It’s only Wednesday and already it’s been a very busy week. Why is it that you’re busiest just before heading out on vacation? In an effort to not let MarketGreener go fallow over vacation, I’ll be taking the laptop with me and will attempt to post some vacation-specific topics. I’m anticipating many opportunities to blast the cruise ship industry in particular and mass tourism in general.

On Thursday we escape the confines of Jackson Hole and the United States to visit our northern cousin Canada. Just in time for the Independence Day holiday, no less. On Saturday we—my small, nuclear family—embark on a coastline cruise to Alaska with my wife’s entire “immediate” family to celebrate her parents’ 50th wedding anniversary. Now, in my family, “immediate” refers to nine of us at most (including my wife, my brother’s wife, and our children), but in her family, “immediate” includes 30 of us. Insert than number into the cruise ship atmosphere and it could get a little crazy. Should be interesting.

In the mean time, I’ve been finishing up a couple of projects that I hope to be able to write a little about in the near future. In particular, while my research focus has been what’s happening with marketing in the online world on a national scale, my business focus has turned out to be local in nature. It is something I knew would happen once my business got up and running, but there is a much clearer line drawn between how marketing is written about—and apparently practiced—on a national scale and the practices embraced on a local level. There is definitely room to exposit on this rather large gap.

As a side note, my clients are shaping up so far to be those in the local non-profit and education areas. Perhaps not always the most lucrative fields locally, but these organizations seem to be fairly well funded for programming but don’t always have the staff or experience to handle marketing. As I begin to write more about my experiences, I’ll be looking for other examples of how marketers are dealing with these local, real-world issues. If you have some of your own to share, please pass them along.