Innovation & Creativity Archives - Page 10 of 18

Tim Siedell: 15 Steps to Bigger Ideas

November 26, 2007

Thinking is hard work. When you're up against a deadline or facing a declining sales chart, it gets even harder. Whether you're a business owner or a creative professional, here are some steps you can take to get even bigger and better ideas.

First things first, however. It's a process.

Creativity is not a magical act. It's a process. Scientists, authors, musicians, and other creative professionals who have studied such things have broken down the creative process into five basic steps:

Gathering information for the task at hand
Thinking through various solutions
Walking away from the problem
Getting an idea
Testing the idea

Yep, walk away.

No doubt, the most surprising aspect to this process is step 3. When you think about it, however, you've experienced this firsthand many times. Frustrated by a project, you walk away in disgust. Hours or even days later, you come up with the perfect solution seemingly out of the blue. It's the clichéd shower experience. Your subconscious is an idea machine.

Ten Steps to Bigger Ideas Now

1) Give yourself a target.
The more concretely you define the problem, the more energy you can focus towards a specific solution.

2) Manage the process and deadline.
Don't allow yourself to move onto the next step until the current one is finished. And build time into your deadline to walk away.

3) Find a comfort zone.
Surround yourself with the creature comforts that make you feel most at ease.

4) Attack the white bull.
Hemingway feared the blank page. He called it the "white bull." If Hemingway can fear the start of a project, you can, too. It's natural. Attack your fear head on.

5) Free-associate with abandon.
Robert Frost called an idea "a feat of association." Smash thoughts together. Write down words and see if they connect. Mash, smash, and crash.

6) Actively search for inspiration.
Look into other industries or unrelated fields for sparks of inspiration. Search the web. Look for items that spin you into new directions.

7) Aim low at first.
Nervous about a deadline? Frustrated? Get an easy solution onto that blank page and you'll loosen up and feel more confident.

8) Forget about it.
Seriously. Go to a movie. Take a walk. Move on to another project.

9) Go to sleep.
Research shows that a good night's sleep leads to bigger and better ideas. Let your subconscious go to work.

10) Be willing to kill your babies.
Don't fall in love with your ideas. Try to get as many ideas as possible and then test them without prejudice at the end.

Five Steps to Bigger Ideas Long Term

11) Break out of ruts.
Pick up a trade pub from a different industry. Eat at a new restaurant for a change. Listen to new music.

12) Be a sponge.
The more stuff you have in your brain, the more material you'll have to work with the next time you free-associate.

13) Keep your radar up.
Actively look around you. Carry a journal to record little nuggets of inspiration.

14) Gain confidence.
Confidence is key to any creative person. The more you employ the above steps, the more your confidence will grow.

15) Collaborate.
Working with others will help you grow your ideas exponentially.

Now it's your turn. What steps or tips have you found effective when it comes time to be creative?

Drew's Note: Tim Siedell is creative director and co-founder of Fusebox Brand Communications. His bad banana blog is an excellent daily resource for creative ideas and inspiration (step 6 above). Tim is one of the funniest Twitterers I know…and has very quickly proven to be not only smart but a good guy.

Can we age out as marketers?

November 2, 2007

One of my favorite blog readers/commenters sent me an e-mail recently. He was seeking a little bit of advice and perhaps trying to find out if he was all alone in how he was feeling.

Well, I don't think he's all alone at all. He expressed a concern that has probably crossed most of our minds somewhere along the way.

Here's how he started the e-mail.

AM I GETTING TOO OLD? As a 43-year-old marketing director, how do I stay in touch with a target market of 18-30 year olds? As we get older, how we practice marketing and stay current?

I posted the rest of his e-mail over at Marketing Profs Daily Fix and we are in the middle of a very lively discussion about his/our universal question — how do I stay relevant?

Come over and jump into the conversation.

Do it Wrong Quickly — is a right choice!

October 31, 2007

In the past, marketers have had to carefully plan ahead because getting it wrong was just too expensive. But today you don’t have to get it right out of the shoot. Now you can start fast, change fast, and relentlessly optimize your way to success. We can do it wrong quickly…then fix it, just as quickly!

In Do it Wrong Quickly, Internet marketing pioneer Mike Moran shows us how to do that–step-by-step. Drawing on his experience building IBM.com, Moran shows how to quickly transition from “plan then execute” to a non-stop cycle of refinement.

I recently had a chance to run a few questions by Mike and I think you’ll enjoy his answers. But brace yourself — he’s a funny engineer. I know, I had trouble with the concept too!

Many of your readers are probably entrepreneurs stuck in a corporate culture. If they get what you’re saying but their boss does not – how would you recommend (other than reading your book) that they begin to infuse this idea into their company culture?

Reading my book and buying copies for their 20 closest friends is by far the best thing to do, but oh–you ruled that one out. I think that we marketers need to challenge ourselves to work just as hard at marketing inside our companies as we do outside.

We all think of ourselves as these very persuasive people that can get customers to consider new ideas, so why do we feel so stuck trying to explain something new to the boss? I say it’s because we don’t apply ourselves.

If your boss resists, do what you would do with customers that resist–try to understand what the blocks are and overcome them. For example, suppose your boss is extremely risk-averse, and trying something new scares him to death.

In that case, you might want to point out how dangerous it is for us to avoid this new important thing that our competitors are doing and customers are responding to. So if he really responds to fear, then scare him even more about the status quo.

Analyze what moves your boss and then pitch to that impulse, the same way you tailor messages to your target market.

How would you recommend that agencies help their clients embrace this thinking?

Read my book–oh wait. Sorry.

One of the things that drives most CEOs and CFOs nuts is that most marketing can’t be shown to contribute to the bottom line. It gives them fluffy stuff like "increased brand awareness."

If you adopt a metrics-based approach to Internet marketing, then everything an agency does produces tangible impact in money terms–which helps clients justify bigger marketing budgets over time and gets them promoted over their peers who are still pitching name recognition and customer satisfaction.

Any agency that can explain how their clients become heroes in their jobs can cause them to embrace this thinking (or at least give it a warm handshake).

Off-line consumers are changing as well. How does all of this translate for the local, primarily face-to-face business owner, like the butcher the baker or the candlestick maker? Is your premise only a web-based one?

The book focuses on Internet marketing of all varieties, but these ideas work offline, also.

In fact, some of them are stolen from offline direct marketing. Anyone sending out direct mail pieces or catalogs already knows how to "do it wrong quickly" because they judge the effectiveness of each piece based on response. They know what they send out the first time is wrong and they use the response to each version to tell them how to keep changing to get higher response.

Direct marketers tweak their materials over and over to get the highest response they can. One of the big messages of my book is how you can apply that thinking online.

If you could only use one tool (blogs, podcasts, Twitter, wikis, Facebook etc.) to track and observe your potential customer, which one would you choose and why?

I’d use a Web metrics package, such as Google Analytics or CoreMetrics.

As important as it is to listen to what your customers say (and I spend a lot of pages on that), it’s even more important to watch what they do. In the end, observing customers seeing your marketing message and clicking (or not) and buying (or not) tells you more than what they say.

Listening is important, but if you only do one thing, watch. A Web metrics package is the easiest way to watch, and Google’s is free, which is personally my favorite price.

Is there a specific industry that desperately needs to "get this" more than others?

I don’t know any industries that really have this down, but the ones that staring at the biggest culture changes are heavily-regulated industries.

Those industries are used to creating very effective one-way messages (even online), but they are scared to death to respond to customers in public because then they have to go off-message.

It’s hard to talk to anyone in pharmaceuticals or financial services without hearing about what their lawyers say about all this risky business. The problem is that the biggest risk of all is to sit out this change.

The first company in each regulated industry to figure this out will have a bigger edge than the first movers in other industries, because their competitors’ organizational cultures will be excruciating to change. Oh, and did I mention they should read my book? Oh, yeah. Just checking.

Create forms on the fly for your website or blog!

October 28, 2007

We talk about conversation and the need for providing feedback mechanisms for our readers, clients and prospects. But how do we make that happen?

One of the elements we’ve been wanting to add to the MMG site’s Contact page is a form where people could subscribe to the blog, our e-newsletter or get more information.

But we were struggling with creating a form that actually worked in all the different browsers and let us modify the form on the fly. Then, I stumbled onto Wufoo.com.

You create the form and then they provide the code to paste into your site. I literally created our Contact Us form and had it on our site in less than 15 minutes.

Think about the kinds of things you could add to your blog or website:

Event Registration
Contact Us
Customer Delight survey
Employee Application
Post Topic Suggestions
Speaking Requests
What else?

Wufoo.com has a free version (the one I used) and depending on your needs (# of forms, # of fields etc.)

Besides how easy it is…my favorite feature is that when I edit the form on Wufoo.com, it automatically edits the form on my site. So there’s no going back to amend the code. Gotta love that!

Mother Nature = Art Director?

October 27, 2007

Here in the Midwest the most vivid colors of the turning trees are coming into their full glory as we enjoy fall’s crisp air.

Mother Nature has a way of creating some amazing color palettes that we should study, consider and make our own as we create visual identities, ad campaigns or collateral material for clients.

Over at COLOURlovers.com, you can explore all kinds of color combinations and trends. Check out their post on autumn colors, including more than 50 different fall color palettes to inspire you.

You can also submit your own color palettes for readers to critique and vote on.

Thanks to my friends at AOR for pointing me to the post.

Are you deadline driven? Good.

October 20, 2007

People moan and groan about deadlines and the pressure that comes with them. But, that’s exactly why we should love them.

Here are some of the benefits of deadlines.

We get things done: If there’s no deadline, there’s no incentive to actually complete the task. You can stay in testing mode forever.

We don’t over-think: Over-thinking leads to the homogenizing of an idea. The more time a group (especially) has to think about an idea, project or action – they more they can worry it to non-existence. Sometimes, you just have to leap off the cliff.

People have to overcome their issues: Teams inherently have conflict. A deadline forces each teammate to determine which conflicts are actually worthy of addressing and which ones they just need to put aside to get the job done.

Things keep simmering: When I know I have a deadline looming, even when I am not actively working on the project, it’s simmering on a back burner Ideas bubble up to my consciousness and when I do sit down to get it done, I’m already halfway there.

What do you think? Are deadlines good or bad? How do they help or hurt your efforts?

Now that we’ve decided blogs are potential PR engines…

October 15, 2007

Ah, the good old days. PR pros bombarded reporters, news directors and radio jocks with their pitches, releases, and freebies.

But it’s a new day my friends and suddenly PR firms, publishers and business owners have decided that blogs are as viable as the daily paper, when it comes to getting out the word about a new product, book or idea.

All that is well and good. When it’s done right. But most often, I get e-mails like this:

Hello Drewsmarketingminute,
I found your site http://www.mclellanmarketing.com/ and I wanted to
know if you could Blog or write an article about XYZ (changed because I am a nice guy)! You can write your own article; alternatively you may use this recent press release below. You also take a look at the XYZ samples and information on our site at http://www.XYZ.com Thanks!

This guy has never read my blog. He found me on a list or technorati search. He didn’t use my actual name (unless I have become Drewsmarketingminute) and he insults my integrity, suggesting that I would just run his release verbatim.

I get several of these a day. I ignore several of these a day.

Ogilvy PR has the right idea. They’ve created a bloggers outreach code of ethics. I, and many other colleagues think they’ve got the right idea. I hope that all of us who live in the marketing world and may be pitching bloggers take note. If you want to reach out to a blogger…this would be a fine primer to study before you make that first contact.

We reach out to bloggers because we respect your influence and feel that we might have something that is “remarkable” which could be of interest to you and/or your audience.

We will only propose blogger outreach as a tactic if it complements our overall strategy. We will not recommend it as a panacea for every social media campaign.

We will always be transparent and clearly disclose who we are and who we work for in our outreach email.

Before we email you, we will check out your blog’s About, Contact and Advertising page in an effort to see if you have blatantly said you would not like to be contacted by PR/Marketing companies. If so, we’ll leave you alone.

If you tell us there is a specific way you want to be reached, we’ll adhere to those guidelines.

We won’t pretend to have read your blog if we haven’t.

In our email we will convey why we think you, in particular, might be interested in our client’s product, issue, event or message.

We won’t leave you hanging. If your contact at Ogilvy PR is going out of town or will be unreachable, we will provide you with an alternate point of contact.

We encourage you to disclose our relationship with you to your readers, and will never ask you to do otherwise.

You are entitled to blog on information or products we give you in any way you see fit. (Yes, you can even say you hate it.)

If you don’t want to hear from us again, we will place you on our Do Not Contact list – which we will share with the rest of the Ogilvy PR agency.

If you are initially interested in the campaign, but don’t respond to one of our emails, we will follow up with you no more than once. If you don’t respond to us at all, we’ll leave you alone.

Our initial outreach email will always include a link to Ogilvy PR’s Blog Outreach Code of Ethics.

What do you think?

Thinking of using a globe in your logo?

October 14, 2007

I was standing in Office Depot this weekend and noticed their "let us design your logo" display. And there they were. The painfully trite visuals that business owners seem to be drawn to when designing their own logo.

You know the ones — globes, shaking hands, the outline of your state, or the very popular paw print (you pick the animal of choice).

If you want your business to be perceived as unique — don’t use the same, tired visuals that everyone else has already used. A logo does not have to be a literal translation of your business’ name or deliverable.

Think beyond the expected. Think abstract. Think about building a brand by being fresh and different.

Think anything but a globe.

Blog makeover?

September 30, 2007

I recently got tagged by Josh Spaulding for the Blog Improvement Meme. The timing is perfect because there are a few things I've been meaning to do for awhile. Hopefully by putting it into writing, I'll actually carve out the time to get these done.

If you recall, we did a complete blog re-design early in '07. So I've already gone through this exercise in the macro sense. I'm happy with the look and feel of the blog. But there are definitely some tweaks I'd like to do.

New/Better head shot: I took the current head shot myself and it shows! For a few months, I've been meaning to make an appointment with one of the photographers we work with, but I just haven't found the time. Now is the time!

Sidebar spacing: I really like the one sidebar design we decided on. But, as I have added things — I haven't spaced everything as evenly as I would like. (When my blog coach helps — it's fine, but I'm not as good when doing it solo.) I just added the BlogRush piece and need to go back in and scootch it down a little.

Greatest Hits: I decided on the 5-6 greatest hits posts in about December, based on 3 months of posts. Now that I have 12+ months, I want to go back and freshen those up. I've written several series (Marketing advice from my Italian Grandma, etc.) that I need to highlight.

How about you — how would you like to improve the experience of your blog readers?

Never click a mouse again?

September 27, 2007

So what do you think of this? (Fair warning…it's a little bit addicting)

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