- It’s now been close to three months since I started at Organic. It’s been a great experience so far – lots of really smart folks and challenging work to boot. I’ve been keeping busy with Bank of America projects, and it’s definitely an interesting time in history to be thinking about financial services. I’ve had to take a few trips to Boston and Charlotte to meet with clients, so that’s been fun as well.

- Ice hockey season is over at Lasker Rink in Central Park. We lost last night in the semi-finals in an overtime heartbreaker. Now I need to sign up for kung-fu lessons to keep in shape for the off-season. Or maybe I’ll just get back on track with surfing out at Rockaway Beach.

- We’re thinking about planning a vacation in June. I’m considering Alaska and Ecuador, but right now the front-runner is a big road trip up the Maine coast and then a ferry to Nova Scotia. I’ve always wanted to check out the Atlantic Provinces of Canada, so this might be my opportunity to do it. Plus, I can avoid getting on an airplane and I can bring my dog Champ along.

- The Prospect Park cormorant has been making appearances on the north side of the lake.

- I’ve been taking guitar lessons the last few weeks. I actually think it’s harder than pedal steel.

That’s about it for now.

I’m honestly very excited to start. Organic is a great company (with a great blog), and I think this role will be a really challenging opportunity for me. I’ll probably be working mostly on Bank of America to start, with some new business work thrown in as well.

Independent experts on Web advertising have been watching, however, and what they see is a myriad of difficulties in making brand advertising work on social networking sites. Members of social networks want to spend time with friends, not brands.

I’m reminded of a brand strategy class I took at Stern last summer in which brand benefits were broken into functional, emotional, and self-expressive. Functional benefits speak to actual features and utility (i.e. a car gets me from point A to point B and has automatic transmission), while emotional benefits speak to how a brand makes me feel about myself. Self-expressive benefits matter most in a social context however. When a brand allows consumers to communicate something about themselves, it becomes highly relevant to sites like Facebook. For that reason, I can see brands with strong self-expressive benefits like Apple (“I think different”) or Harley-Davidson (“I’m an all-American tough guy) having effective social networking presences. For brands that lack a self-expressive component, it’s going to be an uphill battle.

Emily and I just got back from a week in beautiful Portland, Oregon. Here’s what we did:

- Explored Laurelhurst, Mt. Tabor, and Forest Parks.
- Visited some old friends at the local agencies.
- Ate waffles, southern-style biscuits, burritos, and asian stir-fry.
- Checked out a cemetery tour on Halloween night.
- Went to Food Fight, the vegan grocery store.
- Drove to the coastal town of Astoria to visit some sea lions and check out the “Haunted Astoria” tour.
- Gave our umbrellas a workout.

And it looks like I am in good company, as I’ve recently learned that RZA from Wu-Tang Clan has recently started a hip-hop chess site called, WuChess.

On Saturday I took another shot at donut making. This time I tried apple cider donuts dusted with sugar and cinnamon. They turned out much better than the jelly donuts I tried in June.

I think I’m going to start making these on Sunday mornings and dropping them off at the local coffee places.