This isn’t an ordinary start-up, either. I’ve worked with others to create Better Georgia from our passion to see Georgia better represent the people who call this state home.

So, why, exactly, did I leave a comfortable job?

For one, I simply grew tired of watching our state go in the wrong direction. And I really grew tired of listening to people who act as if the state belongs to lobbyists, big pocket corporations and partisan extremists.

It really disgusts me to see Georgia GOP Chairman Sue Everhart call Georgia “one of the reddest states in our great nation.” It bothers me because it’s simply not, true.

Georgian’s don’t care about Republicans or Democrats. They don’t care if this state is red or blue. Georgian’s are fed up with partisan politics. It’s time to look past the ‘R’ or ‘D’ that follows a candidate’s name and look to see how they care for our state.

The people I’ve met in Macon, Columbus, and pretty much every corner of the state, really just want our state to be great again. We all value a state that fosters better schools and better jobs.

In fact, I moved to Georgia more than a decade ago because the state offered good jobs, a creative atmosphere and a distinct contrast to some of the views that were popular in my home state of Alabama.

While I still love my hometown of Troy and will always root for my alma mater’s Crimson Tide, I don’t want Georgia lawmakers to use Alabama as a model for governance.

Sadly, that’s the direction we’ve been heading.

Today, Georgia faces historic levels of unemployment with nearly half a million workers looking for jobs. Georgia has the 3rd highest poverty rate in nation, with two cities ranked among our nation’s 10 poorest places to live. Georgia’s students are defaulting on student loans faster than the national average. Meanwhile, businesses refuse to open in Georgia because our representatives pass laws intended to please a small, extreme group.

These are startling facts. I refuse to sit in silence as we continue to fall further behind.

I’m hoping I don’t have call attention to these problems on my own. Please join me at Better Georgia. By working together, we can improve our state.

But I was a little disturbed this morning when I clicked the tab for Google News and was greeted with this notice:

Thanks, Google. I realize I read a lot of news articles about Gay Rights but I don’t need a Bronze badge to help me recognize that. Can anyone please explain what Google gains by revealing to me how closely they monitor what I read?

This past weekend, Coca-Cola celebrated 125 years since the first Coca-Cola was enjoyed on May 8, 1886. I was fortunate enough to help Jackson Spalding coordinate portions of the event and to invite select media to Friday night’s illumination of the Coca-Cola Tower and Saturday’s 125th Anniversary Celebration Concert in Centennial Olympic Park.

What a weekend!

On Friday, The Coca-Cola Company gave a spectacular visual “Thank You” with the world’s largest single building illumination of its headquarters tower in Atlanta. Even better, the illumination will be on display every Thursday, Friday and Saturday evening in May. Look to the Atlanta skyline between 9 and 11 p.m.

The video at the top of this page is a short look at the illumination.

On Saturday, The Coca-Cola Company shared moments of happiness in a way Coca-Cola always has – by bringing people together through music, art and entertainment. Coca-Cola hosted a 125th Anniversary Celebration Concert streamed online as a live “thank you” to people around the world.

The best part for me was working with the incredibly bright public relations team at Coca-Cola and learning more about the brand assets of one of the world’s largest companies.

I also enjoyed spending long days with one of my all-time favorite JSers, Whitney Ott, and a new favorite, Lauren Coppage. Whitney led the project for Jackson Spalding and kept the entire team organized and on track. She also monitored the pulse of our client and did everything within her power to ensure he was pleased with our work. Lauren was indispensable and touched every portion of the project in a meaningful way. For now she’s still an intern but she proved to be confident and capable beyond her years.

I was tasked with working with Jackson Spalding’s director of social media, Stefany Sanders, and with Megan Jentz (my go-to APR source) to identify online influencers. With input from the client, the list shrunk and morphed to a small mix of traditional and online media. I pitched the media and provided brand messaging and other assets to those who attended. This required dozens of personal emails and many miles of walking through Centennial Park on Saturday.

Another highlight of the weekend was reconnecting with former colleagues Jennifer Brett of the AJC’s The Buzz and Byron Small of the Atlanta Business Chronicle. I was also happy to meet Amy Wenk of Midtown Patch, Tessa Horehled with Drive a Faster Car, Melinda Bluett with Atlanta Social Guide and Shelbi Saine with Midtown Mile.

We closely tracked tweets, posts, mentions and conversations for all of the media outlets — traditional and otherwise — and I’ll soon know who has the most influence and whether some of my hunches were right. I won’t be able to share that data here but it will inform future posts I may write about social media influence and how it compares to traditional media. (I’m particularly interested in how the social media networks of traditional media stacks up against media that only have social media channels).

For now, though, I’m basking in the glory of an incredible weekend and a job well done by The Coca-Cola Company and its partners, including ignition, Obscura Digital, 360i and more.

Friday’s digital illumination of the Coca-Cola headquarters is one of the coolest moments I have ever taken part in. And Saturday’s 125th Anniversary Celebration Concert defies description.

The concert was hosted by Ryan Seacrest, as well as Dusty Sorg and Michael Jedrzejewski, the two Coca-Cola fans who founded the brand’s Facebook page and brought it to more than 25 million fans.

K’NAAN, the artist behind “Wavin’ Flag,” the Coca-Cola anthem for the 2010 FIFA World Cup that became a worldwide hit, kicked off the concert. Emerging talent One Night Only, Grammy-nominated pop star Natasha Bedingfield, R&B artist Ne-Yo and Grammy award-winning singer and American Idol season one winner Kelly Clarkson also performed.

The finale of the concert featured a choir performance of, “I’d Like to Buy the World a Coke” from Coca-Cola’s classic 1970s Hilltop advertising.

At the end of it all, I’ll call this a career highlight for me and my colleagues.

Needless to say there’s been some self-reflection on why we’re such a good place to work. The easy answers are healthy, realistic billable goals and a true focus on work-life balance. But there are a lot of intangibles.

One of those intangibles is the Glen factor. I found this nugget in my email from April 2008 and had to share it today:

To: Jackson Spalding
Subject: A little lesson about selling

Something I thought about today that I wanted to put down in writing about selling:

Instead of selling to people, connect with people.  There is a big difference between the two.

Just a little thought for us to remember.

This is typical of Glen. He finds a connection to everyone he meets. That connection starts as an small ember and he feeds it until it’s a raging fire.

Glen connected with me in 2005 on a walk from Colony Square to One Atlantic Center. Since then I’ve left journalism and learned a new career, largely at his insistence. Glen provided a work place that encouraged me to find my own talents at my own pace. He provided a work place that allowed me to be comfortable as an openly gay man at a time when I personally struggled with the possibility. Glen pointed me to Midtown Atlanta Rotary, which started a chain reaction of life-transforming community service. Midtown Atlanta Rotary expanded to Pure Water for the World, then to AID Atlanta and most recently to Leadership Atlanta.

My life wouldn’t be the same without my connection to Glen and the advice he’s provided for the past five years. Take that single connection and multiply it by everyone at Jackson Spalding and you’ll know why we are the Best Small Agency to work for.

When I learned that Apple enabled every iPhone and iPad to track location data, I was curious more than concerned. I really wanted to see what my personal travel map looked like. It turns out to be pretty cool.

Naturally, I spend a lot of time in Midtown Atlanta. My office and home are both on Peachtree Street. I made a few trips out to the suburbs, have spent some time in Athens and recently drove over to Columbus. The iPhone data correctly logs my trips to Birmingham, Montgomery, Troy and Opp, Alabama. The iPhone logged my vacations to the Florida panhandle, Virginia and upstate New York. The device recorded my stop in Miami before I turned the iPhone off and boarded a cruise ship.

Not only can I use the data to map exactly where my iPhone pinged cellular towers, but I can hit the play button to see my movements over the life of the phone.

Finding the data was simple. I downloaded the iPhone Tracker and the application did all the work in just seconds.

Deciding how I feel about the data collection is a little more complicated. For one thing, part of my desire to own a smart phone was the ability to store this kind of data. Call me a geek but I really love data collection. I don’t always know what I want to do with it but I kind of like having it available, if needed.

For another, phone companies have been collecting data location for years. This isn’t news. But from what I can tell, logging the data on individual phones, where it is easily recoverable, may be a new step.

Much of my concern grows primarily from Apple’s silence on the issue. Exactly what are Apple and AT&T doing with my data? And shouldn’t they have asked permission first?

I would have happily turned on a location tracking function on my iPhone — or simply kept it turned on — if I had been given the choice. Maybe I’m one of the few users who would make that choice but I still think Apple should ask every user a simple question: “May we track your location?”

I pulled together this quick and dirty clip but the footage is shaky and the editing isn’t very tight. Despite all this, I enjoyed spending time in the park with AID Atlanta’s AIDS Walk team. And I know the final product will be more polished and help raise a record amount of money for AID Atlanta.

How cool is that?

Candi’s for Breakfast will be open late-night Friday and Saturday.

A little birdy told me that if the new hours draw enough traffic, they may come back for a few more weekends. Maybe even permanently.  Eat up, Old Fourth Ward!

While we’re all marketers and communicators, today we’re volunteering our time and opinions as consumers and lovers of Midtown, Atlanta.

Jake is bringing a salad selection with homemade salad dressings from his Picnic! brand, along with pies and his famous made-from-scratch Jake’s Ice Cream. Hopefully, we’ll stay awake through the meeting and provide some valuable feedback.

After that, Jake will serve ice cream to the Atlanta office of Jackson Spalding to celebrate a secret announcement for the firm. He’s serving vanilla, strawberry, Slap Yo Mama Chocolate and Red Velvet Cake ice cream with all the fun sundae toppings. There will be homemade whipped cream and cherries to put on top. In addition, Jake will debut a non-dairy coconut ice cream.

It looks like ice cream Friday could be a high calorie day.

It’s amazing what a little market research can do. Boston-based Millennium Partners Sports Club Management watched at the beginning of the recession as clients at Sports Club/LA and the Reebok Sports Club/NY drifted away. Attrition rates steadily rose from 30 percent up to 37 percent. On top of that, ancillary revenue from existing members declined as members cut back on private trainers and other programs.

CEO Smaiyra Million decided to get to the root of the problem instead of simply watching revenue decline by 10 percent in 2010 alone. Her solution? Well, it was partly based on market research.

After listening to customers and potential customers, Sports Club/LA stopped referring to its brands as luxury clubs. It turns out that “luxury” is perceived as being excessive. And excess hasn’t been selling well the past few years.

The company also stopped calling its brands “urban country clubs.”

Today, you’ll hear Millennium discuss the lifestyle associated with the club. In the minds of company management, their clubs are an essential lifestyle for those who can afford it. The company’s current ad campaign, The Essentials of Life, features health and fitness as an essential part of life that should not be put on hold. (Oddly, the company still uses the word luxury on its corporate website).

Here’s how Million described the shift in marketing focus to ClubIndustry.com:

We don’t try to downplay the fact that we do have extras and that we do pay attention to the individual needs of our very discerning customers, but we just don’t talk about it as a luxury because a luxury is something that most people think they should be doing without.

Million projects revenue will increase in 2011 by 5 percent over 2010. Attrition rates are improving and revenue is rebounding. Millennium is now ready for the growth, with Atlanta potentially in the mix.

If Millennium is successful, this will serve as a powerful example of the power of using marketing research. Every company should consider research a necessary investment and a first step with any new marketing campaign.

NOTE: This article is cross posted at Jackson Spalding’s blog, JS Thinkstand.com.