I'm a simple guy. Skip the fancy stuff. Give me a burger off the grill and a cold beer or Diet Coke with Elvis or Willie playing in the background. Don't get me wrong. I’m open to a little adventure. I’ll occasionally buy soup du jour at restaurants. But the jours have to be fresh. I ordered Gazpacho once. Had to send it back. It was cold.

One of the dirty little secrets I try to hide from my friends is that (blush) I own a tuxedo. It'd be bad for my reputation if they find out. I try to make up for it by wearing the scruffiest jeans I can as often as possible. And I insist my employees (all one of us) dress as casually as possible except when actually meeting with clients.

I confess to attending a half dozen or so operas a year and actually enjoying most of them. That's one of the reasons for the penguin suit. But I don't tell my friends about such shameful behavior. And I'm happier going to a good movie, bluegrass concert or one of my granddaughter's soccer games -- places I can be seen without hurting my reputation.

As a simple guy, I was delighted to learn when I started practicing public relations about a zillion years ago that there wouldn't be any math. No one actually promised. But it was clearly understood. The zillion is a rough estimate, by the way. We didn't do math back then.

PR Math: What's 2+2? What woud you like it to be?

The no-math thing hasn't exactly worked out. Things have gotten more complicated. Much more complicated. That's a good thing.

I remember when people working in public relations, marketing and investor relations didn't talk to one another or understand what each other did. In most companies, if you put the PR folks in one room and the marketers in another and asked them to talk about one another they would have pointed a collective finger at the other group and said: "They don't get it." And if you had asked them what the folks in investor relations did, they would have looked at you like you were crazy for even asking and shrugged their shoulders.

I spent several years providing PR support to the investor relations group at a large company back when PR people didn't do that sort of thing. My colleagues in PR figured I was a little odd but, for the most part, forgave me this eccentricity. But as CEOs started paying more attention to investor relations so did folks in PR. So, today PR people routinely work with the folks in investor relations. That means working with numbers. So much for no math. I'll show you my EBITDA, if you’ll show me yours.

After I quit working with investor relations, I spent nearly two years trying to get my PR colleagues and the marketing folks in our company together in the same room to talk about why we should be working together because we were all in marketing. The folks in PR thought I was a traitor. The marketing folks just thought I'd probably been smoking something funny. But both sides eventually agreed, reluctantly, to sit down together. And when we were done we were a team.

We've also been forced -- not without some resistance -- to start measuring what we did in PR. That involves math, too. And it means becoming accountable for actually accomplishing something worthwhile -- like helping the company sell stuff. What a concept.

You can check the chart out for yourself. It replicates measurement data Blue Marble developed for their client, but the numbers and the name of the company have been changed.

I'm not going to try to explain it to you. And I'll admit that the first time I saw it I had no idea what it said. But Debra explained it to me and I got it. She can explain it to you, too, if you're curious.

The bottom line is this: It shows how Marketing and Public Relations can work together to achieve positive results -- in this case a measurable increase in market share as shown by the "red" line that starts above 7/20/08 and ends with the arrowhead in the upper right corner.

As for me, I'm a simple guy. Here's the bottom line for me. I do public relations. Unlike the old days, we now do math, measurements and complicated charts. Cool.