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

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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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What can you expect your social media experience to be if you want to be an anonymous online stalker who shares no identifiable information?

When you try to be anonymous and coy on Twitter, is it realistic to have any expectations about building a follower base?

I was having that discussion on Twitter with someone who has been engaging and asking great questions, but whose name, location, background, gender, and other web presences are all a mystery. My comment was if you’re not going to be real, you better be prepared to settle for whatever you get (but less than you want) from others on Twitter when it comes to conversation and ongoing engagement.

The Online Stalker Blues – 6 Reasons to Not Be Anonymous and Coy on Twitter

Here are six reasons I think someone who comes off as an online stalker will have a less than fulfilling social media experience while trying to remain anonymous and coy on Twitter:

1. You wind up breaking the Golden Rule of Twitter

When you try to mask your identity, location, gender, and everything else about yourself on Twitter, you’re in clear violation of  the Golden Rule of Twitter: “Honestly reveal as much about yourself as you’d hope others honestly reveal to you. “ If you’re not willing to share anything of substance about yourself or point to other places on the web where people can learn more about you, expect to get less than you might hope from your Twitter interactions.

2. You look like a bad social media experience waiting to (re)happen

Just about anyone on Twitter for some time has a story about being burned by someone trying to hide behind an anonymous Twitter account. Several years ago, a new person started tweeting at me a lot, even featuring me in a blog post about helpful Twitter people. I pushed the person to drop the anonymity and create a personal presence on Twitter. She (I’d thought it might be a guy) did that and became a real person. We even had a phone conversation about her career challenges and goals. Soon after establishing a presence, however, she completely disappeared. Since then, I’m increasingly skeptical of people who show up big, show up anonymous, and show up expecting you to invest time in them.

3. It’s going to slow your Twitter audience growth

For the reason above and the weirdness of interacting with someone who is hiding over a long period of time, if you’re going to stay anonymous, don’t have significant expectations on growing a sizable, lasting audience. In fact, the person who was singing The Online Stalker Blues with me recently was frustrated about his/her(?) slow path to growing a follower base. This person has done a great job of engaging, but without more sharing to build a relationship, the direct engagement will wear thin.

4. You seem as if you can’t be trusted

When you decide to remain completely anonymous (no name, no identifiable avatar, no website, no location, no personal clues in the bio), it raises questions about WHY you won’t share even one visible factoid about yourself and/or your identity. If you persist in hiding everything even from those who have made an effort to reach out and engage with you, prepare to be viewed with increasing levels of suspicion.

5. People won’t be as willing to put up with your social media crap

If you want to dive in and be mouthy online, sharing information about yourself gets you more latitude to do it. The more information you share about yourself in your Twitter profile, the more likely you are to get a sustained audience to listen to you mouthing off about what’s pissing you off so much. Recently, somebody with a donut for an avatar, a name which suggested he knew LOTS about social media, and twenty Twitter followers was tweeting frustration in my direction. When he didn’t like a #SXSW-related tweet from a panel I was listening to recapping the event, I really wanted to tell him to stick it. Instead, I tried to be nice and suggest why the tweet and others form the panel were helpful. When he kept it up his “superior to you” attitude (in tweets he subsequently deleted), he simply became pitiable. If he ever tweets me again, he won’t be getting any (positive) attention.

6. You’re wasting the full benefits of your social media effort

When you’re spending a lot of time on Twitter without identifying yourself, you’re wasting the positive outcomes of your time investment: creating stickiness with your profile (as people follow and attach to your presence on other social media channels) and pass along value to your content (where people you interact with are sharing your content and suggesting to others they seek you out as well). When there’s no way to know who are, who do you think is going to recommend that someone else seek you out?

Do you put up with people on social media singing The Online Stalker Blues?

Do you spend much time with people online who are anonymous and coy about sharing ANY information? If you do spend time with someone who comes off as an online stalker, what motivates you to do it?

If I’m missing something about why this strategy makes sense, I’d love to understand what it is. - 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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What to blog about and how to do it is a frequent search bringing people to the Brainzooming blog. This demand for ideas relative to blogging has prompted a considerable amount of blog-oriented content the past 18 months.

That much content on a particular topic always prompts requests for a post that pulls together and organizes the content in one place.

Since I’m conducting a blogging workshop on creating fantastic content for a business blog, we’re meeting two needs in one in this post with a compilation of blogging content that also serves as a primer for participants in the content class.

There are nearly forty articles organized, but if you feel as if you’re still struggling with how blogging can support your business strategy and where to get started, email (info@brainzooming.com) or call us (816-509-5320). We’ll get your business-producing social media effort going in a smart, successful direction.

Deciding to Have a Blog and Objective Setting

• Top 10 Reasons Your Organization Doesn’t Need a Blog . . . Today – It’s a trick headline. Your business does need a blog, starting now.
• “The 6 Social Media Metrics You Must Track” – Before starting your blog, download this free Brainzooming overview on how you should think about metrics and the impact a blog can have on your business.
• Blogging – 10 Permissions for Freelance and Small Business People – Trust us. If you’ve been hesitating on starting a blog for your small business for a bunch of lame reasons you’ve blown out of proportion, read this right now.

Developing Your Content Marketing and Brand Personality

• Creating Intriguing Social Media Content – 3 Fundamental Steps  - It’s not hard to create compelling content.
• A Strategic Creative Brief – 4 Benefits for Your Communications Efforts – You’ll have a stronger more sustainable blog if you begin with a strong idea of where you’re headed and who you’re targeting with your blog.
• Outside-In Blogging Strategy – Creating Robust Social Media Topics – Look outside your organization for what to blog about and identifying regular content becomes much easier.
• Social Media Content Personality Audit – Is Your Brand Personality There? – Simply because you are blogging for business doesn’t mean your personality needn’t show through in your content. No personality translates to no reason for readers to seek out your content.

Creating a Regular Blogging Schedule and Editorial Calendar

• Deciding Whether to Ditch Your Blogging Schedule – What Do You Want to Achieve? – How often you blog comes down to your business objectives, not whether you are inspired to write.
• Our Daily Blog Strategy – 5 Reasons The Brainzooming Blog Won’t Ditch It – Here’s why a high-frequency blog has made sense for us targeting a B2B market. And there are even more reasons since this post originally appeared.
• An Editorial Calendar: An Age-Old Collaborative Work – Creating an editorial calendar helps you stay better on track and publishing your blog regularly.
• Content Marketing – Space It Out Over Time – Manage your content, your time, and the expectations you place on your audience.

What to Blog About

• Social Media Content Ideation: Think – Know – Do – A tremendously efficient way to generate hundreds of content marketing  ideas.
• What to Blog About? 187 Ideas and Topics for Blogs, All in One Place – Our biggest list of links to specific blog topic ideas for business-oriented blogging.
• What to Blog About – 10 Ideas for Blogging through the New Year – There are specific topics you can blog about near the end of year when many blogs halt content creation and take advantage of readers looking for end of year information.
• Social Networking, Personal Relationships & 7 Content Strategy Questions – For business owners considering social media, there can be concerns about how much they reveal about themselves. This post contains advice and help to work through those concerns.

Structuring Your Blog Posts

• In Praise of Short Blog Posts – Blog posts don’t have to be 1,500 words. Write shorter to save time and trouble – for you and your readers.
• List Posts – 2 Tips for Creating More Popular Blog Posts – List posts work, plain and simple. Some list posts are long; some list posts are short. This gives you a rationale for when you should use which.

Blogging for B2B and Larger Companies

• A Collaborative Business Blog: Handling Senior Management Concerns – When the idea of blogging has to be sold to others, you may have some challenges. Here are some ways to counter typical concerns.
• Blog Topic Ideas – Social Media Content Strategy for a Large B2B Company – While these content marketing ideas apply to any business, larger B2B companies have tremendous content creation opportunities, if they take advantage of them.
• Social Media Policy – Whats and Whens Behind Your Guidelines – Questions to help you think through issues to consider in customizing your social media policy.
• Social Media Mistakes You Shouldn’t Be Making in Business-to-Business - Based on real-life examples, these are easy to correct social media mistakes business-to-business companies may be making.

Making the Most of Your Blogging and Social Media Time

• Social Media Productivity – 13 Tips to Maximize Your Time – Make all your content work as hard for you as possible in multiple venues.
• 15 Ideas to Make Your DIY Social Media More Successful – If you have few people and a lot to do on social media, these ideas will help maximize your effort.
• 20 Strategies for Making Your Solo Social Media Effort More Successful – 20 more ideas to get the greatest impact from an efficient implementation.
• Search Engine Optimization Strategy – Getting Smart on the Essentials – An available resource to get started on understanding search engine optimization to improve your blog traffic.

Getting Your Blog Content Seen

• Social Media – 5 Tips to Sharing an Evergreen Blog Post – Once a blog post is written, take advantage of every opportunity to use the content repeatedly in appropriate situations.
• SEO and Keyword Research Tool Use – 3 Blog Traffic Growth Ideas – Tools to help you become a better search engine optimization writer while you write.
• Content Curation – 5 Strategies from Celebrity Entertainment News Shows – Look to cheesy entertainment news shows for ideas you can incorporate into your social media sharing strategy.

Blogging Tips and Tricks

• What to Blog About and How – 25 Blogging Lessons from 5 Years and Social Media Content – Lessons in Creating Fantastic Content – Recaps of lessons learned from years of daily blogging.
• Blogging Success – 18 Blogging Ideas You Haven’t Read on Brainzooming – Ideas we haven’t pursued for the Brainzooming blog gleaned from a prominent blogger’s webinar on social media strategy.
• Reduce, Reuse, Recycle – 9 Ways to Green Your Blog – 9 tips to get more mileage from your social media effort.
• What to Blog About – 3 Ways Blogging Generates More Blog Posts – Once you get started blogging, it gets easier . . . most of the time!
• Social Media Content – 7 Ways to Repurpose What You’ve Written – More ideas on using what you’ve created over and over and over again. Then repeating.

Getting Help for Your Social Media Effort

• 3 Must-Haves for Driving Social Media – Just being young and having a Facebook page doesn’t mean someone is adept at social media. Look for these three characteristics in your social media team.
• Need a “Repair Your Blog” Tip? – 9 Ideas from Restaurant Impossible – When your blog needs a fix, here are nine ideas to consider when putting together your repair plan.

• Resuscitating a Near-Death Blog - Five steps to getting a floundering blogging effort back on its feet.

• Social Media Expertise – Why Wouldn’t You Demand It? – If someone is trying to sell you social media services, but they don’t seem to engage in social media for their own business, you need to ask some hard questions.
• Who Is Creating Social Media Content in Your Organization? – Depending on what you want from your content marketing, you may have to settle or enlist various people within your organization to participate.

Mike Brown

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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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Suppose you used to be a blogger with a healthy blog, but because of some unforeseen accident, your site has suffered a blog heart attack. Your content production has collapsed and there are only faint indications your blog is still alive.  If that sounds familiar, here are five steps you can take as part of your blogging strategy to administer CPR and try resuscitating a near-death blog.

If it’s a personal blog, start at Step 1. If you’re evaluating what to do with a business blog, start at Step 2 – you simply need to get it going again!

Step 1. Evaluate whether you REALLY want to resuscitate your blog

There must be some reasons – good or not – why your blog needs resuscitating. As a result, it makes sense to see if your blog might not be dead already. Maybe the topic or format has run its course, and whether you realize it or not, there are “do not resuscitate” orders you should heed. Check your Google Analytics. Is the blog is still getting traffic? Is anyone asking what happened to the blog? If not, maybe it’s simply time to move on to another project.

Step 2. Move into action and re-establish some pattern of content flow

If you’re moving ahead to save your blog, start with some type of regular content, even if it’s once a month. It’s imperative to demonstrate – more to yourself than to anyone else – you can sustain a regular pace. One way to do this is to go with very short content, even if that’s a break with your past practices. At this point, consistency with whatever schedule you decide upon is an important step to re-establish life in your blog.

Step 3. Go light on the explanations at first

Rather than making a big production about your absence, simply restart publishing. Unless there’s been a significant brand promise you’ve breached with your audience by letting your blog flounder, just get started publishing again as if nothing happened. After you see some signs of life and decent vital signs, then perhaps go back and catch readers up on what was going on during the blog’s absence.

Step 4. Reinvigorate your content distribution channels

Unless your blog is deeply introspective and doesn’t depend on anyone ever seeing your content, you need to get your old audience back in the game. Get the word out on your typical social media channels (assuming you haven’t let those flounder too) and start the work of re-building your readership. Perhaps tweak the blog to ensure more than ever it’s easy to subscribe via email and simple to share your content on appropriate social media networks.

Step 5. Once you stabilize the blog, consider a re-launch as part of your blogging strategy

If you’ve kept up with your blogging lite schedule and starting to see reader interest once again, think about re-launching your blog. Is there a new design that better fits where you’re going now? Are there new types of content that fit better with your interests and schedule? Do opportunities exist to add new channels to your social media sharing that will help dramatically grow what you’re doing with the blog? If so, go ahead and dive in with a big splash and a dramatically different approach to what you’ve done before.

Do you have experience resuscitating a near-death blog?

If you have been successful at resuscitating a near-death blog, what worked for you? And I you’re thinking about the need to get a blog of your own going again, what’s been standing in your way? - 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 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

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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