The Brainzooming Group

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

This World Creativity and Innovation Week, I’ve been thinking about the people I most cherish for their creative help, advice, and prodding over the years. They are a diverse and eclectic group!

21 Talents and Creative Thinking Skills Among My Creative Friends

Here are twenty-one talents and creative thinking skills I cherish among creative friends and team members:

1. A sense of humor
2. A strong listener
3. Active on social media so it’s easier to reach them
4. Open to having impromptu time to talk
5. Will challenge my thinking or perspectives in a constructive way
6. Have different interests in life than I do
7. Think in intriguing ways
8. They are confident in their opinions
9. Know lots of things I don’t have a clue about
10. Express themselves well in varied ways
11. Honesty
12. React to ideas in predictable ways
13. Have a positive attitude
14. Are encouraging to others
15. Can work together well with each other to create and strengthen ideas
16. Have an appreciation for spirituality
17. Both encourage and are willing to try new things
18. We have complementary strengths and weaknesses
19. They share and teach what they know
20. They push me to be better than I am now
21. They know intriguing people

What talents and creative thinking skills do you cherish in your creative friends?

Do they know how much you cherish them? If not, maybe it’s time to thank them during World Innovation and Creativity Week!  – Mike Brown

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

Download the free ebook, “Taking the NO Out of InNOvation” to help you improve your creative thinking skills and generate fantastic ideas! To boost your organization’s innovation success, contact TheBrainzooming Group to help you rapidly expand strategic options and create strong implementation plans. Email us atinfo@brainzooming.com or call us at 816-509-5320 to learn how we’ll deliver these benefits for you.

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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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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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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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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It’s Friday, and this post was written on Thursday night. You know what that means? Hang on for a Larry King post . . . You can learn something from someone you don’t respect, but it’s much harder to respect someone you can’t learn from . . . It’s been a long time since first grade, but I saw the little red headed girl from grade school at our local Starbucks. Her smile has not changed one bit . . . I’m a lot better at stress-induced eating than stress-induced creativity . . . I love the world of multiple screens except I keep muting and increasing the volume on the wrong screen . . . Why is it I can watch Pawn Stars & not go to a pawn store, but 2 minutes of Diners, Drive-ins & Dives, and I’m ready to start eating?

Social Media Hype and Cool from Way Back

Fear, forgetting, and fecklessness can all get in the way of making progress . . . Maybe one little change will be all you need to fix a problem. But sometimes, as they say in NASCAR, you have to take a big swing at it. It just depends . . . Someone having the right words in their Twitter name doesn’t mean someone knows ANYTHING about those right words . . . At some point, you can either talk about your area of expertise for 3 1/2 days straight…or you can’t.

Attention social media rock stars: If you’re going to describe your blog using hyperbole, make it grammatically correct . . . Some people were talking about how my grandma used to go places with a camera and tape recorder. She was a content creator before content creation was cool . . . It’s amusing when someone “whiny tweets” you about nonsense, then goes back & deletes all those tweets (and by “amusing,” I mean “pathetic”) . . . You can tell I’m more than mildly amused (or befuddled) by the cool kid hype out in the Wild Social Media West.

Hate Not, Want Not

Why do they call them “task forces” and expect people to volunteer? “Fun forces” would make more sense, even if it is a lie . . . Three people I hate? Whoever designed airport bathroom stalls to swing in, people you’ve met before who won’t say their name next time you meet them, and salespeople who talked to you once on the phone three months ago who expect you to recognize them by their voice and first name . . . Ever notice how people say they want interaction at conferences, but they really just want to be talked to – and gifted with a copy of your slides . . . What if Pavlov had a cat? How would that have worked out for him?

Who Said That?

It’s fascinating to meet someone new who’s already formed a perception of you that’s so counter to what you think of yourself . . . Right now, I appear to have about 4 mini-offices located around the house . . . You can’t tell how warm the social media water is by standing on the side of the pool & pissing into it . . . One of my high school teachers gave us Hollywood Squares tests. Each person had to answer one question out loud in class. If you were wrong but bluffed well, you still got points . . . I continually forget how many lines I’ve lifted from “Broadway Danny Rose,” i.e. “It’s late, we’ll get right out of here,” “I’m willing to bet that your full of good ideas, but what you lack is confidence, ” and “You can’t ride two horses with one behind.”

There’s a reason for most everything I do, but it may have nothing to do with the reason you think . . . Official spokespeople say official things. Passionate observers provide the real sense for a story and what’s happening . . . People at TEDxWyandotte kept telling me to, “Break a leg.” Two days after the Kevin Ware deal, that wasn’t what I wanted to hear . . . I read about someone described as being a bold social media presence. The first thing out of her mouth was she watched TED videos all the time for inspiration. Obviously the standards for bold were cut by 95%, and I missed the announcement . . . It’s not just me that thinks what I think, but that doesn’t make it any better or easier to deal with.  - Mike Brown

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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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I’ll admit I was tempted to create an April Fools blog post for today on “The Top Ten Reasons Creative Thinking Is Overrated.” It would be a funny and quick post to write (ten spoof reasons followed by “April Fool”) during what’s going to be an already hectic week.

Then I remembered a post author Jim Joseph wrote last year extolling brands creating April Fools social media as a way to show a human side. I replied to Jim’s blog saying I’d considered writing a post with reasons why a brand shouldn’t do April Fools prank social media.

Well, fundamental brand strategy won out over blog writing expediency!

5 Reasons April Fools Prank Social Media Is a Joke for Your Brand Strategy

Here are five reasons April Fools prank social media content is a joke when it comes to your brand strategy:

1. Your brand represents a promise, and unless you’re Penn & Teller or Stephen King, tricking your most important audiences is likely not part of your brand promise.
2. Just because another brand creates April Fool prank social media doesn’t mean you should. If another brand jumped off a cliff, does that mean your brand would too?
3. Your brand doesn’t use “funny” and “surprise” as a part of its brand strategy and brand experience any other day of the year. Doing it one day a year doesn’t make your brand seem human. It just makes your brand seem confused or that it is a mindless follower.
4. Since your brand is more conservative than it is fun, you will only approach April Fool prank social media half-heartedly. If you are going to introduce humor into social media, you should be broad and/or consistent with it so your audience gets it.
5. Self-deprecating humor is safer than “at your audience’s expense” humor. Can you turn your April Fool prank social media idea into one where your brand is the butt of the joke? Would you want to? Probably not.

What do you think about Aprils Fools prank social media and its fit with brand strategy?

You can say I’m too much of a stick in the mud, but if a brand tries to make fools of its customers, that doesn’t seem to be part of a great brand strategy and brand experience. And on that point, I’m serious. No joke.  - 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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I’ll readily admit I’m a proponent for borrowing creative inspiration. Not anything illegal or unethical, mind you. But borrowing creative inspiration in the sense of always being on the lookout for inspiration in everything you encounter. Unless you simply ooze creativity, this idea of borrowing creative inspiration is vital to having new ideas when you need them.

6 Areas for Borrowing Creative Inspiration

Here are six areas where I most frequently look for creative inspiration to borrow:

1. Design Layouts

I can do basic design (as evidenced by an advertising layout award in a long-ago state high school journalism contest), but it’s not my forte. If I need to design an ad flier or white paper, I comb through magazines looking for patterns and spatial relationships to mimic. In fact, the structure for our advertisement in The Social Media Monthly is based on the advertising my previous company did that was very effective.

2. Stock Photos

For the past couple of years, I’ve been using Photocase.com as our main source for stock photos after a Twitter-based recommendation from Sally Hogshead. While Photocase.com definitely has some intriguing and novel photos, its European roots leave it lacking for photos representing some particularly US-oriented images and idioms. As a result, I’ll sometimes use an image on Photocase that’s close, but misses the mark as inspiration to draw or photograph something on my own that more closely fits the need for a blog image.

3. Blog Titles

Magazine headlines, especially for self-help publications, are great inspiration for borrowing engaging headline structures for blog titles. Again, as with design, headlines are not my strongest suit, so any inspiration for catchy blog titles is beneficial.

4. Social Media Content Sharing Patterns

I’m always on the lookout to see how people who seem to know what they are doing are approaching social media content sharing. It’s particularly intriguing when they change how and when they are sharing social media content. I adapted our Twitter sharing pattern from a prominent social media specialist who was sharing content more regularly and frequently than I would have imagined. When I saw Brainzooming had developed a sizable global audience, it made sense to move to a 24/7 social media content sharing cycle on Twitter, with planned tweets every 60 minutes.

5. Speaking Styles and Patterns

Ever since I was a kid, I’ve mimicked how those around me speak. For whatever reason, if I’m around someone enough, I start picking up words, phrases, and speech patterns they use. As a result, when I hear speakers in person or repeatedly via recordings, I unconsciously pick up vocal mannerisms. These often pop up in presentations that I only catch when I listen to my own presentations later.

6. Creative Thinking Models

Whenever I read about or become exposed to a cool business strategy success story, I ask the question, “How could you get to that same result again?” This question is the basis for many of the creative thinking exercises The Brainzooming Group uses in our work. Whether or not a company actually used the questions or steps we envision is irrelevant. We try to create a solid, strategic structure that would plausibly lead an organization down the same successful path.

Where are you most frequently borrowing creative inspiration to boost creative thinking?

In what situations do you borrow creative inspiration? How have you incorporated borrowing into your creativity? And importantly, do you share your creative ideas in a way that others can borrow from them for their creative pursuits? – Mike Brown

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

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.

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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