Innovation Perspectives - Connecting Social Networks to Innovation

30 Ideas for Using Social Networks to Help You Be More Innovative

This is the first of several 'Innovation Perspectives' articles we will publish this week from multiple authors to get different perspectives on 'What is the role of social media in innovation? (Either inside or outside the organization)'. Here is the initial perspective in the series:

by Mike Brown

What is the role of social media and networks in innovation?

Given the collaborative and interactive nature of social networks, they are a natural venue for enhancing innovation across many dimensions. Here are 30 possibilities you could pursue to make social networking a more overt part of your innovation efforts:


Identifying Unarticulated Needs

• Set up a social media monitoring system to see where and how customers are talking about your brand and related issues.
  
• Sponsor a contest to have customers identify challenges they're facing (that you might be able to solve).
  
• Listen for social media participants expressing challenges you could help solve.
  
• Sponsor your own Twitter-based chat for customers in your industry to talk about topics of interest.
  
• Recruit customers to video ideas, issues, and problems they face and post them. Reward ideas that get used.

Tapping New Expertise

• Identify outside experts / partners to potentially incorporate into your innovation efforts.
  
• Spot young talent with new perspectives to bring into your organization through internships or permanent jobs.
  
• Participate in #innochat on Twitter every Thursday at 12 noon ET (US).
  
• Sponsor and promote an open competition to solve a challenge your business is facing related to innovation.
  
• Suggest a monthly topic for Blogging Innovation related to an area where you're looking to be more innovative.
  
• Develop a follower base focused on innovation areas for your business.
  
• Follow the experts followed by the people you look to for innovative perspectives online.

Gathering Different Inputs and Information

• Lurk in competitors' communities to see what new things they're talking about.
  
• Use a blog to write about issues you're addressing and solicit readers to offer their perspectives.
  
• Regularly feed front end innovation questions to your community for input.
  
• Give Flip cameras to employees throughout your company. Have them post video ideas on your private social network.
  
• Participate in social networks targeted at analogous businesses/industries to see how they think about similar issues to ones you face.

Enabling Innovative Collaboration

• Invite your customers to a community to share ideas with one another.
  
• Listen to social media conversations as a source of random inputs for ideation.
  
• Use online chat environments to push and expand ideas you are pursuing.
  
• Set up a private social network to provide a forum for more detailed innovation-based conversations.
  
• Create more active connections and dialogue across boundaries in your own organization.
  
• Summarize and post direct dialogues between innovators in your company to allow a broader group to comment, respond, and adapt an idea.
  
• Share fragments of new ideas which colleagues (both near and far flung) can build on and transform through their input.
  
• After innovative collaborative relationships are developed online, make a concerted effort to meet in real life to move the collaboration to new levels.

Solving Challenging Problems

• Feature your internal experts more broadly toward making them available to help solve challenges in your industry.
  
• Provide multiple social media channels for customers to complain directly to you with product issues.
  
• Offer to help competitor's customers solve problems they're having with your competitors' products / services.
  
• Connect your outside partners more effectively in a social community to allow them to better discuss ways your organization can be more innovative.
  
• Use images from Flickr or videos on YouTube to help communicate early stage innovation concepts.

I'm not sure these 30 ideas have even lightly scratched the surface, so let's hear what you've done that you'd add to the list!



You can check out all of the 'Innovation Perspectives' articles from the different contributing authors on 'How should firms develop the organizational structure, culture, and incentives (e.g., for teams) to encourage successful innovation?' by clicking the link in this sentence.

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Mike Brown is an award-winning innovator in strategy, communications, and experience marketing. He authors the Brainzooming^TM blog, and serves as the company's chief Catalyst. He wrote the ebook "Taking the NO Out of InNOvation" and is a frequent keynote presenter.

Seven Ways to Get Ready for Change

by Mike Brown

It is important to keep a creative and innovative perspective going amid dramatic change. The seven lessons below, originally shared in an abbreviated form on Twitter, were written across several days of thinking strategically about how Brainzooming is progressing and how to move it ahead even more dramatically.

If you're in a situation where you're contemplating making a dramatic change, consider these ideas and how you can get a head start now, before the change takes place:

1. Flexibility is freeing. Design your life strategically to create future options for yourself. You never know when you'll need them.


2. Create situations where you can make as many of your learning mistakes as possible before it really matters. While the intensity will naturally be less, you'll be that much more ready when everything counts.


3. It's one thing to build a network. It's quite another to effectively use it to benefit others and yourself. Beyond simply helping others in your network, work on how you can and will ask others for their mutual assistance as well.


4. Never depend on any one thing as a 'sure' thing. Always be prepared for what you'll do "just in case."


5. You may not have your elevator speech down pat the first time you get on the elevator. It may take a lot of elevator rides to refine it. Start the process now.


6. Borrow liberally and tweak ideas. But be sure to extend credit even MORE liberally than you're borrowing!


7. Don't be crippled by someone telling you, "It's the worst time in the world," to do what your attempting to do. In reality, it's the worst time in the world to tell someone it's the worst time in the world to pursue their dreams.

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Mike Brown is an award-winning innovator in strategy, communications, and experience marketing. He authors the Brainzooming^TM blog, and serves as the company's chief Catalyst. He wrote the ebook "Taking the NO Out of InNOvation" and is a frequent keynote presenter.

Your Personal Brand

Is it mainly personal or brand? Or both?

by Mike Brown

Following-up yesterday's article that started out as a Twitter DM conversation, today's does too. Kate Wilson and I got into a discussion about maintaining multiple Twitter identities for different content streams.

As my personal branding has evolved, I've switched my Twitter focus from @mikebrown to @Brainzooming. Why? When I first signed up for Twitter, the Brainzooming name was still 7 months from popping into my head. Beyond these two names, I have a couple of related ones for live tweeting, and another active account (along with a corresponding humor blog) that's not affiliated with my name or the Brainzooming brand.

Kate's point was you shouldn't need multiple Twitter identities. Instead, she recommends letting your full personality come through in a single identity. People will either accept your full range of messages and personality or not; you ultimately stick with the 'takers' and drop the 'leavers'. She commented that first and foremost, personal branding is about the person, and you shouldn't need a strategy on how to be a person.

Her last comment really hit on the fundamental difference we have on this topic. To me a personal brand is equal parts person and brand. From that, it's only natural you'd apply brand strategy principles to how you carry out your personal brand. This opens the door to multiple personal brands with different promises, attributes, and affiliations to your main brand. Some people have one audience; others have more than one audience. In that case, it doesn't make sense to think that each audience wants exactly the same things from your brand.

Kate's point of view forced me to grapple with whether having multiple personal brands is disingenuous. While she got me teetering on the idea through her tweetering, ultimately I'm sticking with my approach to personal brand strategy, although it's always open to change.

In the interim, what's your take on the topic?


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Mike Brown is an award-winning innovator in strategy, communications, and experience marketing. He authors the Brainzooming^TM blog, and serves as the company's chief Catalyst. He wrote the ebook "Taking the NO Out of InNOvation" and is a frequent keynote presenter.

5 Key Questions for Quick Decisions

Don't Overthink It

by Mike Brown

I used to ask weekly on Twitter what strategic or innovation topics people would like to see addressed in Brainzooming articles. One request from back then was to write about how not to over think business strategy.

Having been in a business where it seemed you'd hear "don't over think it" five times a day, the topic hit a little too close to home, and I didn't ever do a post on it.

Now, with a little distance, I offer some strategic thinking questions to ask your team when you need to quickly move into convergent thinking mode during business planning:

1. Does this issue really matter for our business opportunity? Will it materially change any important business results?


2. What if we could only implement one innovative strategy in this situation? What would it be?


3. If we had only 25% of the time (or resources), would we concentrate our efforts on this business opportunity?


4. Without any additional information, what does our experience suggest as the most successful potential business option?


5. If we had to halt our business planning and make a decision in the next five minutes, what would it be?

Couple any of these strategic questions with a fixed amount of time for dialogue (i.e., "We'll talk about this for 10 minutes") and a required decision (i.e., "When time's up, you have to briefly state what business decision you'd recommend or the course of action you'd take right now").

You may not get the most rigorously vetted, innovative ideas, but using a strategic thinking exercise and a limited amount of discussion time will help quickly catalyze your strategy decision so you can move to implementation.


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Mike Brown is an award-winning innovator in strategy, communications, and experience marketing. He authors the Brainzooming^TM blog, and serves as the company's chief Catalyst. He wrote the ebook "Taking the NO Out of InNOvation" and is a frequent keynote presenter.

Innovation Metrics - A Whole Brain Strategy

by Mike Brown

Metrics strategy is a vital topic relative to innovation. Depsite how important metrics strategy is, it's a challenging one for many businesses when it comes to innovation. Going back through my own experiences and secondary research on innovation metrics, here are a few starting thoughts on developing your metrics strategy:

Begin developing your innovation metrics strategy by determining what factors drive ROI. Specifically identify which factors increase positive business returns and which reduce necessary investment. Starting with the end result in mind will better align the overall innovation effort toward delivering a positive return on investment.

Adopt a "whole-brain metrics" orientation. This means consciously trying to capture both quantitative (left brain) and qualitative (right brain) metrics. Doing so, you satisfy the financial and performance-oriented need for numerical targets and tracking. Adding qualitative metrics into the equation, however, also provides the basis to match the numbers with stories, images, and other insights, providing a more complete performance picture.

Within the whole-brain approach, consider three distinct types of metrics related to innovation:

• Culture Metrics - If your innovation efforts are part of an overall push to instill a more innovative approach to a department, business unit, or company, culture-based metrics help track how solidly the effort has taken hold. Quantitative metrics in this area may be more activity-oriented, i.e., how many people are participating in innovation efforts and what percent of employees have been trained in creative or strategic thinking disciplines. Qualitative metrics can tie to success stories on personal & professional development or other workplace-based changes.


• Process Metrics - The second group of innovation metrics relate to systematic innovation activities. Quantitatively, it could be how many ideas have been developed or are in various parts of the innovation pipeline. Longer term, it could incorporate how many patents have been filed and received. Qualitative measures in this area might relate to process learnings or images / descriptions of prototypes developed through innovation efforts.


• Return-Based Metrics - The third group includes ROI, ROC, new products/services as a percent of sales, etc. Here too though, it's important to augment the quantitative measures with qualitative elements, such as success stories, learnings (from both successes and mistakes), and customer comments (letters, email, online and social media-based responses, etc.).

This is hardly an exhaustive treatment on innovation metrics strategy, but it can be a good starter for expanding what you're doing now. If, however, you're doing more currently on innovation metrics strategy, then please share what's working for you.


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Mike Brown is an award-winning innovator in strategy, communications, and experience marketing. He authors the Brainzooming TM blog, and serves as the company's chief Catalyst. He wrote the ebook "Taking the NO Out of InNOvation" and is a frequent keynote presenter.

5 Ways to Prepare for a Social Media Disaster

by Mike Brown

I watched the @ThatKevinSmith and @SouthwestAir brouhaha erupt live on Twitter but didn't write about it last week. Bunches of tweeters and bloggers hashing out who was right and wrong based on second, third, or five hundredth-hand information simply wasn't interesting enough to warrant adding to the noise.

Getting ready for a social media presentation this week though, I've been thinking about service defects and service recovery in the world of social networking.

I sought an analogy to help think strategically about how a company prepares for an angry customer who wants to be heard and starts tweeting incessantly: handling a hostage situation is very comparable. Rather than a person though, it's a brand's reputation being taken hostage by a customer threatening irreparable harm unless demands are met. With the one-to-many communication capabilities of social media, this type of threat has never been more credible.

Here are five hostage negotiation principles and related implications for preparing to handle when your brand's good name is being held hostage:

1. Have a negotiating team ready - This means more than a single person monitoring Twitter and handling responses. In hostage negotiations, the primary negotiator, who is ideally the sole contact with the hostage taker, is joined by a coach/commander in charge of the situation and personnel along with a secondary negotiator to help monitor, listen, and offer input.


• Strategic Questions - Does your company have a pre-identified team and protocols for how it will work together in a social media-based service recovery effort? And how would you incorporate front-line employees when you're trying to recover from a service failure playing out both at one of your company's locations and online?


2. Gather as much solid information as possible right away - Beyond having standard questions to run through, there's added complexity in a social media-based service recovery effort. Suppose the customer issue IS taking place in-person. With social media monitoring removed from the scene, it may not even be possible from a customer's messages to determine where the issue is occurring. This creates an interesting implication for enacting rapid service recovery.


• Strategic Questions - If it's clear the issue is taking place in the presence of front line employees, what steps will you take to identify the location and establish communication with them immediately? Since multi-person communication with the angry customer is almost a given, how will you ensure your multiple contacts are speaking with one message?


3. Connect on a personal level - Social media throws a whole new wrinkle into this, especially when you want to move interaction with the customer to a private messaging stream. If it's even available, the company may have outdated phone information on the customer, making direct contact challenging to establish. A corporate tweeter may have to try to get a brand kidnapper to 'follow' the company so direct messaging can take place. And typically, the corporate tweeter is communicating under a corporate account without a personal avatar. It makes establishing a personal tone of, "I'm here to try and fix the situation," difficult when the customer is receiving tweets with the corporate logo.


• Strategic Questions - Are you following your customers on social media? Do you have multiple ways to reach out to customers? Do your company social media people have work-related, personal accounts they can use to reach out specifically in these cases?


4. Communicate openly and actively listen - When you have face-to-face contact, listening, and the silence that goes along with it, is easy to convey. It's a little tougher via phone. But in a medium geared toward short, back-and-forth messages, a pause associated with listening or contemplation comes across as being distracted or ignoring the other person.


• Strategic Question - Beyond having plans for migrating service recovery conversations to private channels, are you actively training your social media response team in dealing with the dynamics of these new service recovery situations?


5. Show empathy - One way hostage negotiators demonstrate empathy is by delivering on aspects of the demands that have been made. Granting small, detailed requests is done in real-life hostage situations to slow and drag them out, which is desirable. In a service recovery situation (especially one playing out in public), the last thing you want to do is extend it.


• Strategic Questions - Who is on your social media service response team? Have you included your best customer service people - the ones with strong understanding of what you can do to solve customer problems and are best at understanding issues from a customer's point of view?

No matter what your company is doing in social media, you have to address this reality. Even if your company doesn't want a proactive social media presence, there's a greater chance every day your customers will be talking about your brand via social media. When they do, and the discussion gets negative and brand threatening, you better have thought about your strategy, with a plan for what you'll do.


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Mike Brown is an award-winning innovator in strategy, communications, and experience marketing. He authors the Brainzooming TM blog, and serves as the company's chief Catalyst. He wrote the ebook "Taking the NO Out of InNOvation" and is a frequent keynote presenter.

Don't Strive for Perfection

by Mike Brown

Last Thursday, I presented a session on 'Linking Blogs to Business Strategy' at Kansas City's Central Exchange. While discussing editing blog posts, one potential blogger asked about overcoming the problem of perfectionism when writing. I rather flippantly answered psychological help might be in order.

While trying to be funny, the answer wasn't completely facetious. I love when things happen exactly on strategy. Through years of observation, however, I've come to realize very few mistakes mean even a 'figurative' end to the world. Why drive yourself crazy trying to solve every little issue.

This realization began in earnest early in my career, when another person and I were working on a matrix comparing our company to major competitors. It was an arduous project, with many revisions and lots of eyes (including eyes senior to ours) reviewing various drafts. It was eventually published for several thousand sales and management people in the company.

Everything was fine until I received a call from someone who pointed out our company's goal of "reducing customer exceptions" was mistakenly printed as "reducing customer expectations." Figuring we were both fired, my co-worker and I went to our boss and informed her of the mistake.

We didn't get fired. In fact, no one else ever came forward as even noticing the problem.

Despite lots of effort to avoid them, mistakes happen all the time in life. Not that I condone poor performance, but don't waste your time seeking needless (and often self-defined, not customer-defined) perfection or losing your temper when mistakes do happen. You'll be much more content and better off if you use a different strategy.

When mistakes occur around you, look hard for what's actually better because of the mistake than what was originally planned.

In the case of the "lower customer expectations" gaffe, what was better was it made me a more careful editor. Does that mean I'm a perfectionist in writing. Not necessarily. It means I've learned and developed a whole repertoire of techniques for overcoming proofreading problems.

For you other perfectionists out there, what strategy do you employ to protect yourself from the tendency to be too correct?


Editor's note: Too often people try to make a potential product or service innovation perfect before they launch it. You know what? Often the last 10% of modifications that you make, generally take the longest and aren't always what the customer thinks will make it perfect - they're what YOU think will make it perfect. Instead, determine your potential risks, plan your risk response, get it in the hands of a customer sample, get ready for feedback you never expected, and love every bit of feedback you do get (it's a gift).


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Mike Brown is an award-winning innovator in strategy, communications, and experience marketing. He authors the Brainzooming TM blog, and serves as the company's chief Catalyst. He wrote the ebook "Taking the NO Out of InNOvation" and is a frequent keynote presenter.

Innovation Perspectives - Trendspotters' Fab Five

This is the second of several 'Innovation Perspectives' articles we will publish this week from multiple authors to get different perspectives on 'Who should be responsible (if anyone) for trend-spotting and putting emerging behaviors and needs into context for a business?'. Here is the next perspective in the series:

by Mike Brown

Who should be deciphering the future and helping shape how a business understands and prepares for it?

The first inclination might be to think about a specific part of an organization for the function. It's important though to identify the individuals well-suited to this challenging role. From that perspective, five capabilities are vital to successfully champion this effort:

1. Having a Natural External Perspective


• Creating solid insights about the future depends on starting with a view outside, not inside the business. It's a natural orientation that not all people share. Someone in a trend-interpreting role has to be a sponge for gathering, processing, and extrapolating information on markets, customers, competitors, and a broad set of inputs on the economy, demographics, and other environmental factors.


2. Being an Integrator


• Being able to do something with a broad set of future-looking inputs requires someone with a solid perspective on the business and what drives its success. This has to be coupled with the ability to understand how other industries and markets affect the business today and imagine how they might in the future. Finally, it demands a strong command of frameworks to integrate meaningful interpretation of broad, and typically incomplete, forward-oriented data sets.


3. Possessing Both Left and Right-brained Orientations


• Ideally solid quantitative metrics (i.e., demographics, demand forecasting, industry sizing trends) are available to help form relevant predictions. Often though, numeric information isn't available. In any case, analysis has to be coupled with creating compelling stories to drive strategic actions anticipating and preparing for the future. "Whole brain thinkers" are essential, since they provide left-brain quantitative and analytical skills coupled with creative, communications-oriented right-brain perspectives to help make on-target, forward-looking action happen.


4. Displaying Strong Intuition


• There's no single clear picture of what the future holds. Creating credible future scenarios requires tremendous amounts of interpretation and extrapolation. Some of this can be learned; much of it can't. Trend watchers and prognosticators need to be able to instinctively "know" what all the information they're seeing means. If it's a broad intuitive sense, that's fantastic. Even if it's industry-specific, that can be fine too. I used to work with an economist who had been in transportation for many years and had tremendous instincts for our market. I'm not sure he could have been dropped into another industry and had the same feel, but for our market, he could look at a competitor's quarterly numbers and tell you exactly what was and would be happening in its logistics operation with high certainty.


5. Building Powerful Relationships and Networks


• It's quite a list to this point, isn't it? It's challenging for one person to excel at all of these skills. As a result, the fifth essential capability is to be an outstanding relationship builder. This includes the ability to recognize the talents necessary in others who can help shape a view of the future along with the interpersonal skills to cultivate and share value throughout the network of experts that's needed.

There are certainly other skills and capabilities which make for a strong trend watcher and interpreter. But if you can find someone in your business solidly embodying these skills, don't wait for a clearer view of the future. Get them into the job right now!


You can check out all of the 'Innovation Perspectives' articles from the different contributing authors on 'Who should be responsible (if anyone) for trend-spotting and putting emerging behaviors and needs into context for a business?' by clicking the link in this sentence.

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Mike Brown is an award-winning innovator in strategy, communications, and experience marketing. He authors the Brainzooming TM blog, and serves as the company's chief Catalyst. He wrote the ebook "Taking the NO Out of InNOvation" and is a frequent keynote presenter.

Returning To Your Innovation Center

by Mike Brown

HBO ran a program on preparations by four-time NASCAR Nextel Cup Champion Jimmie Johnson and his team for racing in the 2010 Daytona 500 at Daytona International Speedway.

At the first 2010 team meeting, Johnson's crew chief Chad Knaus called the team's attention to the bare walls in the meeting room. He highlighted the absence of all the awards and pictures celebrating the team's fourth NASCAR championship in 2009. Knaus let the team know it is on the hook to perform at a level in 2010 to allow them to fill the walls once again with racing successes.

Maybe a move like that is easier when you've won 4 NASCAR championships in a row!

But it's a great reminder for any of us:

• Don't rest on your laurels. Instead, get motivated for the successes that lie ahead of you.

So when you look around your office, what do you see?

Are you stuck in past wins, or do you have motivators for the greatness that's yet to come?


Editor's Note: I love the point of this post. Leaders celebrate when it's time to celebrate, but are never satisfied, and always stand ready for the next innovation challenge. One of the things that makes Tiger Woods so great is how fast he can return to center - whether he has just hit his best shot - or his worst. Companies that don't celebrate their innovation victories demotivate people - you have to make time for it - but companies that celebrate their innovation victories too long are soon passed by those eager to push the boundaries even farther.

Are you satisfied?


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Mike Brown is an award-winning innovator in strategy, communications, and experience marketing. He authors the Brainzooming TM blog, and serves as the company's chief Catalyst. He wrote the ebook "Taking the NO Out of InNOvation" and is a frequent keynote presenter.

Two Biggest Mistakes in Social Media

by Mike Brown


What are the two biggest mistakes in social media marketing?

1. Believing everyone sees your content

2. Believing no one sees your content

In the first instance, thinking you can simply dabble in social media and get lots of people to see what you're saying doesn't work. For nearly any traditional brand (and @shitmydadsays isn't a typical brand) wanting to talk about itself, audiences don't spontaneously emerge. It takes time to create an effective fan/follower base. Simply picking a fast-approaching date and saying "implement Twitter (or Facebook) by such-and-such date to get our message out" is asking for disappointing results.

The second mistake rests on the assumption you can ease your way in, make some mistakes, and find your social media footing. Maaaaaaaaaaaybe. But there are too many counter examples of brands that screwed up and got burned because of not knowing, understanding, or working within the evolving conventions of social media. If you've got a brand worth anything, you need to be ready for prime time the instant you step on the social media stage.

How do you avoid these terrible two?

Focus first on developing a solid social media strategy and ignore the ridiculous peer pressure you may feel to create a social media presence ASAP. This is a game made for deliberate, smart followers - not fast, unprepared, first-movers - to win.


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Mike Brown is an award-winning innovator in strategy, communications, and experience marketing. He authors the Brainzooming TM blog, and serves as the company's chief Catalyst. He wrote the ebook "Taking the NO Out of InNOvation" and is a frequent keynote presenter.

Do You Have a Creative Imbalance?

by Mike Brown

Being in the transportation industry (as I was) meant a lot of time spent thinking about balance, and not being too heavy inbound or outbound. In moving things (or people), the ideal state is the same number arriving and departing. If you're too heavy outbound, it means you have lots of things going out, but very few coming in. Heavy inbound is the opposite - many things arriving, but few leaving. Within the economy, there are distinct geographic and industrial patterns in the movement of goods and people. As a result, transportation providers are constantly trying to achieve balance within their networks.

All of this has a direct tie to creativity. It's not difficult to find yourself in creative imbalance, with a disconnect between the amount of creativity you're producing and the creative elements you're taking in to fuel your own pursuits.

Typically, I run heavy on the outbound side of creativity. Part of it is my personality; part of it is a strategy to provide real-life testing of the various creativity-instigating exercises and tools I share. If I'm creatively spent and a particular approach helps spur my creativity, chances are it will work for you as well.

Right now though, I'm so heavy outbound, it's a little ridiculous. Beyond blogging and tweeting, I've been doing a lot of proposal writing (which is a wonderful situation to have), building messaging for the business side of Brainzooming, and trying to do more commenting and guest blogging, too.

One problem of being too heavy outbound in transportation is you wind up with all the equipment you need to function located somewhere else. You have problems making commitments because you lack necessary resources.

What that means for me in the creativity world is trying to force myself to schedule an all inbound day - no blog writing, no tweeting, no thinking about what I should be communicating. Simply a day to read, absorb, replenish, and learn, unencumbered by the need to say something.

Quite a goal, and I'll let you know when it's achieved! In the meantime, how's your creative balance?


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Mike Brown is an award-winning innovator in strategy, communications, and experience marketing. He authors the Brainzooming TM blog, and serves as the company's chief Catalyst. He wrote the ebook "Taking the NO Out of InNOvation" and is a frequent keynote presenter.

Pretending to be a Customer

by Mike Brown

It's a challenge to objectively examine your own website as if a prospect or customer seeking information would. There's an approach you can follow to get ideas flowing though: Look at a direct competitor's online presence, trying to shoot holes in it based on how a customer might view it.

You should really be able to get into it by answering a few questions:

• What misleading or out-of-date information is presented?


• What's not compelling about the website?


• What's confusing about the navigation?


• How much unnecessary detail do I have to supply to get a copy of the "free" download?


• What questions do I have that the website doesn't answer?


• Do I know where to get my other questions answered?


• In what ways did I get smarter by browsing this website?


• In what ways were my information needs left wanting?

After doing this, go back and see how your own online presence compares. Looking at yourself from a customer perspective should now be much easier!


Editor's Note: When you're in a pinch (or without a research budget), you could also use this technique with employees (preferably new ones) for more than just web sites.


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Mike Brown is an award-winning marketer and strategist with extensive experience in research, strategy, branding, and sponsorship marketing. He's a frequent keynote presenter on innovation and authors Brainzooming!

Who Should Be Driving Social Media?

by Mike Brown

The title topic came up recently on Twitter, as it had at a B2B social media roundtable late last year: Who should be doing social media strategy and implementation for a brand - organizationally and individually?

My take is a strategic perspective is the foundation for a social media effort to build a sustaining impact. When it comes to questions of social media strategy "ownership," it's clear sole responsibility for it doesn't fit nicely into a box on today's org charts.

Stepping back from the discussions, I forced myself into three criteria which seem necessary for taking on social media responsibilities in corporations:

1. Ability to always be on message for the brand, which implies effectively linking brand strategy to messaging


2. Appropriate sensibilities for social media channels


3. Diverse communication skills that work across various social media channels

Sometimes those people are in marketing communications, but you may find them in other parts of a company as well. They may also exist outside a company's employee base; that's fine too.

Most importantly, given the rapid pace of social media, you want the best strategic writers crafting the communication. Where are these people located in and around your company? Find them wherever they may be!

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Mike Brown is an award-winning marketer and strategist with extensive experience in research, strategy, branding, and sponsorship marketing. He's a frequent keynote presenter on innovation and authors Brainzooming!

Reserve Judgements

by Mike Brown

F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby" begins with its narrator, Nick Carraway, recounting his father's admonition that not everyone in the world is provided the same advantages. The comment led to Nick's inclination to "reserve all judgments," a "habit that...opened up many curious natures" to him.

This opening passage of "Gatsby" has shaped me dramatically. Amid growing up in an environment of clear rights and wrongs, these words were a reminder to delay judgment in order to better understand people, even those who are objectively well outside my behavioral beliefs.

Given the importance of suspending judgment in the early stages of originating new ideas, this practice has been fundamental to helping businesses imagine new possibilities for potential opportunities. There's a time for judgment, but initially, ideas have to emerge and "breathe" first.

It isn't all glorious, however, when you reserve judgments. As Nick notes, it led to him being "the victim of not a few veteran bores." I've certainly found that to be the case. It's also led to having a diverse set of friends (really fun) who at times can't stand one another (not so fun). Their distinct differences, which I tend to overlook, often make them incompatible.

In all, delaying judgments is a beneficial practice. So what do you think? Are there a few situations in your life right now where you'd be better off to suspend judgment and see how they play out first? The interesting things you'll experience and learn will FAR outweigh any bores you might encounter. Just go with me on this - okay?

BTW - Want a little "fun" with "The Great Gatsby"? Watch this video of Andy Kaufman trying to read the book to a reluctant audience. You can skip ahead to 2:40 to hear the passage that inspired this post!

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Mike Brown is an award-winning marketer and strategist with extensive experience in research, strategy, branding, and sponsorship marketing. He's a frequent keynote presenter on innovation and authors Brainzooming!

Live Out a Positive Life

by Mike Brown

My dad came back from Ed Foreman's Successful Life Course in the mid 1980s with a new favorite word, "TERRIFIC!!!" as the all-the-time answer to the question, "How are you doing?"

Back then, it was bothersome to me because it was clear he wasn't always TERRIFIC. Years later after listening to some of Foreman's tapes and seeing him live, I finally understood the reason for saying "TERRIFIC!!!" all the time. The point is words precede attitudes and attitudes precede actions. Saying you're TERRIFIC gets you in the mental mindset that will ultimately lead you to act as if you are TERRIFIC!!! all the time.

I got it and tried to embrace the belief, yet couldn't get myself to say TERRIFIC. My version is, "Wonderful!" It's certainly more understated, yet still far more positive than I would have ever answered previously. I'll admit I don't always come off sounding "Wonderful," but the greeting does stand out and helps keep me honest about being thankful for the MANY truly wonderful aspects of life.

So, how are you doing?

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Mike Brown is an award-winning marketer and strategist with extensive experience in research, strategy, branding, and sponsorship marketing. He's a frequent keynote presenter on innovation and authors Brainzooming!

Help Others Recognize Their Talents

by Mike Brown

Chuck Dymer is a strategic mentor, having done more than any single person to help me understand lateral thinking processes and how integral they are to business success. You could say I've borrowed everything I know on innovation tools from watching Chuck do what he does so masterfully.

After working with Chuck on various projects, he said to me, "You make other people more creative just by cheering them on." While always enjoying participating in brainstorming sessions with others, its potential impact had never occurred to me.

Chuck's comment, though, caused more deliberate reflection on this "talent" I'd never considered and how it could be used more widely. This led to incorporating lateral thinking approaches into additional business activities, speaking topics, and ultimately, Brainzooming.

Are you working with others who display talents you see that they don't realize? Give them a gift by pointing out these talents so they can start considering how to use them even more beneficially.

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Mike Brown is an award-winning marketer and strategist with extensive experience in research, strategy, branding, and sponsorship marketing. He's a frequent keynote presenter on innovation and authors Brainzooming!

12 Steps to Grow Diversity in Your Personal Network

by Mike Brown

Look at your network now compared to last year. Have you dramatically expanded the number of people you can call or email and be reasonably sure you'll get a response from them?

And that doesn't mean from loading up on contacts inside your company using the "People You May Know" feature on LinkedIn. A network gains value through diversity - not from having 75% of your connections riding on the same economic train as you!

If your active network looks the same as it did last year, ACT NOW when ideally you don't need your network's benefits. Here are 12 potential ways to add not only numbers, but diversity to your network:

1. Join and actively participate in professional associations


2. Regularly attend (and even create) networking events and follow up on connections


3. Take on leadership roles in church, school, or alumni organizations


4. Deliberately try to network with other parents at kids' activities


5. Write articles for publications within your industry


6. Speak publicly on topics of expertise for you (and if you're reluctant to speak, join Toastmasters and get over your apprehensions)


7. Use Twitter to build a global network of people involved in topics of interest (Twitter Lists or WeFollow are great places to start)


8. Run for public office


9. Find and join groups focused on hobbies you enjoy


10. Share your expertise via social media - start a blog, comment on other blogs, record podcasts or video blogs


11. Start a second job where you interact more with the public


12. Strike up conversations with people you meet standing in line

And IMPORTANTLY, have business cards with you and introduce yourself to new people with your first and last names. I can't believe how many people go to networking events and don't have cards and/or introduce themselves by mumbling their first names.

Not all of these methods make sense for everyone. For my networking strategy, numbers 1, 2, 6, 7, and 10 have all been very effective at meeting great new people both online and in IRL (in real life), especially by starting to attend and even organize tweet-ups.

There are certainly several of these that will work for you, so pick and get started adding diversity to your network!

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Mike Brown is an award-winning marketer and strategist with extensive experience in research, strategy, branding, and sponsorship marketing. He's a frequent keynote presenter on innovation and authors Brainzooming!

Double the Fun - If You Follow the Rules!

Out and About Marketing

by Mike Brown

The Baskin Robbins Double Header Cone screams, "I came out of an innovation session!"

That's okay though because it appears from the outside-looking-in to have a solid customer experience-based strategic foundation.

An ice cream cone allowing multiple flavors and formats side by side lets customers preferring cones experience them in a new, fun way. Who can beat two different ice cream flavors and formats (soft serve and scoop) the way YOU want to combine them, instead of randomly (mashed scoops), sequentially (scoops on top of each other), or in a forced swirl (for soft serve)?

It's fun for kids (who seemed to be the primary audience the day we were in Baskin Robbins) and probably makes a parent's life a little saner (since it helps more easily please a kid wanting multiple flavors). For Baskin Robbins, it creates some near term buzz and introduces a new, slightly higher price point to upsell customers who'd typically only buy a single cone.

Unfortunately, the poster's fine print clearly states "no substitutions." You can't have two scoops or two soft serve flavors. The Double Header cone "fun" doesn't extend to customer-driven innovation at the point of sale.

Have a wonderful Thanksgiving (US-based readers), and be on the look-out for more "out and about marketing" examples to share here! Brainzooming is taking a few days off and will be back next week.

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Mike Brown is an award-winning marketer and strategist with extensive experience in research, strategy, branding, and sponsorship marketing. He's a frequent keynote presenter on innovation and authors Brainzooming!

Getting Ready for 2010 - Real Life Planning Successes

by Mike Brown

I'm a proponent of spreading strategic thinking broadly in a company and not readily handing off strategy development to outside parties exclusively. Yet I've been a part of many examples where an outside perspective helped move strategy development ahead much more quickly.

Here are several examples you may be facing where it's good to get outside expertise:


Turning Talk Into a Plan

A small subsidiary's three-person management team was told to get a plan in place to show corporate management the company's direction. They had no planning process and only ten business days to deliver a comprehensive strategic plan. We brought in the Brainzooming process to develop an innovative strategic plan in one day. The output couldn't be simply a bunch of ideas nor could it be only a rote plan with little strategic insight.

Structuring a day-long session using question-based exercises allowed the team to answer questions about the business, participate in exercises to stretch strategic perspectives on competition and opportunities, and come back the next morning to make people and timing decisions on a tight plan to share with the operating president.

As non-planners, they wouldn't have been able to put together a coherent business plan in ten days, but they did understand their business and the general direction they needed to head. We combined their deep knowledge with exercises and facilitation allowing us to challenge and create a strategic flow from their answers. We delivered the best of both worlds - a structured plan reflecting their intent for the business with sound strategic logic and more innovation than they'd have ever brought to it alone. This experience demonstrated the clear benefit of the emerging Brainzooming process.


Stimulating a Management Team that Knows It All

We rolled into town to help a really experienced senior management team tackle annual planning. Because of their tenure and smarts, they knew the company inside-out. This knowledge rendered them ill-suited to solving a long-term growth challenge: as every idea was uttered, they "knew" why it wouldn't work for the brand.

During the course of a day-long planning session, I created a new exercise on the fly based on a brand in a very different industry sharing the same fundamental characteristics of our client. I asked the group to suggest how this other company could address the same challenge they were facing. All of a sudden ideas started flowing non-stop. We were able to take the concepts and strategically apply them to their business.

Left on its own to think strategically, the management team would never have reached an alternative look at its business. An outside perspective, unburdened by excessive detail was critical to identifying an analogous situation, providing an entree for innovative strategic thinking and implementation.


Doing the Thinking for a Distracted Management Team

We had a pre-scheduled planning follow-up with a management team who, since our initial session, had been charged with exploring a major brand contraction. Unable to convince them their new assignment should be the focus for our session, we instead spent time addressing the status quo scenario. Unfortunately, the status quo wasn't likely or compelling enough to command much of their attention and strategic creativity.

Frustrated by the lack of intensity while addressing the status quo, we wrapped the effort early. We told them we'd work on the status quo scenario, delivering 200 prioritized, fleshed out ideas and concepts within 3 days. Using several creativity techniques during the flight home, we generated really strong creative concepts for the status quo or, with some modification, for the alternative scenario also.

This was a great example of the importance of a balanced group in doing the best strategic thinking. The client's management team had business experience and functional knowledge, but was sapped of any creative energy it ever had. Bringing in outside talent for a creative spark was needed to turn lackluster thinking into vibrant, implementable ideas.

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Mike Brown is an award-winning marketer and strategist with extensive experience in research, strategy, branding, and sponsorship marketing. He's a frequent keynote presenter on innovation and authors Brainzooming!