What’s a ScLoHo?

At the end of 2016, I was preparing to launch a podcast version of the weekly articles I have been writing and  publishing on The Genuine ScLoHo website and this is the very first episode that you can also listen to. Here’s the link to this episode.   Now that we have all the details taken care of, here we go:

Kicking off a brand new year and a new dimension to this website, I thought it would be a good time to give you a bit of background information on What’s a ScLoHo? and who is this character…

This article (or podcast if you’re listening to this) is longer than they will be in the future.

First, some history. My name is Scott Howard and in the 1960’s my family moved to Fort Wayne, Indiana. In the 70’s my high school launched a radio station and that led me to working on the radio at the age of 16 part time.  After graduating, I was working full time in radio, on the radio in Marion and Kokomo, Indiana before returning to Fort Wayne where I was on the air at WMEE, owned by Federated Media.

While at WMEE I married a listener and we ended up having 3 kids, moving back to Kokomo and eventually Detroit when I was 26.  In Detroit I spent nearly 8 years at WMUZ, a 50,000 watt FM commercial Christian radio station.  This move to Detroit was my entry into the advertising and marketing world.  We would create advertising campaigns for our advertising partners and my primary job was to create these campaigns including writing and producing the ads.

I also trained others in our production department and we had a full staff of 5 commercial producers.  Eventually I returned to the air on WMUZ in Detroit, initially doing vacation fill-in and then took over the morning show for about a year.  I also spent about a year full time in sales at WMUZ before deciding to return to Indiana for family reasons.

Back in the Fort Wayne area, (actually Warsaw, Indiana at first) I worked part time on the air at country music WBTU before accepting a full time on air position at WFWI.  This was the early 90’s now and when WFWI decided to switch music formats, they asked me to move from afternoons to mornings on the new 92.3 The Fort.  I did this 6 months before I decided to walk away from radio and took a job in Warsaw where my wife and kids and I lived.

About 4 years later, my first wife and I are no longer married and my Dad had passed away so I moved back to Fort Wayne to help my Mom downsize and move forward with her life. It’s the summer of 1998 and I returned to radio full time for a few months as the program director of talk radio station WGL in Fort Wayne.  Due to unstable ownership I left full time radio again but never completely as I start doing weekends on WAJI ushering in the year 2000.

For the next 3 years I worked in a couple of different industries and to summarize, I know how to drive a forklift, manage a tool crib work in quality control and run a thermometer.   I also met and married my wife Kathy who introduced me to local coffee shops.

It was during one of those coffee shop visits that I noticed we were the only customers and outside was a guy dressed in a dirty pink chicken costume waving at passing cars.  I asked the owner what the chicken had to do with coffee and his response was, “I gotta do something”.  Clearly he was desperate to get customers.  We had a conversation about advertising and marketing and later as my wife and I were driving home, she said you ought to go back into advertising and marketing.  Apparently she and the coffee shop owner were both impressed with the common sense advise I offered.

Kathy and I talked about the pros and cons of my returning to radio.  She did not know me when I previously worked in radio and I told her about the challenges and opportunities and we prayerfully agreed to give it a go.  A few months later, in April 2003 I was hired by a group of radio stations in Fort Wayne that was known mostly as Summit City Radio as one of their advertising sales persons.

The ScLoHo name and identity was born during my 8 and a half years working at those radio stations.  It began as an email address and later when I began my online activity, it became my twitter handle and I even formed a marketing consulting practice with the ScLoHo name.

What does ScLoHo mean?  It’s pretty simple.  Even though I had never met another person with my name, Scott Howard until a few years ago, there are over 800 Scott Howard’s in the United States according to the website, HowManyOfMe.com.

If you were to Google Scott Howard, one of the top results was the character named Scott Howard, played by Michael J. Fox in the original Teenwolf movie.  While I’ve had a beard most of my adult life, I’m not a werewolf.  So I created a mashup of my first, middle and last names… If you take the first two letters of Scott, the first two letters of Louis and the first two letters of Howard, you have six letters, ScLoHo.  And it’s easy to pronounce too as a two syllable word, Sc-low, Hoe.

I jumped on the blogging bandwagon while I was still working for those other radio stations and was writing, editing and publishing articles every day on multiple blogs online.  Some of the articles were picked up nationally by the Wall Street Journal and other publications.  I was doing speaking and teaching engagements around town and around elsewhere too.  The subjects varied but the main topics were Media, Marketing, Branding and Advertising along with some on the personal side and about my city, Fort Wayne, Indiana.

2011, I was lured away from the radio stations I was working for which included WGL, Rock 104 and Wild 96 and started a full time position working for a website development firm.  It was a great learning experience and my friend and co-worker,  Kevin challenged me to tie the ScLoHo identity with my own name, Scott Howard.  See, for several years there were people who knew me as either Scott Howard or ScLoHo, but not both.  By October 2011 I was ready to consolidate all my online blogs and websites to a new domain.  Since the dot com and dot net versions of my name were taken, I bought the Scott Howard dot me domain and have been writing and publishing every single week.

By the way, after leaving the website development company I joined another radio station in town, then went to work full time for a national e-commerce company headquartered near Fort Wayne.  I managed the social media for all 5 of their brands.

In 2013, I accepted the position I have now with Federated Media.  I am a member of the WOWO radio sales team and also have all of the marketing resources available from our Federated Digital Services division.  For me it’s like a marriage of the best of both worlds that I have enjoyed… radio and online.

It was also a homecoming of sorts.  The building that houses WOWO and Federated Media also is home to other stations including WMEE where I worked on the air when I was 21 years old in 1981.  Two of my co-workers from those old days are still here too.

Over the weeks ahead, I’ll share some marketing and media insights, dip into some personal stories on occasion and pass along what I’ve learned from hundreds of others and continue to learn nearly every day.  

Questions? Answers? Thoughts of nearly any kind are welcome.  You can find me online ScottHoward.me; on Twitter @ScLoHo; on Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram and a few other places online. Just Google ScLoHo, that’s S-C-L-O-H-O and you’ll probably find more of me.  Drop me a note via email too, Scott@ScLoHo.net.

More details can be found at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Scloho