Half-baked thinking: What's your brand?
Mar. 17th, 2005 07:56 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
elfsThis afternoon, sparked by a television show (yeah, this one, what did you expect?) I started thinking back on the training I had received as a member of the Franklin Covey dayplanner cult. CompuServe was big on this; we received three hours a year of "refresher" training in how to use the big, bulky thing, which I carried with me everywhere. These days I'm down to a David Allen project list and a calendar, blessed be, on a Palm V that fits in my pocket.
But sometimes, Allen recommends that you do the Covey thing-- not as often as Covey would like, which is every week, every day if you can-- but once every couple of months, one should step back from the immediate task of Getting Things Done and consider one's objectives, one's goals and, in the Covey terminology, one's roles.
I dug up my old list and there, at the top, was father, then husband, employee, writer, programmer, and adviser. I've had to drop the bottom one, for I no longer hand out unsolicited advice on agony blogs and newsgroups. There simply is not time enough.
As I was thinking about this list of roles, the "who am I" question came up and then I realized I had another role: blogger. And then it clicked: I'm Elf Fucking Sternberg, I've been on the Internet for seventeen years, which is longer than some of my readers have been alive, and I am a brand.
But what is the Elf Sternberg brand about? What do you get for brand loyalty? This is the question I must figure out. How do I build brand integrity into the name "Elf Sternberg"? Is it a multiple of brands: is there one about a secularist father trying to raise children, another about the erstwhile programmer, another about the relentless writer, another about the wine and anime and chocolate and cooking fanatic? Do they need separate identities? What are the deliverables for each, and how do I improve the quality of those deliverables?
This is something I will probably be spending some energy thinking about, because I perceive that it is valuable to me. I have only a short time on this Earth, my transhumanist optimism notwithstanding, and I need to do something with it.
As a short interim, I really, really wish that LiveJournal had tagging. "This post is about" and a collection of one-word tags that would let people filter. "Show me all of Elf's posts about anime" or "Show me all of Elf's posts about fatherhood" would totally rock! as a feature.
But sometimes, Allen recommends that you do the Covey thing-- not as often as Covey would like, which is every week, every day if you can-- but once every couple of months, one should step back from the immediate task of Getting Things Done and consider one's objectives, one's goals and, in the Covey terminology, one's roles.
I dug up my old list and there, at the top, was father, then husband, employee, writer, programmer, and adviser. I've had to drop the bottom one, for I no longer hand out unsolicited advice on agony blogs and newsgroups. There simply is not time enough.
As I was thinking about this list of roles, the "who am I" question came up and then I realized I had another role: blogger. And then it clicked: I'm Elf Fucking Sternberg, I've been on the Internet for seventeen years, which is longer than some of my readers have been alive, and I am a brand.
But what is the Elf Sternberg brand about? What do you get for brand loyalty? This is the question I must figure out. How do I build brand integrity into the name "Elf Sternberg"? Is it a multiple of brands: is there one about a secularist father trying to raise children, another about the erstwhile programmer, another about the relentless writer, another about the wine and anime and chocolate and cooking fanatic? Do they need separate identities? What are the deliverables for each, and how do I improve the quality of those deliverables?
This is something I will probably be spending some energy thinking about, because I perceive that it is valuable to me. I have only a short time on this Earth, my transhumanist optimism notwithstanding, and I need to do something with it.
As a short interim, I really, really wish that LiveJournal had tagging. "This post is about" and a collection of one-word tags that would let people filter. "Show me all of Elf's posts about anime" or "Show me all of Elf's posts about fatherhood" would totally rock! as a feature.
