KPIs

There’s a moment that occurs where you complete work tasks, and your brain can no longer support the disconnect. I’m confident the Germans have a word for it.

For me, it happened recently after typing the sentence:

These past few months we’ve reduced CPCs across both Brand and Non-Brand, which has allowed us to capitalize on the uptrend of Children's Health Care search interest with no increases to the budget.

I think you may know why there is an uptrend of people interested in Children’s Health Care. I felt deflated.

The last time this happened was in the throes of First Wave COVID where I had grown leads YoY for an affluent Mountain Community in North Carolina, and assisted in growing total property sales over the entire previous year…. by July.

I was told that “a lot of people are wanting to get the hell out of Charlotte because of the restrictions and the, you know, unrest.”

They were, of course, referencing the very necessary and justified protests around George Floyd’s murder. Plus, since the community is private, they don’t have to mandate any types of distancing or masking. Your own private homogenous viral playground—only two hours from Charlotte.

Can anyone endorse me for “Facilitating White Flight” on LinkedIn?

Since I’ve been working from home full-time for over a year, everything is URL. I’m doubly detached now, and that’s dangerous. If everything is intangible then nothing is really real, and I don’t have to examine any actual IRL impact beyond a KPI scorecard or a bullet point summary.

I have to imagine there’s a person at Amazon corporate reporting on the initial “efficiency” success of an initiative put in place to make it so people don’t even have time to pee in bottles. I’m certain that person goes home, and is fine with it because it’s just a metric, after all. If you obscure the language, it’s easier to pretend.

Digital Marketing is nebulous. Spend some money. Try to make people do some things, and if everything goes right people way richer than me get even more richer. It’s honestly the ideal career for me because I can lay claim to any positive results that came from elsewhere, or explain away negative results as not my fault. It’s the perfect industry for bullshitters. The problem is that I know I’m a bullshitter. To be really good you have to believe you are not a bullshitter. You have to eat your own bullshit, and shit that shit down into other desperate fools’ eager maws.

I blame self-awareness for all my shortcomings. It’s the reason I’m not a millionaire.

After coming out of my fugue state and feeling less-than gruntled, I found I had opened a new tab for LinkedIn to explore what other jobs were out there that would maybe allow me to create something of value for the world. After dismissing the 20 requests from sales people whose emails I already reported as spam, I decided to see what ex-colleagues were up to.

I wonder what my old boss who fired me is doing now? Double promoted. Fuck. I am going to register for this Google webinar they are a part of and hate-watch their presentation section.

Hmmm… what about that coworker who got mad I beat him in a game of ping pong and smacked a ball at my head as I walked away? Ah cool. VP.

This lead me to taking stock of how I got here.

1. Went to college thinking I wanted to be a teacher so I could be a basketball coach, selected a school with a good Education Program.
2. Choose English as my Major because I’ve always enjoyed reading and I’m a top-tier bullshitter. It would at least be easy.
3. Discover how much I hated the idea of being subjected to arbitrary rules made by principals and superintendents. Change minors after three years.
4. Graduate and get a job designing Home Automation Systems, Home Theaters, etc. but actually just spend 80% of my time as an installer.
5. Get a part-time job doing database integrity stuff for 10Best.com via my wife’s cousin. Basically, I just called establishments and confirmed the information was still accurate: Your hours on Wednesday are still 10am-10pm? Do you take Diner’s Club?
6. Main Job starts fucking with my commission checks, I quit.
7. Learn 10Best has openings for copywriters. I learn SEO Copywriting.
8. Do that for a few months and then learn that it is contract-based and that in 4 months it will be time for IHG to sign a new contract to do another few thousand hotels, but that it can be 7 days to 6 months before they resign (“Just depends”).
9. With two months left on the contract, I get a callback from an agency I applied to that morning. I usually just wore shorts and a hoodie but on the day they called me to come in and interview I happened to be wearing pants and it was right down the road from me.
   
   Side Note: If you get a call from a potential employer the same day you applied asking if you can come in that day to interview… don’t work there.
   
10. Get the job with no real effort. I’m a copywriter.
11. Ask who is doing the SEO for clients, and it was the guy who interviewed me, who answered my question of “Well, what kind of keyword research tools do you use?” with “I don’t. I just do it and it works.” I’m the SEO Person now.
12. Guy who did paid search at the agency takes a week-long vacation to Florida, and does not return. The following Friday I am brought into the owner’s office who says “Brandon is no longer with us. Since SEM is like SEO so you do SEM now.” I do SEM/PPC now.
13. Teach myself paid search, and over the next 10 years get jobs at better/bigger/worse agencies until one of my clients poaches me to work directly for them.
14. Continue to get paid search freelance projects…

While I enjoy aspects of what I do, my entire professional career path was set in motion because a guy I worked with got eaten by a shark.

Seeing that absurdity, made me ruminate on all of my past-life blogging career. Let’s see if there is a theme here:

1. Look up song lyrics I don’t get the reference for in 2010 and discover Rap Genius.
2. Do a bunch of annotations because I’m bored at work and have nothing going on in my life, and it’s the perfect intersection for my valuable English Degree. Get recruited as a moderator.
3. Write stupid articles for RG that I think are funny to me because I have nothing going on in my life. Connect with marc at Mostly Junkfood in the comment section of a Childish Gambino article.
   
   Side Note: MJF was posting Kevin Abstract in 2011.
   
4. Start making Vines and tweeting way too much because I am unfulfilled in life and hate my job and am drinking 79¢ PBR Tallboys in an abandoned parking garage on my lunch break. Get asked to write for Complex.
5. Keep making content to entertain myself. Get asked to write for Noisey.
6. Get a new job where I’m living in a different city 100 miles away from my family while we try to sell our old house and buy a new one. Stay at the office until 3 am doing insane content to stave off the extreme anger and loneliness and entertain myself enough to forget I’m sleeping on an air mattress in a house with a roommate who has two cats with an overflowing litter-box.
7. Get asked to write for Four Pins, throw a Subway Sandwich off the roof.
8. Go to SXSW in 2014 and get asked to do video coverage of the tech week portion (I was there on a panel) and then do subsequent music week coverage.
   
   Side Note: The previous side note and this walk down memory name reminded me just now that I ran into Brockhampton (though I guess at the time they were technically still AliveSinceForever) walking to the UT-Austin bus stop. I’m very happy for them.
9. Get asked to do video work for Complex, fail miserably.

All of that because I had never seen Slumdog Millionaire (2008).

I envy people who “manifest.” Or, the kind of people who actually have a goal that they actively work towards achieving. I’m incapable of thinking, or even caring, about anything beyond tomorrow.

Well, that’s not entirely true. I do have every lunch for the next two weeks planned in my mind, but that is in response to years of being depressed in an office. My only escape…

As I look at those timelines, none of those opportunities came from intentionality nor were they due to luck. Luck implies “If I could just…”—that you were toiling in the shadows with visions of greatness and then you coincidentally interact with someone who shines the light on you for everyone to see. I have never done anything with the intentions of getting to “the next step.” I don’t think I’ve ever “worked towards” something in my life. If I have, I don’t remember, which means I failed, which means my original statement still holds true. I’ve never told a lie online.

I've always just sort of done what was right in front of me, and eventually something new and sometimes better comes along. While I luxuriate in stupidity, I do not enjoy looking stupid, or incapable. That fear does at least compel me to stay late or work hard or learn more so that when someone on a level above me asks why I’ve done something the way I did it, I have already thought through every implication 100 times over.

My opportunities have come from other people seeing what I am doing, and wanting to exploit me for whatever thing they have going on. Being short-sighted is comforting, but it does not facilitate long-term growth. I see that now, *squints* I think.

How am I doing? Are we talking month-over-month or year-over-year? Where do I go from here? Not sure. Someone needs to present some new ideas and develop a strategy for me.

All of this because I spent more than five minutes on LinkedIn.