wait until this blog starts making me some money, then we’ll talk). I want everyone to be as fiscally responsible as we were, but since that didn’t happen we are stuck with the situation as it is.

The situation being what it is, its time to start practicing socialism. Its Poly Sci 101; when you live in a society there are times where you have to sacrifice the individual good for the societal good, because in the long run its better for you too (even as a staunch Libertarian I know that). If we don’t bail out the banks we most certainly face a very deep recession, and possibly another Great Depression. No one wants that. If you don’t think bailing out the banks is a good idea you haven’t thought about it long enough. I’m not arguing that. What I am arguing is that they are the only ones in need of help here.

If we are going to help out the banks, which by all rights should go under completely because of the bad lending decisions they made, why are we not helping out the consumers, the citizens, who by all rights should go bankrupt because of their fiscal irresponsibility? Neither party deserves it in the classic sense of deserving charity, but that isn’t stopping us from helping the banks out at all. I feel like you can either do both or neither here, but selective socialism does nothing but set ourselves up for another situation just like this down the road. I’m not saying they should get something for nothing (even though that’s what charity is by definition). If we go with a model such as the plan that worked for Sweden our government will own a piece of the banks they bail out (and believe me I expect to see a piece of that since I am paying for it. Do you hear me federal government?), so I think the same thing should be done for citizens. Give them a chance, give them the opportunity to keep their homes or their cars and still remain solvent, instead of foreclosing, but have them pay it back somehow. Take it out of the Social Security they have accrued, take their tax refunds until its paid off, whatever it takes, I don’t know. I will admit I am not the wisest man in the land, and if someone can think of a better plan I will be glad to go with it. The problem I see is that no plan is being formulated for citizens whatsoever.

If our government is going to practice socialism in order to keep the standard of living we have become accustomed to they should be practicing socialism as it was meant to be, as it was dreamt to be by its inventors. Socialism is equality for everyone, not just for big business. If we are going to do this bailout thing, we should bail out everyone involved. I have no love for big business or for irresponsible citizens, but this would go a long way in helping restore my faith that my government actually cares about the plight of the common man.

So I promised my friends my next post would be about Apple and their ridiculous walled garden practices, and I still plan to write that post, but my civic duty called me to action before I was able to do so. My friends, October 1 will be a sad day for every American. Whether or not we mourn it then, we will all soon wish we had observed the passing of the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878.

I didn’t bother to find a picture for this post, as I felt I must spend as much time writing it as I had available to me, and as any blogger with kids will tell you (Louis Gray you’re my hero) when you get the time to blog you just go all out. What we face now is a turning point in our nation. A dangerous precedent is being set and done so completely under the radar of mainstream media, all of whom are in a frenzy over the economy. Now don’t get me wrong, the economy is huge right now, and something we all should rightly be focused on, but we must keep our eyes sharp, for those wily politicians are trying to slip one past us again.

For those of you who chose not to follow the link above, Posse Comitatus is an act passed by Congress forbidding US troops from being deployed in any sort of peace keeping or law enforcement capacity inside the borders of the US. This law is the reason why Kennedy called the National Guard to move George Wallace out of the entrance of the University of Alabama instead of the Army in 1962. The law was made after Reconstruction, the period after the Civil War when the Army was used to keep the former Confederate states under martial law while order was restored. Basically the whole point of the law is to safeguard our rights as citizens to never have the Army that we as citizens comprise and finance used against us. My friends this law has been broken, and broken in such a quiet and innocuous way that there hasn’t been much of a fight. I aim to change that.

Starting October 1 the 1st Brigade Combat Team of the 3rd Infantry Division has a new job. Under the command of NorthCom these brave soldiers will be stationed at Peterson Air Force Base in Colorado Springs, CO, with their stated goal being to quell civil unrest and provide crowd control. Here. On us. Americans. Our own Army is being turned on us. And this is a permanent post.

This turn of events cannot be allowed to happen. By definition, a Democracy is a nation ruled by its people, which we are already only squeaking by on a technicality to qualify for. That means you and I are supposed to be the ones in charge; the ones making the decisions. I know it doesn’t feel like that lately, because it hasn’t been, but ostensibly that’s what is supposed to be going on. Now the spying on Americans, the lying to get us into war, the botched job on Katrina and even the terrible economy I can try and get over, but this is a whole new level. Once these troops are deployed, the very first time they are used as a policing agent against US citizens just like themselves, we are no longer a Democracy. When the Army is used to control the people it is supposed to protect then you can by definition call us a Police State. Doesn’t quite have the same ring to it does it? I can’t see the ancient Athenians waxing philosophically about the virtues of a Police State, can you? I don’t remember reading any of Sartre’s great works about the future of the Police State. But that’s what we will be. A sad shell of the former greatness we once were. An insult to the men who came before and made this nation great.

I already know what you’re thinking. Its only one brigade. They are here for crowd control. They are using non lethal weapons. I don’t care if they come at me with sticks, I pay them to protect me, not control me. Our nation’s leaders have gotten so far out of touch with what they are supposed to be doing (helping us) that they now fear an uprising and feel the need to have my fellow Americans quell any ‘disturbance’ that should arise. It also must be noted that they are not repealing the law, but breaking it. They are simply acting as if the law only applies to those they wish it to, much like they did with the telecom companies and the banks. This is not how a democracy is works, this is how a totalitarian government is run. I pray for the sanity of the men and women who are forced to make the choice between obeying a superior officer and destroying their nation. There is no faster way to bring a nation to its knees than from within, and this is definitely an inside job.

Now I don’t know about you, but I’ve seen many a country go from Democracy to Police State, but I’ve seen very few make the trip back. Will we be so lucky? Only time will tell. As I said before, a dangerous precedent is being set; the most dangerous one of all. I promise you this is no hyperbole, for we speak on the matter of the passing of the United States of America, something I never thought I would live to see. As a father, a husband, and a patriot I beg you to stand up. Do not let this be the sad final chapter of what was once the greatest nation on the planet.

So if you’re in the neighborhood on a Thursday; and by the neighborhood I mean Portland, Oregon, the place to be is The Calabash at 2^nd and Taylor. The reason why is my good friend Chase Manhattan is the main man along with his go to guy Nicky Mason on the turntables from 10-12, and trust me when I say that he is a master of the vinyl (and a closet geek). As far as contemporaries I would liken his style to Cut Chemist in its composition, but definitely with a flavor that is all his own. If you want to check out a sample of what you can expect you can download some previous sets at cmanhattan.com.