This month’s #Ideachat (organized by Angela Dunn on Twitter) was guest hosted by author Jennifer Louden and focused on the extent to which people either claim or hide borrowing ideas from others. Jumping in late, the group was addressing topics such as the impact on your creativity of others borrowing your creative ideas and whether ideas can be “owned” in this day and age.

On the former topic, my response was it all depends on who borrowed the creative idea, if I wanted them to borrow it, & whether they matched up my ideas or content with other people. If they put me in good company, that can be quite a kick.

If you’re really intent on getting something done and think you have a creative idea to realize positive change, the best thing that can happen is others claiming ownership of your ideas. Maybe you accomplish this by being obvious and blatantly saying, “Here, TAKE MY IDEA!” Often though, you have to be much more subtle and kind of leave your creative idea “mentally” laying around for others to find and claim . . . much like they might pick a coin up off the ground and consider it found money.

Leave Your Ideaprints on a Creative Idea

As the #Ideachat group discussed idea ownership, my response was that in the world of social media, it seems you own an idea by being able to point to your first use and predominant sharing of it. I cited Joe Pulizzi and content marketing as a prime example. Joe put a term to the concept, developed it, and shared it for others to expand upon it. What was important was it was readily apparent Joe Pulizzi was the first person everyone remembers talking about content marketing as an idea.

As I tweeted during #Ideachat, when you put an idea out there for others to use, it’s a good idea to leave your “ideaprints” all over it, just as Joe did.

Just like finerprints, ideaprints are indicators you had your brain all over an idea before releasing it into the world. Maybe the idea was yours originally. Maybe you adapted the idea from something else. Either way, if you’ve added value to an idea, your ideaprints signal your brain touched the idea somewhere (ideally early) in its life.

I’m sure Seth Godin has written about something like ideaprints, and there’s a marketing company using the name, but here some ideas for how to place your ideaprints on an idea:

1. Secure the typical and appropriate legal protections available – copyright, trademark, patent
2. Develop a unique or at least distinctive name to describe the idea
3. Frequently use the distinctive name you created online and in other places
4. Develop your idea into a more fully fledged concept
5. Author a great deal of content about the idea that continues to expand on, describe, and make it more usable by others
6. Make it easy for others to advance the idea whether in total or in part
7. Create an organization that embodies your idea
8. Cultivate a group of people who will point back to you when others ask them where they heard of the idea
9. License the idea to others

There are definitely more ways to leave ideaprints, but amid our #Ideachat conversation, those were the first ones that came to mind.

Making It Obvious Your Brain Was All Over a Creative Idea

I think being adept at leaving ideaprints on your most important ideas is an important skill to hone.

One of the last #Ideachat topics covered whether challenges in attributing ideas in the 21st century will lead to more or less creativity. My answer was it depends on the attitude people have toward ideas. People who spend their time chasing down others to protect their ideas will spend a lot less time on generating ideas and a disproportionate amount of time on idea protection.

Far better to spend much of your time coming up with ideas, a little time being more obvious with your ideaprints, and most of your time making things happen with your ideas – whether it’s you or others doing big things with them! – Mike Brown

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The Brainzooming Group helps make smart organizations more successful by rapidly expanding their strategic options and creating innovative plans they can efficiently implement. Email us at info@brainzooming.com or call us at 816-509-5320 to learn how we can help you enhance your strategy and implementation efforts.

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I met Nick Kellet through the monthly #Ideachat Twitter chats hosted by Angela Dunn. Intriguingly enough, after we got to know each other, it turns out Nick had included Brainzooming blog content on list posts in one of his presentations about how his company List.ly is changing lists to make them more collaborative. With a new release in the works, this is a great opportunity to hear from Nick on the next generation of lists:

9 Reasons List Posts Are Broken by Nick Kellet

So what is a list? Lists are simply a collection

We use lists to organize our lives online and off. We make lists of just about anything.

Lists are the backbone of the web. Lists exist on every web page to organize content from menus to blogrolls and so much more.

Lists are a construct that hasn’t evolved since the inception of the web, given all the changes in our social norms and the way we share, interact and engage online that feels wrong.

Lists and list posts are too important to be ignored. From here on I’m going to talk specifically about “list posts.”

Why are list posts broken?

Image Credit: marcobellucci via Flickr.com and Creative Commons

List posts are things such as:

• 5 Ways to Not Screw Up Focus Group Input 
• 6 Social Media Metrics You Must Track
• 18 Blogging Ideas You Haven’t Read on Brainzooming
• 7 Ways to Share to Build Community & Create Collaboration

List posts are a subset of all the types of lists that exist on the web (lists of videos, songs, slides, friends etc). List posts account for 30% of the content and 50% of page views. Even those who dislike list posts agree list posts work.

While list posts work well, they are still broken. At best lists use a simple HTML construct of tags. Lists are essentially dumb HTML. Lists need to be smarter.

So let’s explore. I’ve noted 9 reasons why lists need a makeover:

Am I missing anything? Vote for those you agree with, and feel free to add your own suggestions.

The Dawn of Interactive Lists

Lists are a wonderful concept for engaging people. Humans love to skim lists, but our social norms and expectations have changed. Lists need to change with the times.

This is the thinking that drives our vision at Listly.

The best way to experience an interactive list post is to create a list and embed it in a blog post just such as this one.

So what’s stopping you? – Nick Kellet

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Download the free ebook, “Taking the NO Out of InNOvation” to help you generate fantastic creative thinking and ideas! For an organizational innovation success boost, contact The Brainzooming Group to help your team be more successful by rapidly expanding strategic options and creating innovative plans to efficiently implement. Email us at info@brainzooming.com or call us at 816-509-5320 to learn how we can deliver these benefits for you.

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When it comes to brainstorming tools, everyone has their particular preferences for what stimulates big creative ideas.

Personally, when Angela Dunn, founder of #Ideachat, put a call out for a number of us to share our favorite creativity and brainstorming tools, I didn’t hesitate for a minute. My choice had to be the Crayola Giant Floor Pad (affiliate link). With each sheet providing nearly 352 square inches of wide open creative space, the Crayola Giant Floor Pad coupled with a Sharpie Marker, are go-to brainstorming tools for me, whether working alone or with a group.

11 Reasons Why the Crayola Giant Floor Pad Tops My Favorite Brainstorming Tools List

Rather than simply sending Angela a written list of why this was my favorite among all my brainstorming tools, I used one my new creative devices, the iPad, to take a photo of this handwritten and cartooned blog post. It highlights the 11 reasons why I gravitate to these big sheets of paper:

1. There are no boundaries or lines

2. There is ample room for making strategic connections

3. It’s possible to depict BIG creative ideas

4. There’s no need to charge the Crayola Giant Floor Pad

5. There is ample space to depict different types of creative thinking

6. Take a digital photo and your creative ideas are easily shared with others

7. They can be both a launching pad and a destination for creative ideas

8. Bold creative ideas have the opportunity to come to life

9. It’s a no-glare surface

10. Pages can be removed without fuss or muss (although be careful tearing a page out around the cut-out handle)

11. Angela (or @BlogBrevity as she is known on Twitter) also uses Crayola Giant Floor Pad sheets as brainstorming tools

What are your favorite brainstorming tools?

Care to send a picture of your favorite brainstorming tools or post a comment about them? It would be especially great to know what you use on the iPad to trigger your creativity. – Mike Brown

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Yesterday I was asked about how, after having worked at one corporation a long time, I now go into a new client  and make a relatively quick assessment of the organizational culture and political dynamics.

What a fantastic question!

I’ve written about a variety of both bad business personalities and accomplished leaders, but I’ve never documented (even for myself) a mental checklist of things to observe when entering a new organizational culture.

We started compiling the questions right then (writing ideas on a paper napkin) and  continued growing the list back at  the office.

18 Organizational Culture Cues

Here are eighteen organizational culture cues I look for when trying to make a quick assessment about opportunities for best managing a project and establishing strong strategic relationships.

• How long do you have to wait in the lobby for someone to ask if they can help you?
• Does the organization run on-time?
• How do people introduce themselves? What information is deemed pertinent enough to include when they tell you about themselves?
• What type of diversity is evident, whether it’s people, environments, opinions, clothing styles, etc.?
• What are people wearing?
• What types of “manners” do employees show to “outsiders”? (And that’s not just to people outside the company; it could be people outside their department or work group but still inside the organization.)
• Who talks first in multi-person meetings?
• How do people treat each other? Is respect demonstrated among co-workers?
• Is there a sense of emotional and interpersonal openness inside the organization? Are the physical surroundings more or less open than the people?
• Do people demonstrate an understanding of the broader business or are they only given insight into their own little part of the operation? Do they have information they need from across the business?
• Who appears to talk honestly – and who doesn’t?
• What decision making style is evident? Do multiple people seem to share perspectives and participate or does decision making seem pretty centralized?
• Are people fearful – of bosses, competitors, expectations, failure, or something else?
• How do the senior leaders behave? How differently do they treat each other vs. everyone else?
• How does everyone else behave in return with senior leaders?
• What is the small talk like before, during, and after meetings?
• Who are the apparent cultural outliers, and what sets them apart from the rest of the organization?
• How much bad talking of others goes on when someone leaves the room or isn’t present?

What would you add to this list of organizational culture cues?

That’s my starting list of questions for seeking out organizational culture cues. What things do you look for when you’re dropped into a new organization?  – Mike Brown

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The Brainzooming Group helps make smart organizations more successful by rapidly expanding their strategic options and creating innovative plans they can efficiently implement. Email us at info@brainzooming.com or call us at 816-509-5320 to learn how we can help you enhance your strategy and implementation efforts.

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Here’s another great post from frequent Brainzooming guest blogger Woody Bendle. When we were together for #Ideachat last weekend, Woody mentioned that he was working up this piece on exceptional customer experience. Given Woody’s extensive experience in the retail industry, it’s great to get his perspective on what it takes to be able to successfully deliver an exceptional customer experience through these important six steps.

When was the last time you had an exceptionally terrific experience as a customer?

I’m not talking about the type of experience that was pretty good – as it should have been.  You know what I’m talking about here… these are the types of experiences where you were greeted and thanked for your business in a pleasant manner; or maybe someone actually helped you find something you were looking for in a store.

Or maybe, there wasn’t even a person involved, but perhaps there was a self-help process that was so well-designed, that you were surprised by how smoothly it actually went.  These types of experiences and interactions should be the norm.  But increasingly is it more and more difficult to even come up with these types of examples.

However, what I’d like for us to think about is:

• A customer experience that genuinely wowed you
• An experience that thoroughly knocked your socks off
• An experience that was so unbelievable, you just had to tell somebody else.

I’m guessing you had to spend more than just a few minutes thinking about the last time you had an experience like this.  Still haven’t come up with one?  Guess what, you’re not alone, so I’ll give you a few more seconds…

Now think about how this exceptional experience made you feel as a customer.  Did you feel special?  Did you feel appreciated?  Did you feel valued?  Did you feel important?  Did you feel just a little bit more loyal to that business?  I’m betting you felt all of these things and possibly even more.

The thing is, very few companies consistently deliver truly exceptional customer experiences.  Why is this this the case?  Is it really so hard for an organization to consistently deliver extraordinary customer experiences?

Unfortunately, the answer is yes – and no.

An exceptional customer experiences don’t just happen on its own.  The very best customer experiences are very well thought-out, designed, and orchestrated interactions.  Customer experience-focused organizations have cultures and strategies that are completely aligned in order to consistently deliver exceptional experiences.  In turn, these organizations gain an incredible (nearly impenetrable) competitive advantage known as fiercely loyal customers and brand evangelists.

If you have any doubts about this just think about how loyal the guy is who passes you later this afternoon on his Harley.  You know, that 40-something ER doctor with the HUGE Harley Davidson tattoo on his right shoulder?  Suppose you’re going to see him riding a Honda anytime soon?

OK, you’re convinced. But now what?

Six Steps to an Exceptional Customer Experience

In order to become a stand-out organization recognized for consistently delivering exceptional customer experiences, you need to follow and employ these six steps:

1. Know what you stand for (or at least what you want to stand for) and what you expect.

That is, what is your organization’s Vision, Mission and Customer Promise?  What is it that you are guaranteeing your customers each and every time they choose to interact with you?  How do your customers want to feel each time they engage with you?  How do you want your customers to feel?

2. Understand the expectations and desired outcomes from each customer interaction point – from both your, and your customer’s perspective.

What is it that your customer is trying to accomplish at each interaction point?  What benefits does your company expect from each interaction point?  How do you expect each interaction point to benefit your organization and brand?  Ask, “How does this interaction live up to my customer promise and help build my brand?”

3. Identify all of the customer interaction points that occur with your organization.

Are there ways that your consumer interacts with (or attempts to) that you are unaware of? You’ll be surprised by this one.

4. Establish goals and objectives for each and every interaction point.

What is it that you want this interaction point to do for your customer, your business and your brand?

5. Develop and employ ways to capture metrics about each of your customer interaction points and establish targets.

What gets measured gets improved.

6. Commit to being one of the rare organizations that continually delivers exceptional customer experiences and hold everyone in your organization accountable.

Walk the talk.

And as for Customer Experiences that Aren’t Exceptional?

So as you are contemplating the pros and cons of designing, planning for, orchestrating, and monitoring each and every one of your organization’s customer interactions through these six steps, I’ll leave you with the following four questions:

1. When was the last time you had an absolutely horrible customer experience?

2. Did you tell anyone about it?

3. Have you been back?

4. How much of your money are they never going to see again?  - Woody Bendle

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You hear people ask, “Why does time fly so much faster than it used to?”  It feels like time is running past so quickly. Holidays and major life events seem as if they arrive right on top of each other. Yet as fast as it seems time flies, some recent events (i.e. meeting IRL with Woody Bendle for #Ideachat last month and again this past weekend) seem as if they happened a year ago.

Why does time fly so much faster in your estimation?

Considering this question, I came up with three possible ideas:

1. Information Overload

There is so much more information that comes at us now, we’re processing what used to be a year’s worth of information in a relatively short time One study from a few years ago said information was coming at us 5 times faster than 20 years before. Right now, with the further proliferation of social media participation, the five times faster figure seems low. Regardless, what used to be a year’s worth of information hits you so much faster – in just a couple of months now. This phenomenon has to be a big factor in disorienting our perception of time passing.

2. Seasonal Marketing Is Out of Whack

To get in front of the message glut and to try and cut through the message clutter, marketers (especially retailers) begin seasonal messaging so much earlier than the calendar suggests. Retailers time shift the entire year. The Christmas retail season goes from July to December 26 (contrast that with a liturgical view of the Christmas season which runs from the evening of December 24 to early January). The Halloween retail season starts in early September and is on closeout before October 31. Back-to-school seems to overlap with “just barely leaving” school. The result is it feels like time is running out and nearly completely disassociated from what the calendar says.

3. The Challenge in Scheduling Meetings

Since in so many organizations there are fewer people to do more work than there used to be, there is a challenge in scheduling meetings and other events. As a result, you wind up scheduling meetings far in advance. On a routine, longer-term project for us, it is common to be scheduling meetings three months in advance. When it comes to a bigger event, the scheduling window is even longer. When you are operating like that, the challenge in scheduling meetings forces you to be thinking many months ahead and acting as if the future is now.

What to do?

If you buy those three reasons for why time seems to fly by so quickly, you can try to manage your information intake as much as you can and do your best to maintain a perspective and a schedule more firmly rooted in the actual calendar than in seasonal marketing messages.

Will this help? What do you think? – Mike Brown

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At the end of March’s #Ideachat, I commented to JoAnn Jordan (who lives in my hometown of Hays, KS) that I use three different Twitter tools to participate in Twitter chats as active as #Ideachat. JoAnn asked me to write a post explaining why in the world I use three different Twitter interfaces. Here’s my answer to JoAnn’s question.

What is a Twitter Chat?

A Twitter chat is a typically a scheduled, usually hour-long time set aside for participants to discuss (which really means, “tweet”) a specific topic. The conversations are organized through including a Twitter hashtag specific to the chat in all tweets. There are a whole slew of Twitter chats on a whole slew of topics, although no one seems to be sure whether there is a truly comprehensive and up-to-date list of them.

Some Twitter chats are snoozers because not enough people participate. Others (such as some of those on social media) are mad houses because there are so many side conversations going on it’s difficult to follow and get much out of them.

I’ve found #Ideachat to be in the “just right” category: it’s always a vibrant conversation on relevant topics where you can actually interact, share, and learn from global participants who show up the second Saturday of every month at 8 a.m. central time.

Participating in a Twitter Chat

Even though #Ideachat is a much more manageable than other chats, here are the three Twitter interfaces I use to keep up, along with how and why I use each one.

Tweetchat.com

Tweetchat is great application because it is designed for Twitter chats and automatically appends the appropriate hashtag to every tweet. I use Tweetchat for:

• Keeping track of questions and prompts from the host / moderator.
• Monitoring the general chat conversations and identifying tweets to build on and respond to within the discussion.
• Responding and replying to questions and comments from others.
• Retweeting all host questions (This is so they appear in the stream and provide context to any followers who might be monitoring the chat. This also helps organize the tweets if I want to write a blog post from the chat.)
• Retweeting all interesting comments that add to the discussion, IF they are short enough to retweet, i.e. under 140 characters. If the retweet winds up being more than 140 characters, I will shift to Twitter.com or Tweetdeck to retweet it.  (I retweet intriguing comments from others that might also be destined for a post-chat blog post.)
• Clicking on the names of people I do not think I follow. This opens up their Twiter.com profiles to easily follow them.

Twitter.com

I do not spend a lot of time on Twitter.com, but it does a nice job for two things during a chat:

• Checking to see if I am following new people in the chat, and following them if I am not already.
• Retweeting comments from others that are too long to retweet in Tweetchat.

Tweetdeck (old version) or Hootsuite

I usually find Tweetdeck refreshes more quickly, so I tend to use it more frequently during chats. But that is only because I am still using the old version of Tweetdeck. If not for that, I would probably deal with the slower refreshes on Hootsuite since it does have some other advantages. Hootsuite allows you to create a specific tab with only the streams relevant to a particular chat. Having all the columns in one tab along with the ability to drag and drop them (which Tweetdeck cannot do) is a real advantage. These applications come in handy for:

• Checking my @ mentions and search column to see if anyone within the Twitter chat is “talking” to me. It can be difficult to spot people reaching out directly on Tweetchat. If responding from one of these apps, it is important to remember to add the hashtag since it will not be done automatically.
• Creating a Twitter chat specific search column to track the chat and retweet tweets too long for Tweetchat (this applies to Tweetdeck, since Hootsuite won’t letyou retweet a too-long tweet).
• Tracking related hashtags and a list of people who generally participate in the current Twitter chat.
• Responding to non-chat conversations.

That’s my setup for participating in a chat. Well, all that plus a Diet Dr. Pepper. And, if it’s one of  Jim Joseph’s evening EXP event chats, then rule number 5 is also in effect.

If you’re active on Twitter chats, what shortcuts have you found to participate on them?  - Mike Brown

The Brainzooming Group helps make smart organizations more successful by rapidly expanding the strategy options they consider as we create innovative plans they can efficiently implement. Email us at info@brainzooming.com or call us at 816-509-5320 to learn how we can help you enhance your strategy and implementation efforts.

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