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

Are you using Google Analytics to assist you with your online initiatives? If not, you're allowing valuable information to go unused. Analytics can help to answer questions like: Which marketing initiatives are most effective? What are accurate traffic patterns/trends on my websites? Where are my visitors coming from and what do they do on my

I read Seth Godin from time-to-time and I think the following blog post by him is one of his best observations. It's something that we all tend to forget at times. --- Kraft singles - Seth GodinHere's a ubiquitous food that succeeds because it's precisely in the center, perfectly normal, exactly the regular kind. No kid whines about how weird

In our over-advertised, over-branded and over-marketed society we have been foolishly led to believe that we can have it all. All the style, all the status, all the luxury, all the quality, all the savings, all we can eat, all we can watch, all the time. Everything is for us the customer. However this is not the case. The point of this post is