Is that Jeremy Clarkson looking over his shoulder?

Well David Beckham’s gone and announced his retirement now but surely the biggest news item in this week was the publication of yet another of my postings in the fabulous high50 site. Alright David might have stolen the front page headlines but it was big news in this household I can tell you and I’m sure old Clarkson must be quaking in his Sunday Times boots at such an amusing new columnist. Long-standing readers may remember this posting about one of my early public appearance successes heading up the marketing function at mobile network Cellnet. I still blush today at the memory but you’re welcome to enjoy my indignity:

http://www.high50.com/blog50/my-stamford-bridge-humiliation

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to poll and to paul

There’s a new feature which has been added to my blogsite facility which will allow visitors to the pasta paulie site to vote on topics of my own choosing. It sounds great fun, rich in potential and I’m going to try and introduce it later in this posting (ie assuming my attempts at registration etc have worked). It’s been developed by the WordPress team who run the platform for these blogsites in conjunction with some other company and, in celebration, the boss of WordPress (some bloke who looks like a 15 year old kid) has posted an interesting picture of his WP team on our bloggers’ dashboards.  Of which more later…..

pw – what a guy

I wrote about PW, one of the senior guys and our boss at Cellnet, in Blunter and the updated Blunter postscript. He was a hell of a character and made working at the place so enjoyable. Never a dull minute with PW. I don’t think he was a great marketing guy but he was in his element in sales and channel management. He taught us about doing things in style, with panache and flair. He loved to party, loved entertaining the key channel guys. No expense was ever spared when it came to functions, trips, hospitality and PW always insisted the whole team be present with partners if they wished, kids too at week-end stuff. His big love was motorsport and at Cellnet this translated itself into the big marketing concept; sponsorship of an F3 team. I actually think B my immediate boss did the ground work on the concept but PW embraced it totally. He saw it as a clothes horse that all of our marketing activity had to hang from. It wasn’t a bad idea but with hindsight I realise we spent too much on the actual team and nowhere near enough on pure marketing support activity. Then again none of us were marketing specialists – we were learning on the job. Vodafone our only competitor built a head of steam in supporting the channel which took 8 years to claw back. But at Cellnet we had the most fun, no question, led by PW.

big log – blog perchance?

I mentioned in the Blunter blog the guy who delivered the biggest log in a public loo I’d ever seen. Incidentally, I’m no computer specialist and you don’t suppose blog is short for the big log do you? Can’t be. I’m sure it’s an acronym or new age equivalent of captain’s log or something. You tell me…

blunter: postscript

In the recent posting I did on Blunter I referred to two guys who helped me enormously in those early Cellnet days, C on PR and J our motorsport consultant. J caught sight of the Blunter blog late last week and has reminded of two more incidents as a postscript to the day and soon afterwards.

blunter

I worked for the mobile network, Cellnet, for about 12 years. It was in the early days of the industry and it was the best of times. I don’t remember too many bad times. Most of the craziest people I’ve ever met were in the mobile business; some of the greatest people I’ve known were also involved and many of them remain my friends to this day. But one of the real characters was a guy called Bill Hunter, known affectionately as ‘Blunter’ as that was exactly how he’d answer the phone. He was a real one-off and they threw away the mould after Bill. He passed away sadly several years ago but his memory makes me smile to this day.