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Any time we have an all eyes on the news tragedy, there is a question about what brands should do with their social media content:

• Do you act like major networks and news programs and start exclusively sharing updates and (second hand) news about the tragedy?
• Do you act like a cable network and keep up with whatever social media content was already planned, irrespective of the news?
• Do you go completely dark out of respect for the tragedy and its victims?

So, what do you do with social media during a tragedy?

David Armano offers five pieces of advice for brands and how they should conduct themselves. It is great advice oriented toward a brand with a larger collaborative social media effort, although some of it (review your scheduled content and remove anything sensitive) applies across the board.

Another piece of advice from David Armano, summed up as “Do the Right Thing,” is a great sentiment, but there’s no one answer to what the right thing to do is.

One safe answer seems to be sending out your brand’s thoughts to a tragedy’s victims. Thoughts are nice, although not particularly efficacious. Some brands take advantage of their large audiences to help broadcast emergency and relief updates. Some brands are willing to go out on a limb and offer prayers. Since many times all you can do in these situations is pray or pay (i.e., donate), prayers are at the top of the heap to help victims.

Other brands, keep on with what social media content was already planned (or inappropriately chosen amid the tragedy), as others (typically individuals) spend their time calling these brands out for their social media miscues.

Perhaps the safest answer is to go dark in the face of tragedy. The challenge is there are tragedies and victims daily.

So does that mean a brand should NEVER share any social media?

No, it doesn’t.

But when there’s discussion about the importance of being “human” on social media, it’s not some b.s. social media strategy mumbo jumbo. You DO have to be human with your social media content, no matter how big or small your brand is.

And if you’re human with your social media sharing every day, you have a lot better chance of getting it right when a human tragedy is close enough to intersect with your social media content.  – Mike Brown

Mike Brown

Founder of The Brainzooming Group, and a huge fan of strategy, creativity, and innovation. Mike is a frequent speaker on innovation, strategic thinking, and social media.

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For more on World Creativity and Innovation Week, visit http://toronto.wciw.org/

World Creativity and Innovation Week starts today (as it does every April 15^th) in honor of Leonardo da Vinci’s birthday.  We’ll join in with the World Creativity and Innovation Week theme this week since innovation, creativity, and enhancing your creative thinking skills are all topics core to our coverage at Brainzooming.

7 Ideas to Get the Most from Your Creativity

Maybe your job requires daily creativity while offering few opportunities to recharge your creative thinking skills in dramatic ways.  Perhaps your work environment’s attitude is less about waiting for creative inspiration and more about, “Be creative dammit!”

If this describes your work situation, how do you get the most from your creativity on a daily basis? Here are seven ideas I’ve been depending upon to boost creative thinking skills and keep them strong daily:

1. Take advantage of the time right after your sleep.

The creative refresh that comes from sleep can help boost your creativity so much. Early mornings and late evenings (after a refresh nap) are all important for a fresh view and maximum creative output.

2. Cultivate your spirituality regularly.

Might as well take advantage of the greatest creative force there is! To stay focused on spirituality, I need structure surrounding me. Attending a church service every weekday morning refreshes my creativity at the start of each day and opens my mind to possibilities I wouldn’t have imagined the night before.

3. Revisit your creative inventory.

I hang on to completed creative output, as well as interim drafts and partial ideas that might never see the light of day. Not only does this provide a source for new and reformatted creative ideas, looking at interim creative drafts helps me think about previous creative techniques that might be a fit for what’s needed now.

4. Develop reusable creative structures all the time.

Call it laziness or call it smarts, but with every client we take on for a strategic or creative effort, we review how even impromptu efforts can become creative thinking exercises we can use as future creative structures.

5. Have creative fakes available.

A “fake” songbook gives musicians enough of a song’s framework (lyrics, melody, chords) to perform at a moment’s notice. A creative fake book provides the core of a creative structure to go from nothing to creativity rapidly. For me, the Brainzooming blog is my creative fake book. When I need a creative structure to get started quickly, I visit the blog, no matter where I am.

6. Get away from the daily routine whenever you can.

Contrary to everyone else on the planet, I love airports and airplane flights. Time on an airplane is my most creative because it is disconnected from the daily routine. Even if I don’t have a plane trip on the horizon, going somewhere different around town that’s fun and new can provide the needed creative boost.

7. Be around the right people.

From experience over time, I know being around people (vs. being by myself) helps to get the most from creativity. Specific individuals can often stimulate certain types of creativity very efficiently. When it’s been too long since I’ve been around one of these people, I know it’s time to get together right away!

What boosts your creative thinking skills daily?

These seven ideas are what I’ve been using the past few years when I tell myself, “Be creative dammit!” What works for you when you’re facing the same type of creative demands, whether imposed by your client, boss, or even yourself? - Mike Brown

Learn all about Mike Brown’s creative thinking and innovation presentations!

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Mike Brown

Founder of The Brainzooming Group, and a huge fan of strategy, creativity, and innovation. Mike is a frequent speaker on innovation, strategic thinking, and social media.

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If you’re blogging on a regular basis, it’s likely you have accumulated plenty of blog scraps along the way.

Blog scraps are the stray ideas, sentences, paragraphs, or maybe nearly complete blog drafts that have not turned into published blog posts. It could be they aren’t timely anymore, you’ve struggled to fashion them into full blogs, or you are suffering from creative apathy relative to the original topic. I can’t even begin to tell you how many online pages and notebooks I have filled with partially written copy that is only seen when I revisit them looking for ideas on what to blog about when time is tight and there’s a daily blogging deadline looming.

What to Blog About – 10 Things to Do with Your Blog Scraps

While these scraps may have seemed like good ideas for what to blog about at some point, that has not turned out to be the case. No matter the reasons  your blog scraps haven’t been published though, the question is can you find SOMETHING to do with them?

Here are ten things to do with your blog scraps:

1. Expand a blog scrap into a full blog post in a different direction than you originally intended to write it.
2. Simplify the blog scrap to one central idea, making it more viable as a blog post.
3. Compile a bunch of related scraps into a themed blog post.
4. Compile a bunch of unrelated scraps into a potpourri blog post.
5. Add your scrap to a related blog post you’ve already written to freshen it up.
6. Find someone else’s blog where your blog scrap works as a comment.
7. Make your blog scrap into a short Google+, Facebook, or LinkedIn group post.
8. Keep the scraps for use as fresh content in a white paper, eBook, or book.
9. Take another shot at writing the original blog post for which the scrap was intended.
10. Throw the blog scrap away (or delete it online) to free yourself of feeling guilty about trying to do something with it.

What do you do with your blog scraps?

When an idea you have for what to blog about doesn’t turn into a fully fledged blog post initially, what do you do with it? Are there other ways you’ve found to take advantage of your preliminary work to get value from your initial writing, video, or audio efforts? Please share what works for you! - Mike Brown

If you enjoyed this article, subscribe to the free Brainzooming email updates.

If you’re struggling with determining ROI and evaluating its impacts, download “6 Social Media Metrics You Must Track” today!  This article provides a concise, strategic view of the numbers and stories that matter in shaping, implementing, and evaluating your strategy. You’ll learn lessons about when to address measurement strategy, identifying overlooked ROI opportunities, and creating a 6-metric dashboard. Download Your Free Copy of “6 Social Media Metrics You Must Track!”

Mike Brown

Founder of The Brainzooming Group, and a huge fan of strategy, creativity, and innovation. Mike is a frequent speaker on innovation, strategic thinking, and social media.

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If you follow us on Twitter or Facebook, you may have seen a status update the other evening about launching an intense period of learning for Brainzooming as we undergo a process change the next few weeks. We’ve been in the midst of introducing a new online collaboration tool over the past several months. In the next few weeks, we’re incorporating this online collaboration tool into multiple strategic thinking sessions with varied objectives, formats, and group sizes.

In the midst of designing and facilitating these new types of strategic thinking sessions, there have already been ample opportunities to have session participants play new roles within the Brainzooming methodology. Whenever that type of process change happens, we benefit and learn many lessons as new individuals carry out what we’ve designed.

I imagine it must be similar to a playwright seeing his or her written work interpreted and brought to life by actors. There are bound to be nuances and lessons in these performances  the playwright didn’t envision.

12 Process Change Lessons

Thinking back over the first half of this week’s strategic thinking sessions, here are twelve lessons from loosening or completely turning over the reins to others in bringing the Brainzooming process to life.

So far, I have . . .

1. Become reacquainted with little things we do without thinking that make a significant difference in helping people perform more productively.
2. Realized anew how we create a visual and photogenic depiction of an organization’s strategy.
3. Seen how others approach resolving open questions and issues in alternative ways that make sense to them.
4. Taken process suggestions from others causing me to use skills I don’t use that often now because they aren’t as fun.
5. Been forced to stick with a strategic thinking exercise I didn’t think was working (but ultimately worked very well) because a client wouldn’t let me skip to another one.
6. Gotten to see what others expect they will need or will have happen during a successful strategic thinking session.
7. Needed to marry our new technology with other client technology to integrate remote participants in a strategic thinking session.
8. Used our new online collaboration tool in ways I hadn’t anticipated in order to be more personally productive.
9. Cut down the development time for what we do by weeks because of a client’s limited availability.
10. Tried to figure out fewer things ahead of time to give our strategic thinking process more capacity to adapt to a client’s current needs.
11. Screwed something up without freaking out which allowed someone else to help troubleshoot the problem and fix it with little notice.
12. Accepted “better done than perfect” more readily than I prefer.

These dozen benefits didn’t take much time to list. But being able to identify them depended on being willing to exercise less control, embracing experimentation, and being open to mistakes.

Step Back, Experiment, and Learn with Your Own Process Change

When was the last time you stepped back from a process you know inside and out to experiment, learn, and see how it plays out under the influence of others?

My advice is, if you haven’t pushed for this type of process change recently, figure out a way to make it happen right away and starting learning new lessons! – Mike Brown

If you enjoyed this article, subscribe to the free Brainzooming blog email updates.

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.

Mike Brown

Founder of The Brainzooming Group, and a huge fan of strategy, creativity, and innovation. Mike is a frequent speaker on innovation, strategic thinking, and social media.

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At a recent blogging for business training workshop I conducted, the audience members had many great social media questions during the session and in the post-session evaluation. These four social media questions from the blogging for business training workshop are applicable across organizations on the front end of blogging.

What do you do when your boss does not understand social media?

If your boss does not understand social media, you need to have a strategic business conversation, not a social media conversation. Before you have the conversation, do your homework and have a firm understanding of what drives success in your organization. When you understand what translates to success for your organization, structure and prepare a strategic conversation addressing business fundamentals and priorities. With that strategic foundation in place, consider how social media contributes strategically toward overall goals. Do not start with talking about Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, or even blogging. Start with revenue, leads, customer service, processes, or any other real issues that drive the business. Then put social media in that context.

Are a website and a business blog separate places online?

This was an intriguing question, because in the context of the blogging for business training workshop, I was talking about an organization’s website and business blog separately. I did this because websites and blogs are different in tone, intent, and messaging. Digitally, however, they are tied together, if not one and the same. You do not want your blog and website to be in two separate digital locations. If they are, you lose real advantages of the web traffic a blog helps attract on a daily basis.

How do you not give away your competitive secrets to your competitors when blogging for business?

I have heard people talk about sharing the “whats” and “whys” of your business, but not the “hows” to protect your proprietary techniques from spilling into your business blog. You can also write in generalities vs. specifics (i.e., we rarely name specific clients). It is also great to write about something other than your organization that is of more interest to your audience. Quite honestly, I do not think about this much since with the strategic planning and marketing work we do, how we do it makes all the difference in efficiently producing the strong imaginative thinking and implementable strategies we devise. You cannot read about it and go do it.

When blogging for business, how do you balance messages so you aren’t overly sales-oriented?

My answer on this question was when it comes to organizing your business blog content, think about a TV show. A ½ hour TV show has approximately twenty-three minutes of content, and seven minutes of commercials (as opposed to an infomercial with is 100 percent commercials). Within a business blog, you’re trying to create entertainment and a reason for people to show up at your website. With that in mind, having at least a 2-to-1 non-commercial to commercial ratio is a starting point. By simply being yourself, you’re “advertising” your value. As a result, blatant selling should be a very small part of the time and messages in your business blog.  - Mike Brown

If you enjoyed this article, subscribe to the free Brainzooming email updates.

If you’re struggling with determining ROI and evaluating its impacts, download “6 Social Media Metrics You Must Track” today!  This article provides a concise, strategic view of the numbers and stories that matter in shaping, implementing, and evaluating your strategy. You’ll learn lessons about when to address measurement strategy, identifying overlooked ROI opportunities, and creating a 6-metric dashboard. Download Your Free Copy of “6 Social Media Metrics You Must Track!”

Mike Brown

Founder of The Brainzooming Group, and a huge fan of strategy, creativity, and innovation. Mike is a frequent speaker on innovation, strategic thinking, and social media.

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Yesterday’s post explored sixteen signals to identify when strategizing becomes procrastination, stopping you from moving forward with implementation. At the heart of many of the sixteen signals is apprehension with decision making for various reasons.

In light of the challenges we all (okay, maybe most of us) face at times with making decisions on a timely basis, here is a recap list of Brainzooming articles on making successful decisions.

Decision Making Techniques

1. Don’t Overthink It? 5 Key Questions for Quick Decisions

Here are five ways to constrain thinking when it’s too easy to take more time to make decisions. Chopping off some available time, resources, and possibilities can get you to a decision much faster.

2. Making Decision Making Easier – She Loves Me, She Loves Me Not

One factor that can slow decision making speed is too many available choices. Here is a low-tech, very direct way to narrow your decision options and move directly toward decision making.

3. Strategic Thinking Exercise – Simply Making Big Decisions

Your approach for making big decisions doesn’t have to be overly complicated. It can be as simple as listing your criteria and asking yes or no questions about the options you’re considering.

4. Black and White Decision Making? Today, Change to Grey (and Vice Versa)

There are benefits to consciously changing your typical decision making style, even if temporarily.

5. Project Management – 15 Techniques When Time Is Running Down

I enjoy events because they have a built-in deadline: at some point, the event will start, and all decisions are either made or you’ve lost the chance to tinker any longer. When looking at all deadlines as “events,” these techniques help focus and move forward when time is running down.

Decision Making with Teams

6. Level 5 Decisions – Decision Making without Your Influence

Maybe part of your decision making challenge is you are trying to make too many decisions yourself. This helpful strategic thinking approach helps move decisions away from you toward your team so everyone can be more effective.

7. Striving for Simple Revolutionary Ideas

This prioritization and decision making approach not only helps identify winning ideas, it takes best advantage of using both individuals and groups working through a group decision making process efficiently.

Prioritization

8. Built for Discomfort – An Alternative Prioritization Strategy for Innovation

If the easy decision is always the decision that gets made, this prioritization strategy will help force a group to more strongly consider uncomfortable ideas that can be more challenging but also more beneficial.

9. Prioritizing Things Others Are Depending Upon

When you’re in a team situation, delaying a decision or action can really screw things up for the next person in the process. This alternative prioritization approach places a premium on taking actions that set the next person up for success.

Dealing with Varied Decision Making Situations

10. Making a Decision – 7 Situations Begging for Quick Decisions

It can be easy to lose sight of the bigger picture and turn small decisions into protracted ones. This guide adds some perspective to seven common decision making situations that could be quick decisions once you strip away everything that’s surrounding them.

11. Market Research – 5 Ways to Not Screw Up Focus Group Decision Making

As a market researcher, I’m quick to support the idea of getting market input to help make better decisions. If you misuse market research as a way to tap market input, however, you can make the situation worse. Here’s how to not screw up focus groups if you’re using them.

12. Is Your Brand Headed for Trouble? 5 Strategic Warning Signs

While decision making isn’t the central focus of this article, poor decision making is at the  heart of these strategic warning signs that suggest a brand is heading for trouble, if it’s not already present and accounted for in Troubleville. – Mike Brown

If you enjoyed this article, subscribe to the free Brainzooming blog email updates.

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.

Mike Brown

Founder of The Brainzooming Group, and a huge fan of strategy, creativity, and innovation. Mike is a frequent speaker on innovation, strategic thinking, and social media.

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I love when blog topics come directly from reader tweets and questions, as does today’s. Simon Oliver responded to a tweet on a previous article (“Step 1: Strategy, Step 2: Wild Creativity. Don’t Reverse the Order”) by asking for any signals strategizing has become procrastination.

We have covered advantages and disadvantages of strategic patience and tried letting procrastinators off the hook. We have not covered a strategic thinking exercise for diagnosing people who love strategizing so much they never seem to get around to implementing anything.

A Strategic Thinking Exercise to Judge Strategizing vs. Procrastination

From Simon’s request, here’s a strategic thinking exercise with sixteen signals to consider if you sense you, someone on your team, or perhaps your whole organization is strategizing as a form of procrastination.

1. There is a history of missing opportunities by not acting in a timely fashion
2. There’s no clear objective so the extended strategizing isn’t sufficiently focused
3. You are waiting to accomplish something bigger in one step, when you could be accomplishing smaller steps moving in the right direction
4. You’re spending undue time determining multiple strategies tied to market situations highly unlikely to materialize
5. You are trying to figure things out to a level of precision well beyond how precisely you’ll implement the strategy or measure actual performance
6. You are wasting time by NOT pursuing basic strategy planning steps
7. The level of prudence you are exercising far exceeds the level of risk involved in starting
8. You aren’t learning enough while waiting to make you disproportionately smarter when you act later
9. You have identified a direction clearly adequate to meet your objectives but want to tinker some more
10. There is no indication the current strategic answer will change after additional delay
11. Your future readiness to act isn’t increasing appreciably during the delay
12. You enjoy strategizing as much or more than “having strategized”
13. You’re spending more time rationalizing not acting than you are identifying strategies
14. Frustration with the delay is disaffecting your strategic team
15. You’re working diligently on refining your strategy while discounting how much you can refine your strategy as you implement
16. You’re not sensing any pressure to begin implementation

How many of these conditions does it take to signal strategizing has become procrastination?

I do not have a scientific answer for how many of these signals have to be present to indicate solid strategizing has become procrastination. Looking at one of our own strategic decisions where I’m not happy about how long it is taking us to act though, five signals are present. Evaluating a potential client opportunity that’s now languished more than a year because the client has sidelined it for a variety of reasons, there are at least six of signals present.

While it’s clearly not a definitive sampling, my starting guesstimate is if at least five or six of these signals are present, your strategizing has become procrastination.

If that’s the case with your situation, take advantage of this strategic thinking exercise to diagnose the underlying issues, address them, and get going. -  Mike Brown

If you enjoyed this article, subscribe to the free Brainzooming email updates.

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.

Mike Brown

Founder of The Brainzooming Group, and a huge fan of strategy, creativity, and innovation. Mike is a frequent speaker on innovation, strategic thinking, and social media.

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