What Is Branding, in 100 words or less?

There’s who you are right now, and who you want to be in the future.  The path you choose while moving towards that desired future, or more precisely the shortcuts you avoid . . . that’s your brand.  

It’s your credo.  It’s showing up and doing your thing, even when the world doesn’t “get it.” It’s showing people what to expect when they are around you, rather than living up to their expectations when you are around them.

It’s the difference between using a different batting stance like Cal Ripken, Jr. did, or taking performance enhancing drugs like A-Rod.

Now do you understand?

 

Request: Pictures of Water Towers

I have an unusual request for my blog readers ( . . . all two of you).

I have a hypothesis involving water towers, and I’d like to gather pictures of  water towers from around the country as examples that either support or disprove my hypothesis.  I don’t think I should explain the actual details of the hypothesis right now, because if I did so then people might take photographs in such a way as to sway the outcome . . . if that makes sense.

What I’m looking for are photographs of water towers you might find in the center of cities or towns.  It will likely have the name of the city or town on the front; anything else included in the photo is optional.  I’m attaching an example photo (the water tower in the city where I work) as the featured image on this post to give you an idea of what I am looking for/interested in.  Feel free to compose other elements of the picture as you wish.

If you’d like to play along, put a link to your water tower picture in the comments below.

Please do not “click here”

I want to tell you a story:

Once upon a time, there was a large public organization with a large staff of web content curators. These curators dealt with a lot of content, and would often use ‘click here’ in their hypertext links to help users move between pages.  Like this:

For a copy of the full summer reading list, click here.

To see only the Elementary level list, click here.

To see the Intermediate level list, click here.

To see the High School level list, click here.

Everyone did it, because that’s how everyone else was doing it, and no one had ever said there might be a valid reason for it to be done differently.

Continue reading “Please do not “click here””