I'll admit it. I'm a sucker for branding. Recently, I took a one-week vacation to Mexico and in preparing for that trip, I thought to bring a notebook. Part of the purpose of the trip was to get some downtime. To relax. To think. To experience instead of what most of my days look like which is to respond moment-by-moment to a to-do list or the

Did you know that 3 of the Top 10 most-shared YouTube videos in February 2011 were Superbowl ads? These are ads that bridged the gap between different mediums. Volkswagen's ad, "The Force", started as a YouTube video, was reinforced on television during the Superbowl and then continued to garner hits online after the Superbowl (within 3 days

Last week, I wrote about goal-setting and part of my post was a quote that challenged you to ask if you really have 10 years of experience or do you have 1 year of experience repeated 10 times? This idea was reinforced in my mind by Mack Brown, coach of the Texas Longhorns football team, when he stated that he doesn't "want to hear a 40-year-old

I read a press release from Ipsos yesterday entitled: "Anticipation Building as Vancouver Canucks Look to Become 'Canada’s Team'". The opening lines of the release were as follows: The puck is about to drop for the first game of the 2011 Stanley Cup Finals and it appears that most Canadians are cheering for the Vancouver Canucks. In fact,

I've recently been challenged through a number of influences, to establish goals for myself. One such influence was Catherine Finlayson, Executive Director of the Fanshawe College Foundation at a seminar she gave last week when she asked all the attendees if our professional work experience is less like 10 years of experience and more like 1

This morning I took in a talk on communicating with donors. At one point in the talk, the speaker made the following comment: "If you don't have a relationship with a donor, you shouldn't accept their gift". Think about that for a second. Money without relationship isn't worth the money. Part of the reason for that is the fact that a donor who

The lesson in this post isn't reserved solely for Twitter users but that platform provides a tangible example of why all of us should think carefully and strategically about what we post on the Internet. Around this time last year, the entire Twitter archive was acquired by the U.S. Library of Congress. That's every single tweet by any user on

Protecting your brand at all costs sometimes means sacrifice and the consumption of a little humble pie. This lesson has been magnified by a customer experience I just had. Our 11-year old daughter is a competitive swimmer and so, for her birthday, we bought her a Speedo backpack. We wanted to make it extra special so we took it to get her name

Here's a tip for all you bloggers out there. Recently, we were excited to announce the addition of a new feature to the blogging engine called time-shifting. It allowed you to post-date a blog post for a day in the future. This feature has proven to be extremely helpful to me as I manage the content for our blog here at work, because it allows