Friday Top 5

I've got some crazy travel coming up, so T4P will be going on a brief hiatus (probably just a week). Top 5 Things That Are GREAT About Me Taking a Break: 

1. You'll have ample time to read all the other amazing association bloggers out there. Need a place to start? Check out the Acronym blog roll.
2. I'll come back charged up with a bunch of new thoughts and ideas to write about.
3. Breaks are good for the soul.
4. You can always check out Carpe Annum, my picture a day Tumblr, if you start to go through withdrawal.
5. How can you miss me if I won't go away?

See you in a week or so...

What Is Your Brand?

It's not your logo or your colors or your font. Those things are your brand IMAGE, but they aren't your brand.

Your brand is an idea...a feeling...an experience.

To quote David Ogilvy: brand is "the intangible sum of a product's attributes: its name, packaging, and price, its history, its reputation, and the way it's advertised."

Think about that: intangible - attributes - reputation.

What you think your brand is doesn't matter. What matters is what your audience thinks it is.

And all of us good little marketers nod our heads in agreement with the above. Yet we consistently talk about brand and act in ways that indicate that what we really believe is that brand is something *we* determine and *we* control and that *we* can change from anything to anything at will.

And that's just wrong.

You can't control your brand directly.

What you can do is act consistently in a way that supports the thoughts, images, and most importantly, emotions and experiences you want to be.

What can you do today to find out what your audience really thinks of you? What's one action you can take to help move that perception into closer alignment with what you'd like it to be?

What I'm Reading

• Need fundraising tips? One of my organization's former corporate partners writes a great blog on this topic, Fundraising Fundamentals, you should check out.
• Facebook is changing big time, again - is your organization ready?
• Jamie Notter breaks down what generational differences can and can't tell us. 
• Another great piece from Jamie Notter on how conflict affects decision making.
  
• Speaking of decision making, great advice (via Vinay Kumar): just do the next right thing.
• SEO myths debunked.
• Facebook: creating a home for the marginalized?
• Running out of ideas for your brand to post on FB?
• The last of the “for 2012” tips, I promise, these on making work more enjoyable.
• Help! We're Being Disrupted!  It's behind the Technology Review subscription wall, but given that it's $25 a year and that I'm constantly singing its praises, what are you waiting for?
• What is the cost of being you versus the cost of NOT being you?
• Recognizing it a little late, but fantastic post by my friend Hecate about Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
• FB expands the “like."
• Just in case you missed the great #assnchat Nikki Jeske (aka @Affiniscape) moderated recently, she's also blogged about it: What inspires you?
• Speaking of inspiration, I've been re-reading a lot of TC Boyle recently. Right now, I'm on The Inner Circle, his fictionalized account of the research team around Alfred Kinsey.

So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish

The title of the fourth book in Douglas Adams's The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, "So long, and thanks for all the fish" is the message the intellectually-superior-to-humans dolphins leave as they depart Earth just before the Vogons show up to demolish it to make way for a hyperspace bypass. Don't worry - the dolphins save the day by constructing a duplicate Earth and transporting everything from the original Earth onto it before the Vogons destroy the original Earth, thus saving the human race.

So what does this have to do with associations?

What happens to your members when they retire from the industry your association serves?

Do you offer them nothing more than active professional benefits at an active professional price? Do you kick them out because they no longer meet the standards of membership?

Or do you provide ways for them to move to an emerita/us status and stay engaged in different ways that make sense to people who've stepped back from active day to day involvement in the profession?

What might that look like? Has your association been trying to launch a mentoring program? Most mentoring programs suffer from too many prospective padawans and not enough Jedi masters (to mix my sci-fi metaphors for a moment). Retired members and young members are a match made in heaven (or at least on Tatooine) for cross-mentoring. Are you short volunteers who can help with the doing, not just the planning and issuing of orders? Your emerita/us members have time and expertise. Do you need people who can help orient new members? Trust me, your staff doesn't know what members need to know, but other members do. Are you trying to run a fundraising campaign and need people to make initial contacts? Your retired members can give, use their Rolodexes to help you identify prospects, and use their career's worth of contacts to open doors.

Don't leave your retirees with no option but to say, "So long, and thanks for all the fish!" Find ways to engage their expertise in and passion for your industry or profession in ways that make sense for them.

Always the Last to Know: Tool Roundup

OK, sure, we're in mid-January, but this was too good not to share: Ray vanHilst's 2011 holiday best productivity and tech tools roundup. Bonus? Most are freemium tools. Thanks for sharing, Ray!

Friday Top 5

One surprising (and good) unintended consequence of this year's New Year's resolution has been that, in an effort to find interesting and different things to photograph every day, I've gotten much more dedicated to taking a break to take a walk mid-day. If this isn't something you do on a regular basis, I highly recommend it. Top 5 great things about taking a stroll at lunch:

1. Apparently, sitting all day is killing us. A lunchtime walk gets you up and out.
2. Fresh air.
3. Sunshine (especially important during the shortened days of winter).
4. Chance to clear your head after the morning and plan the rest of your day.
5. That colleague you wanted to tell off or argument you wanted to start? Have that conversation in your head and return to your office serene.

The Birth of a Word

Very cool TED talk by Deb Roy about data and how we learn language.