In the spirit of re-establishing a presence on Innovation Excellence with new content this year, here are two recent innovation articles appearing there exclusively:
You may find these two innovation articles beneficial, and the entire Innovation Excellence website, with a wide variety of authors, is definitely worth checking out.
It seems there are so many awards competitions for businesses, if you want to pursue them. Unless a business person is simply big on expending the time and cost to submit award applications – or the follow-on dollars often resulting from winning – it’s valuable to take a strategic perspective when deciding which business awards to pursue.
Consider these 5 strategic questions to decide what awards your business seeks:
1. Is the award name and business category consistent with our brand’s positioning?
2. Does the awarding organization have both name recognition and credibility with our audience?
3. Is the award selective and distinctive (i.e., not every organization who is nominated wins)?
4. Will competing for the award provide discernible marketing or business advantages?
5. Will winning the award provide discernible marketing or business advantages?
Beyond additional opportunity costs on the time and effort to submit an application, these five strategic questions can help decide when an award makes sense for your organization to seek. The more “yes” answers to these strategic questions, the more strategic sense it makes to seek a particular award.
For Brainzooming, being on the Top 40 Innovation Bloggers list makes a lot of strategic sense, as opposed to another award “nomination” we just received. The award name runs counter to how we position The Brainzooming Group, and one tweet about the contest said a single company had submitted 100 other companies as nominees. Those two "no" answers on questions one and three were enough to tell us to save our time on this business award nomination.
We’re entering the heavy entertainment awards season on TV. Couple that with the February 3rd Super Bowl, and you have everything necessary for the fun #EXP (short for “Experience”) Twitter chats sponsored by friend and author Jim Joseph. While Jim bills the #EXP Twitter chats as focused on the marketing during these broadcasts, they quickly extend to hilarious and snarky running commentaries (or commentweeting) on the people, places, and miscues of live television. You have to be on Twitter to participate, but if you are, please join us for the upcoming schedule using the hashtag for each of the #EXP Twitter chats:
Trust me – even if the broadcasts aren’t entertaining, the #EXP Twitter chats will be! - Mike Brown