The Brainzooming Group

Here is another interview from the Greater Kansas City Chamber of Commerce Innovation Conference, where The Brainzooming Group produced live event social media content.  One panelist on the manufacturing and transportation panel, Merlin Spencer, DBA, talks in this video about the concept of “master doers.”  He describes these individuals as the people inside an organization who specialize in getting the vital functions of a business moving forward and completed.

Merlin Spencer’s comments resonated strongly because of the link between the “master doers” concept and the 3 vital audiences for strategic thinking approach The Brainzooming Group uses in facilitating strategic planning and innovation sessions. We’ve repeatedly seen the best strategic thinking results when participants with front line experience, functional expertise, and creative orientations all participate in a facilitated strategy session.

“Master doers” are a subset of the front line experience group, and they are very often misused in strategic innovation work. They’re frequently either excluded (because they don’t fit a typical view of creativity) or they wind up dominating a strategy session (because of the false belief that those without comparable experience are unable to meaningfully contribute to strategic business issues). This fundamental misuse is why we expend concerted effort ensuring the right mix of people and introducing innovation exercises so the three groups, who view the world very differently, can work together constructively, innovatively, and successfully.

The strategic advice here is to examine the attendee list the next time you’re involved in a strategy, innovation, or planning discussion and make sure you have some, but not all, master doers participating. – Mike Brown

The Brainzooming Group helps make smart organizations more successful by rapidly expanding their strategic options and creating innovative plans they can efficiently implement.  To learn how we can bring out the best innovative thinking in your team email us at brainzooming@gmail.com or call us at 816-509-5320.

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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Today is the Greater Kansas City Chamber of Commerce Innovation Conference, where The Brainzooming Group will be producing social media content working with a team of seasoned marketing communications and social media professionals.

To get a great idea of the the panel sessions at the Innovation Conference, the video below highlights four of the five sessions on industry-specific topics. To follow tweets from the Innovation Conference, the live Twitter feed at the bottom of the post will feature the social media team’s live tweets throughout the day using the hashtag #GKCCCInno. For a full social media channel overview for the Innovation Conference, please visit Monday’s Brainzooming post. – 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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BP video, via AP (from Cleveland.com)

Last week, John King of CNN was covering the Gulf oil spill in front of what must have been 16 different live camera feeds of BP trying to get the spill capped.  Amid all the discussions about the impact of the Gulf oil spill in deteriorating the BP brand, this scene suggested another question to consider:

Is your brand ready to have 16 cameras covering your service recovery efforts?

That’s another scary thought from this whole fiasco that other companies need to be considering and planning for as a possibility. Because even if it isn’t 16 cameras, it’s very likely your lowest paid front line employee is on camera (or being tweeted about) as he or she is (hopefully) trying to satisfy a pissed off customer. And if the video isn’t available in real-time, then it’s probably going to be posted online shortly after the service recovery takes place.

So again, ask yourself: Does your organization have a service recovery strategy that’s prepared to be shown to the world? – 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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We’ve talked before about The Brainzooming™ Group strategy for producing live event social media content. Rather than relying exclusively on content being generated by attendees, The Brainzooming Group strategy focuses on producing social media content through a team covering a conference or industry event across social media channels. In essence, the team we organize is a small news operation reporting on conference events via video, images, audio, and the written word.

At the recent 2010 Business Marketing Association Engage conference, our social media team numbered more than fifteen. It included a mix of business marketers, marketing communications professionals, and social media specialists. With that much talent assembled, we struck a balance between ensuring the event’s coverage from a news perspective (through preparing an extensive live social media reporting primer and editorial schedule), while providing freedom for the social media journalists to interact with attendees and presenters in creating spontaneous content onsite.

Beyond the event’s planned content, the BMA social media team’s creativity produced other great videos. Here are three that emerged from their onsite creativity.

The first video is a recap of the Business Marketing Association Engage conference social team’s efforts during the three day event. It was produced by Tim Dreyer of Zebra Technologies and features team members describing their conference social media roles.

The next video extended our brief post-presentation video interviews by featuring a longer, day-before discussion with author Chris Brogan. It includes a great behind-the-scenes look at how Chris adapted his topic and delivery specifically for the BMA Engage audience. The video was done by multi-dimensional social media team members Nate Riggs and Becky Johns (both future social media luminaries on par with Chris Brogan, btw).

Given the relationship Nate and Becky have with Chris, they also shot this funny video spoof about Help a Reporter Out (HARO) creator Peter Shankman, with Chris Brogan doing a send-up of Shankman’s manic style.

This video has already turned into a skydiving dare between the two social media rock stars, with someone’s favorite charity due for a $1000 gift because of it.

All part of the fun coupled with the real business benefits of bringing together great talent, providing some structure and letting them create rich social media content for and about an event. If you’d like to explore how The Brainzooming Group can do the same thing for your conference, contact us. – - 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 seeing this video as the blog post on Friday, June 4, 2010, it means things have been hectic at the Business Marketing Association Engage conference and there wasn’t any time to do an update blog. if that’s the case, we’ll get you caught up next week on the last week happenings.

In the mean time, enjoy this cool stop-motion post-it note video. Got to love those post-it notes! - 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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A recent post highlighted strategies for creating an informal social media team within your organization to help carry out social media strategy.

Debra Feldman was nice enough to tweet a link but gave it the frown emoticon for not being applicable to solopreneurs. I promised to create a comparable list for individuals in business for themselves. Hopefully, these twenty strategies, based on experience with Brainzooming, will help those building their small businesses (or personal brands) more effectively manage social media.

Managing Your Presence

• Select several social media platforms supporting your business strategy and objectives; concentrate your presence on these alone. You might have one location for content (i.e., a blog or micro-blog), a second for networking (maybe Twitter or LinkedIn), and a third for community interaction (Facebook or LinkedIn).
• Divide social media time into 3 roughly equal parts – reading and monitoring social media in your topic area, commenting and participating on other peoples’ sites, and creating content for your own site. From this framework, decide how much time weekly you can invest on social media. Really work to stick to your time expectations.
• Before blogging, determine how many times monthly you expect to blog. Pre-write that many posts to see if the frequency is viable and to build a month-long content cushion for when time is limited.
• Choose creating and consistently delivering less content over wild swings in activity. Faithfully writing one blog post weekly and three tweets daily is better than three posts your first week with lots of Twitter activity then going silent for weeks.

Generating Content

• Exploit your best communications talents aggressively in your social media effort. These might include article writing, headline writing, shooting video, illustrations, photos, etc.  Design a content strategy allowing you to use these talents to be as efficient in creating content as possible.
• Write down at least two potential blog topic ideas daily where they’ll be available later as idea starters.
• Cut your writing time and keep it short. You don’t need to (and probably shouldn’t) write thousand word blog posts. Stick to one idea in a couple of hundred words.
• Save tweets and comments you make on other blogs to use as the basis for blog posts.
• Solicit material from your audience, providing a brief description of what type of content, topics, and format you’re seeking.
• At a minimum, set up Google Alerts on relevant topics to create readily available content for sharing online.
• Find an intern from a local university to assist your business in its social media strategy.

Promoting Your Presence

• Use common hashtags and keywords to increase visibility and pass along mentions.
• Place social media buttons on your blog to make it easy for readers to share your content within their own social networks.
• Sync your various social media sites so one item feeds multiple platforms (i.e., send your tweet about a blog post to LinkedIn and Facebook automatically).
• Offer simple, fun give-aways to your audience to incent participation in commenting, retweeting, social bookmarking, etc.
• Take time to write a brief bio and company overview for use on every social media site. Use a service such as KnowEm.com to secure your identity on many platforms, with links back to your main sites.
• Create an informal network of friends (onine and IRL) with relevant networks and agree to tweet about each others’ work.

Continuous Improvement

• Attend in-person or webinar training on effectively and efficiently using social media applications to build business.
• Identify someone within your network who is more knowledgeable or efficient at social media than you. After figuring out how to use your best talents to help them, offer to trade for regular help (i.e., tips) on your social media effort.
• Do at least an informal ROI assessment – is your social media effort generating the type and volume of business results that make your time investment worthwhile?

There are certainly many other ideas and technical approaches you can use to be more efficient in your social media implementation. What things have you tried that are working for you?  – Mike Brown

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 brainzooming@gmail.com or call 816-509-5320 to learn how we can develop an integrated social media strategy for your brand.

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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Over the weekend, our cat Coco (or “my cat” as she was known), passed away. She had a rare tumor, and for a number of months, we knew it wouldn’t be that much longer before this happened.

I won’t get maudlin, but the story of Coco’s adoption holds a couple of solid lessons.

Cyndi had wanted a black cat for some time. While waiting for her to finish at a store in our nearby shopping center, I saw, in the car’s rear view mirror, a Humane Society volunteer carry a caged black cat toward the early Saturday morning pet adoption just down the way.

When Cyndi returned, we decided to see about adopting the black cat. She was sitting rather forlornly in her cage when we found her. In talking with the volunteer, we discovered she was a Manx kitten, i.e. she had no tail. The volunteer explained how this caused potential problems and made these cats more difficult to care for than the typical cat. She asked us whether we had other cats and if they went out doors. After answering a few more questions, we were told that we wouldn’t be able to adopt this kitten.

We were surprised but went on our way. Later, we figured that beyond the fact we told them our two cats went out in the back yard, the fact we had gone over to the shopping center before getting all spruced up in the morning may have been a factor. Granted, we probably looked pretty scruffy, but I’d never known being unshaven to be grounds for being denied the opportunity to adopt a pet.

Running errands that afternoon, we decided to go back and see if the cat were still there. Sure enough she was, and now, nicely dressed, we got none of the questions we’d received in the morning. Instead, we were welcomed and within a very short time, were headed home with Coco.

That was nearly fourteen years ago.  We talk often about how in a world where people increasingly look disheveled, the way we looked that Saturday really did matter in how we were judged. We also remind ourselves about all the joy we’d have missed in our lives if we’d have taken the first “no” as the final answer.

To close, here’s a quirky moment from Sunday night. I was looking at a video I’d shot of Coco earlier this year when Clementine, our last remaining cat, hopped up on the desk, as she so frequently does. It’s an unstaged, double video goodbye between the two of them. One in January and one today.

I’ll admit this post was kind of light on strategy and innovation. Thanks for reading it anyway though, because I just had to write it – 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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