Today’s strategic thinking questions focus on creativity, social media, and content marketing.

As we mentioned in yesterday’s post, these strategic thinking questions don’t appear in the Fast Company most creative people in business profiles. They were created by reviewing the profiles and asking ourselves what questions those profile may have asked themselves while working on their creative achievements.

The reason we’re emphatic this is because of what happened with Fast Company after publishing our post covering the 2012 list. We noticed late one morning the main Fast Company account shared our tweet about the blog post. Noting the hundreds of thousands of followers they have, I quickly inserted a Brainzooming ad in the post, and waited for the blog traffic explosion. Then, as a double check, I went to the Fast Company RT to see what it would be like to wind up at our blog from a Fast Company link.

Guess what?

Fast Company swapped out our link to Brainzooming in my original tweet, substituting one to the list on its website. If we’d ripped off their copy, I would completely understand. But our content is unique AND featured more than 100 links to the magazine’s website. That’s a social media foul, in my book, but what are you going to do.

Here are today’s UNIQUE strategic thinking questions. You can click to get to the underlying profiles, but don’t expect to find these creativity, social media, and content marketing questions there!

Creativity, Content Marketing, and Social Media Questions Inspired by the Fast Company 100 Most Creative People in Business 2013

Creativity Questions

How many scary and risky things do you say “Yes” to in the course of a year? How many do you say “No” to? What’s the impact of your answers on your creative output? (13. Connie Britton - ACTRESS, NASHVILLE)

What are new ways to expand your global influences without having to leave your office? (2. Dong-Hoon Chang - EVP, HEAD OF DESIGN STRATEGY, SAMSUNG)

What’s the longest your organization has ever brainstormed, and are you ready to brainstorm 10x longer at one stretch? (27. Maria Mujica - LATIN AMERICAN MARKETING DIRECTOR, GUMS AND CANDY, MONDELĒZ INTERNATIONAL)

How can you deliberately create more white space to experiment, try stuff, learn, change, and do it better? (32.Hosain Rahman - FOUNDER, CEO, JAWBONE)

Why would it be interesting to hear you vent about what’s gone wrong or has failed in your life? (34. Marc Maron - COMEDIAN, WTF WITH MARC MARON)

If you were required to triple the number of new creative ideas you generate on any given day, what would you do differently to boost your creative output? (37. Darrin Crescenzi - SENIOR DESIGNER, PROPHET)

What creative residue do you leave yourself at the end of the day to fuel a quick creative start tomorrow? (47. Simon Rich – WRITER)

How can you grow the number of self-described “creatives” you talk to weekly to boost your new ideas? (6. Max Levchin - CEO, AFFIRM; BOARD MEMBER, YAHOO)

How would it change your creative perspective if, as a TV show’s creator is called a “showrunner,” your title were whatever you produce + “runner”? (77-83. TV’S Head of the Class – A GROUP OF SIX TV SHOW CREATORS)

If you typically have a plan in place for your creativity, how would just starting and seeing what happens feel more refreshing and creative? (77-83. TV’S Head of the Class – A GROUP OF SIX TV SHOW CREATORS)

How can you bring together young, experienced people and older, inexperienced people to reverse the typical learning environment of the older teaching the young? (84. Michelle Rowley - FOUNDER, CODE SCOUTS)

What happens when you flip your typical creative process around completely? (90. Pendleton Ward – ANIMATOR)

What’s stopping you from asking for favors and help from people you have no business trying to talk to? (96. Ruzwana Bashir - COFOUNDER, CEO, PEEK)

Lots of risk can thwart addressing lots of societal need, unless someone is bold enough to do something – how bold are you? (98. Wendell Pierce - COFOUNDER, STERLING FARMS FRESH FOODS)

Content Marketing and Social Media Questions

How can you collect and share more real-life stories of people your company has helped in meaningful, personal ways? (10. Scott Harrison - FOUNDER, CHARITY: WATER)

What would happen if you tried to come up with and select a year’s worth of content marketing ideas before you published your first piece of content? (18. Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele - COCREATORS AND STARS, KEY & PEELE)

If you covered only one topic, how would the narrow topic free you for incredible diversity in how you deliver content on the topic? (20. Lara Setrakian- FOUNDER, SYRIA DEEPLY)

What are all the ways you are and aren’t making it easy for your fans to create and share content about their experiences with your brand? (40. Kate Phelan and Justin Cooke - CREATIVE DIRECTOR, TOPSHOP; CMO, TOPSHOP)

How are you getting ready to have your brand catch and do something with the content your audience throws back at you? (21. Jaime Robinson - VP, EXECUTIVE CREATIVE DIRECTOR, PEREIRA & O’DELL)

If you’re giving new content away, what and when will you get paid for it? (28. Diplo - DJ, FOUNDER, MAD DECENT)

What are new ways to serve up your best content and not just your most recent content to readers? (45. Kate Lee - DIRECTOR OF CONTENT, MEDIUM)

What will it take for your brand to process external inputs and do / say something about them in real-time via social media? (7. Jill Applebaum and Megan Sheehan - CREATIVE DIRECTOR, JWT; ART DIRECTOR AND DESIGNER)

Would a prank via social media potentially help draw attention to a cause you care about deeply? (76. Rebecca Nagle and Hannah Brancato - FEMINIST ACTIVISTS)

When it comes to content, what more could you do with your content to create attention for your brand or another brand that needs attention? (88. Sscott Borchetta - CEO, BIG MACHINE RECORDS)

How can you create a place for smart, opinionated, and even snarky customers to hang out and share their knowledge about what they love (which might not be your brand)? (91. Mahbod Moghadam - COFOUNDER, RAP GENIUS)

What will it take to create as clear a group of dissenters for your content as you have created fans? (92. Leandra Medine - FOUNDER, MANREPELLER.COM)

If you provided 3 weeks of training to the content creators in your organization, how would you best use the time? (97. Stephanie Horbaczewski - PRESIDENT, CEO, STYLEHAUL) 

Mike Brown

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

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 info@brainzooming.com or call us at 816-509-5320 to learn how we can help you enhance your strategy and implementation efforts.

Given interest in the recent Brainzooming post highlighting more than 200 strategic planning questions, we used the stories from the most creative people in business list to generate strategic thinking questions inspired by the varied creative successes represented in the issue.

As with last year’s Brainzooming recap, these questions AREN’T in the Fast Company issue. Instead, we applied our technique of taking a case study and imagining the questions that would inspire someone else to get to the same place as the person or business in the case study.

So to repeat: this is ALL NEW CONTENT you’ll be reading throughout our series of posts. Later in the week, I’ll explain WHY I’m being so emphatic about this being content you won’t see in Fast Company. Stay tuned for that!

Branding and Customer Experience Questions Inspired by the Fast Company 100 Most Creative People in Business 2013

Today’s list includes twenty-five strategic thinking questions on branding and customer experience. Later in the week, we’ll feature questions on creativity, content marketing, insights, and strategy.

Branding Questions

How can you change your brand experience to cause people to want to spend more time with the brand? (12. Liz Muller - DIRECTOR OF CONCEPT DESIGN, STARBUCKS)

How would an artist create a live art event starring your brand? (16. Ai Weiwei – ARTIST)

What could you do to grow a large enough audience and facilitate a way for them to want to talk about your brand more and longer? (19. Fred Graver - HEAD OF TV TEAM, TWITTER)

If “cute” is part of your brand personality, how can you make your brand experience more childlike to enhance its “cuteness”? (22. Phill Ryu and David Lanham - FOUNDERS, IMPENDING)

What do your customers love about your brand, and how do you respect what they love when you freshen your brand experience? (25. Jason Wilson - LEAD PRODUCT DESIGNER, PINTEREST)

What are the hidden aspects of your brand experience that hold new, untold, and intriguing stories? (63. Roman Mars - HOST, 99% INVISIBLE)

How can you start serving the cool part of a market that isn’t being served sufficiently? (68. Rosie O’Neill and Josh Resnick - COFOUNDERS, SUGARFINA)

Customer Experience Questions

If your product were completely interactive with a user’s touch, why would it be exciting for them to touch the product? (15. Ivan Poupyrev - SENIOR RESEARCH SCIENTIST, DISNEY RESEARCH)

What are you doing to add more personalization (that provides value) into your customer experience? (17. Michelle Peluso - CEO, GILT GROUPE)

How would fewer choices make things easier and better for your customers? (67. Aerin Lauder - FOUNDER, CREATIVE DIRECTOR, AERIN)

How can you offer customers a smaller set of options, but give them more flexibility and higher performance as a trade-off? (30. Bob Mathews and Gary Chow - SENIOR RADIO FREQUENCY ENGINEERS, AT&T)

If you redesigned your business – even if it’s a stodgy business – around delivering “more fun for customers,” what would have to change about your customer experience? (35. Alli Webb - FOUNDER, DRYBAR)

How would your brand’s customer experience change if you designed it for the lowest common denominator technology instead of the newest technology? (4. Kirthiga Reddy - DIRECTOR OF ONLINE OPERATIONS, FACEBOOK INDIA)

What can you do to translate what you know about your customers into pleasant surprises for them? (46. Jackie Wilgar - EVP OF MARKETING, LIVE NATION)

What are new ways you can turn customer research efforts into customer design opportunities? (48. Tina Wells - FOUNDER, CEO, BUZZ MARKETING GROUP)

In what ways could you create opportunities for your customers to meet, talk, and bond? (56. Sarah Simmons – CHEF, CITY GRIT)

How can you make the online and offline experiences of your brand have the same feel? (64. Tare Lemmey - CEO, NET POWER & LIGHT)

If your customers don’t have a 100% success rate with your product or service, how can you make it more like something they can do/use with complete success? (66. Michael Buckwald and David Holz - COFOUNDERS, LEAP MOTION)

What can you do to feed information to customers about what other customers are thinking / choosing / doing right now? (70. Kevin Bruner - PRESIDENT, CTO, TELLTALE GAMES)

In what ways can you bring together people who wouldn’t otherwise meet but would find value in doing so? (71. Caroline Ghosn - FOUNDER, CEO, LEVO LEAGUE)

How could you turn a complicated process in your customer experience into a one-step process? (73. Katelyn Gleason - COFOUNDER, CEO, ELIGIBLE)

If your product requires training to use, what do you need to change about it so you can eliminate all training? (74. Aneel Bhusri - COFOUNDER, CO–CEO, WORKDAY)

What is pre-planned in your customer experience that would benefit from being spontaneous, and how can you make that happen? (75. Andy Cohen - TV HOST, EVP OF TALENT AND DEVELOPMENT, BRAVO)

How can you make it easier for potential customers to go from receiving a reminder about your brand to taking action (with telepathic communication as the end goal)? (85. Grace Woo - FOUNDER, PIXELS.IO)

If combining live events, social, and crowdsourcing is where it’s at, how do you use social to let the crowd, whether in-person or remotely, influence your event? (87. Bozoma Saint John - DIRECTOR OF CULTURAL BRANDING, MUSIC, AND ENTERTAINMENT, PEPSICO)

Mike Brown

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

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 info@brainzooming.com or call us at 816-509-5320 to learn how we can help you enhance your strategy and implementation efforts.

Today, we’re highlighting two people who’ve been particularly kind in their appreciation for our content and in featuring Brainzooming content through their own social media presences.

Join Us and Let’s Talk Live on the WiseTalk Teleconference, May 30

Sue Bethanis, Founder and CEO of Mariposa Leadership, has been a recent, much appreciated retweeter of Brainzooming content. While Sue is newer to Twitter, she’s been hosting the monthly WiseTalk Leadership Forum since 2004 when she published her book, Leadership Chronicles of a Corporate Sage: Five Keys to Becoming a More Effective Leader.

One interesting wrinkle to WiseTalk is since it’s a live teleconference (before becoming an archived recording), listeners can ask live questions via phone and email.

This opportunity to converse and shape the content to the live audience’s interests is just one reason why I’m looking forward to being a guest on the hour-long 99^th episode of WiseTalk on Thursday, May 30, 2013 at 2 pm EDT. Sue and I will be talking about the Brainzooming approach to strategic and creative thinking, plus anything else you want to talk about specifically!

Since it’s too infrequent that I get to talk live with Brainzooming readers, I’d love to take the opportunity to do so during WiseTalk. Plus if it’s a really great show with lots of call-in questions, maybe we’ll make the greatest hits 100^th episode!

Register Today for WiseTalk and Let’s Talk Live!

How do you join in to help shape our May 30^th WiseTalk conversation?

Register for the May 30 WiseTalk teleconference right away on the Mariposa Leadership website to get your dial-in information.

Check out Stephen Lahey and the Small Business Talent Podcast

Stephen Lahey, a great phone and social media friend, is the self-proclaimed #1 Brainzooming fan! Stephen is the successful leader of Lahey Consulting, a search firm and HR consultancy he founded in 2000, with a focus on marketing recruitment and retention.

Additionally, earlier this year Stephen introduced SmallBusinessTalent.com® to help business people take advantage of their “knowledge and talent to attract more ideal clients.” Among the free resources Stephen offers on Small Business Talent is a weekly half-hour podcast providing in-depth information small business people can directly benefit from in the varied roles they play.

I was honored to be the first guest on the Small Business Talent podcast when it debuted in January 2013. Stephen and I talked about how blogging, social media, and content marketing specifically apply for small businesses, including how it fits into The Brainzooming Group business strategy. You can listen to the kick-off podcast here or on SmallBusinessTalent.com®, along with all the fantastic guests Stephen has interviewed.

Stephen has made quite an impact in such a short time with the podcast. In talking with Stephen, he has some very exciting, big name authors coming up in the near future. Additionally, we’ve talked about doing another podcast soon to dive deeper into content marketing strategy for small business. To get the first word on when that’s scheduled along with updates on Stephen’s other weekly guests, sign up for Stephen’s email list today!

What’s Next?

We have several other public appearances coming up in July, including a live, in-depth webinar on strategic thinking and a  social media workshop in Boston. More on those later, but in the meantime, let’s talk May 30! – Mike Brown

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

Strategy and Creative Work Passing in the Daylight

I was talking recently with someone involved on a team creating a response for a customer inquiry. For various reasons, team members building the strategy for the response worked separately from those addressing the creative elements. Since the strategy people and the creative people were working one after the other, instead of together, a variety of late in the process issues developed.

As the person sharing the story related it, some issues were addressed successfully, many were addressed in a compromised fashion, and some were never addressed in an integrated way.

Eeeek!

5 Reasons Strategy and Creative Work Must Be Integrated

Listening to this person’s frustration prompts these five reasons it’s vital for strategy and creative work to be integrated. In this example, all five reasons contributed to falling short in creating an optimal response.

When a strategy and creative team are working together . . .

1. The creative team can do initial design with an integrated view of the end product

Without knowing key decisions the strategy team was making over the course of a week, the creative team sat idle awaiting input. By the time creative team members received the nearly final content, team members were behind the gun to get the creative design turned around with adequate review time to meet the deadline.

2. It allows the strategy team to efficiently deliver direction and content

The strategy team didn’t understand the final format the creative team was creating. As a result, they threw “stuff” over the wall to the creative team in ways that made sense from a strategic standpoint. What was convenient for the strategy team wasn’t optimal for the creative team, unfortunately, since the divided team didn’t talk throughout the development process.

3. Clarifying questions from the creative team can be placed in context

As the work moved into creative development, the creative team asked for more input from the strategy team. Because strategy team members lacked a frame of reference, they viewed the request as too encompassing for the time available. The result was the strategy team passed on sharing additional information. After the fact, strategy team members discovered they had over-estimated what the creative team was asking for in the request, creating a gap that went unaddressed.

4. It keeps creative team members from guessing when needing to fill last minute blanks

No matter how well a process is planned and managed, there will be last minute details and gaps to be filled. In this case, because the strategy and creative teams were disconnected, the creative team wound up filling last minute blanks without sufficient input. Some blanks were filled appropriately; others weren’t.

5. The creative team won’t leave out important things because they don’t fit the design

The strategy team had made decisions about the customer response’s positioning and compelling support points to reinforce the recommendation. Lacking visibility to the decisions or a strategic understanding why it received some of the content, the creative team varied the positioning and left out significant detail behind the support points. Why? The content didn’t fit the design and creative direction developed in isolation.

Sounds like a cluster? That’s why strategy and creative efforts need to be integrated.

As a former associate used to say, “This wasn’t open heart surgery. No one died.”

That’s certainly true in this case, but the disconnect between the strategy and creative teams created a needlessly under-optimized business result. That’s just one reason why when we’re conducting a live strategy, business performance, or innovation workshop for a client, we push for having both strategic and creative team members included.

You can’t have one or the other group represented and expect the most successful result.

Are you with us on how imperative it is to connect strategy and creative work? What do you do to make sure it happens as successfully as possible? – Mike Brown

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Learn all about Mike Brown’s creative thinking and innovation presentations!

Instigating a Strategic Lesson

A reading at morning mass this week from the Gospel of John involved Jesus talking about the apostles being “in the world” but not “of” the world. The point is since His followers should focus on the importance of a heavenly reward, time in this world needs to be marked by a sense of detachment. While human functioning, making a living, and being of service to others are important, the expectation is to resist becoming overly enamored with things (in particular) that belong to this world since they are fleeting relative to eternity.

This may seem a simple enough statement, but the world beckons so strongly with so many attractive diversions – both good and (many) bad – that it’s an incredibly challenging call to live out successfully.

Another Version of the Strategic Lesson

My trainer recently had me begin using myfitnesspal, a weight and fitness monitoring app. I whined like crazy, but within days, the accountability of logging all my exercise and everything I ate changed my behavior dramatically. Seeing the numbers behind my eating caused me to cut down on snacking, especially late at night when I am writing.

One number that surprises me daily is the outrageous amount of sodium in pre-prepared foods.

One day I had a partial order of leftover Chinese food for lunch, munched an appetizer at a happy hour meeting, and ate a sandwich based on a recipe from my family’s former restaurant that my wife made for dinner. When everything was plugged into myfitnesspal, my daily sodium intake was nearly double the recommended amount. The surprising thing about my huge sodium intake is I pick up a salt shaker once a year – maybe.  I don’t add salt to food.

Slamming Two Experiences Together

If you had asked me before myfitnesspal, I’d have confidently told you I was “IN but not OF a salt-filled world.”

My gigantic sodium number tells a very different story tough.

It’s clear that through uninformed and lackadaisical decision making about what I eat daily, there is way too much sodium in my diet. What has seemed harmless or not even an issue is, I now realize, something harmful.

And the Strategic Lesson Is?

As an entrepreneur, it’s easy to decide what you plan to do to build your business.

It seems even easier though, to pursue other enticing (potentially overhyped) possibilities that promise to build your business – but not directly and not right away.

In my case, these activities include creating content in lots of venues, exploring intriguing possibilities, and putting additional time into opportunities that once seemed promising. They all tend to be about reaching a new / different / bigger audience that SHOULD yield even greater success than the same old audience.

Absent some way to measure and monitor how much time, energy, and effort is going into all these enticing activities relative to the solid activities to build a business however, you can get away completely from what matters for your business.

The cumulative impact is you wind up being not just in a world of overhyped possibilities, but spending most of your available time on them.

When we started The Brainzooming Group, I sketched out a decision making hierarchy for ranking and narrowing promising but more speculative activities. Because of my interest in trying new things and challenges in saying “No,” that decision hierarchy is still in a long-ago shelved notebook.

So the strategic lesson from these random events this week is it’s time to actually apply the decision making hierarchy and stick to it.

How about you? Can you benefit from this strategic lesson in your business?

By the way, thanks for hanging on with me to get here. – Mike Brown

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

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 info@brainzooming.com or call us at 816-509-5320 to learn how we can help you enhance your strategy and implementation efforts.

The Value of Strategic Thinking Exercises

I tell people who ask about how we developed The Brainzooming Group methodology that a big motivator was business people I worked with who didn’t know how to fill out strategic planning templates and worksheets.

They did, however, know a lot about the businesses, customers, and markets they served. We found we could ask them strategic planning questions and brainstorming questions to capture information to create strategic plans.

Since I could write the plan, knowing strategic planning questions to ask (within a fun, stimulating environment to answer them) was key to developing creative, quickly-prepared plans infused with strategic thinking.

And when you combine “creative,” “strategic thinking,” and “quickly-prepared,” you get Brainzooming!

Here is a sampling of more than 200 brainstorming questions and strategic planning questions that are part of the strategic thinking exercises we use with The Brainzooming Group. Yes, more than two hundred questions! Who could ask for more?

More than 200 Strategic Planning Questions for Strong Strategic Thinking

Creating Productive Questions

• Great Strategic Questions – A 3-Step Strategic Question Formula – 3 questions to make sure your questions elicit the best answers.

Strategic Thinking Questions for Developing Overall Strategy

• First Questions – 1 question that’s the granddaddy of all strategy questions within the Brainzooming methodology.
• Strategic Thinking Questions to Identify What Matters for a Brand – 10 questions for getting to the heart of what’s strategic for your brand.
• Identifying What Matters in Your Organization? – 7 questions to signal whether a topic or effort is strategic for a brand.
• Checking for Simplicity in Your Strategy – 3 questions to see if your strategy is simple enough to drive changes in strategic and tactical actions within your organization.
• Anticipating Non-Traditional Competitors – 4 questions for anticipating non-traditional competitors and strategic threats your organization may face that aren’t apparent currently.
• Do You Have What It Takes for a Marketing Plan? – 15 questions to ensure you have everything in place for a complete marketing plan.

Developing a Strategic Vision

• Strategic Planning Doesn’t Have to Kill Creativity – 5 questions to better identify and articulate your organizational vision statement.
• What Are We Trying to Say? – 7 questions to improve the understandability, emotion, and impact of your organizational vision statements.
• Look and Ask Around – 3 questions to assess where you or your organization provide the most and least value, along with where you should focus more effort to improve the value you deliver.
• Look Inside for Distinctive Talents – 5 questions to identify talents and capabilities that can set both organizations and individuals apart from the crowd.

Digital and Social Media Exploration

• Social Media Content Personality Audit – Is Your Brand Personality There? – 10 questions to gauge whether your social media content conveys your brand personality.
• See Me, Feel Me, Criticize Me – 8 questions to ask relative to the accuracy, ease, and user experience of your digital presence.

Creative Naming Questions

• Creating Cool Product Names for a New Product Idea – 8 Creative Thinking Questions – 8 questions to go beyond the typical bland names for new products that stand out from the crowd.
• Creative Job Titles – 8 Innovative Questions to Create Them – 8 questions to enliven the job titles you use throughout your organization – or to come up with your own new self-created title.

Innovation-Oriented Questions

• 11 Strategic Questions for Disruptive Innovation in Markets – 11 questions to help identify different types of innovation opportunities.
• A Spoonful of Unconventional Makes the Conventionalism Go Down – 4 questions to look for an unexpected innovation opportunity in your market.
• Innovation Opportunity – Knowing When New and Innovative Becomes Status Quo – 3 questions to figure out when it is time to innovate your previous innovation.
• 1 Great Way to Be More Creative Each Day – 8 questions (from Trait Transformation) to change the characteristics of your current situation into something new.
• Trying to Finish the Previously Unfinishable – 5 questions to identify ways to turn incomplete ideas into something salvageable.

Identifying Strategies and Assumptions

• Strategic Thinking Exercise – Resolving Contradictory Assumptions Easily – 2 questions to sort through assumptions which seem to point in opposite directions.
• Don’t Overthink It? 5 Key Questions for Quick Decisions – 5 questions to get through decisions more quickly.
• There’s No Accounting for Taste – 3 questions with more beneficial criteria (other than “I like it”) to determine if you creative work is on strategy.
• Ask and You Shall Receive with Great Strategic Questions – 5 questions to help someone expand on their ideas.

Extreme Creativity Questions

• 9 Extreme Creativity Questions from Peter’s Laws – 9 questions to push creative possibilities to reach extreme creativity levels.
• Extreme Creativity – 10 Brainstorming Questions from Diners, Drive-Ins, & Dives - Guy Fieri visits crazy restaurants where they serve up incredible food and extreme creativity questions galore!

Strategic Marketing Questions

• 20 Innovative Strategic Planning Questions to Prepare for 2012 – 20 questions from a variety of marketing and strategy experts to tweak and improve a marketing effort through strategy, marketing communications, and content marketing.
• Nobody Cares About You!!! – 2 questions to test whether your communications efforts are audience-oriented.
• It’s the Most Memorable Time of the Year – 8 questions to look for ways to strengthen personal interest and better integrate emotional dimensions to increase memorability.

Sales and Business Development Questions

• You’re a Business Solutions Provider? If You Claim It, Prove It – 6 questions to test if your marketing and sales effort is really delivering the “solutions” you promise.
• Do You Want More Business? 10 Questions to Identify Sales Opportunities – 10 questions to ask prospective clients to identify new business development opportunities.

Questions to Perform More Effective Recaps

• It’s Great to Learn from Your Mistakes…Once! – 8 questions to dissect what didn’t go right so it never happens again.

There you go with more than 200 strategic planning questions. Do you have any questions? Let us know!

Mike Brown

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

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 info@brainzooming.com or call us at 816-509-5320 to learn how we can help you enhance your strategy and implementation efforts.

That’s exactly what happened when Alex Knapp, Social Media Editor and staff writer at Forbes, headlined this month’s Social Media Club of Kansas City lunch talking about the intersection of publishing and social media strategy.

For those who don’t follow @Brainzooming on Twitter, here via reformatted tweets and paraquotes, are just a few of the social media strategy insights Alex Knapp shared.

Mistakes Publishers (and others) Make with Social Media Strategy

According to Knapp, the biggest mistake publishers make is thinking there is something new in social media. Publishing changes based on the platform, and the only thing that changes over time is the type of content you put on each one. The challenge (and opportunity) with social media is that it is communicating, engagement, and marketing all at once.

Social Media Talents

Social media requires multiple abilities from someone in a short time in a small space. Many publishers (and other types of companies) make the mistake of picking people with only one talent who then struggle. Among the many skills needed to be great at social media, headline writing is THE social media skill.

Alex Knapp proposed a thought experiment: You have two people, one of whom you can hire to do social media for a publication. Do you pick someone who is early in a business career and all over Twitter or someone more senior with lots of work experience and no clue about Twitter? Knapp advises picking the more experienced person since it’s possible to train someone on Twitter in an hour. Training someone who understands social media to write well, think better, and market more effectively? Well, that takes considerably longer than an hour.

Not Every Social Network Should Have identical Same Content

When it comes to taking the best advantage of varied content across channels, Knapp pointed out a great example from the world of publishing to illustrate his point: The New York Times wouldn’t run an arts story on the sports page unless it had a very specific sports angle. Given that, why would an organization run the exact same story at the exact same time on very different social media platforms?

Similar to how we covered Mall of America featuring different content by social network, Knapp shared that at Forbes, Google+ is for tech news, LinkedIn is for startup news, and there are twelve different topic-oriented Twitter feeds, some of which have come and gone over time based on what’s working. Ultimately the goal for each platform (which may have much larger readership than a publication’s paid subscriber base) shapes how a brand approaches it.

When faced with too many social media options and not enough time to go around, Knapp recommends to start where a brand has its biggest audience and focus there. He also advises against the common idea of not putting resources toward social media because it’s free. He asked why a brand WOULDN’T want to put resources toward something that was free and worked vs. paying money for marketing efforts that cost a lot and are difficult to track.

Social Media Strategy Fundamentals

• Social media is the industrialization of word of mouth, so it’s vital to make sure social content is easily shared.
• If you have great content that’s working, run it again, adding variety to how you feature it. He suggested pulling out a quote (because people love quotes), trying an alternative headline, or featuring a specific item from a longer list.
• Invite and reward engagement with personalities, content, and readers themselves (i.e., readers whose content and comments are featured will turn around and share it with others). It’s vital to show you are listening to social media exchanges and are able to engage your audience.
• Data from multiple sources helps determine the effectiveness of social media efforts. Social data sources may disagree, so you have to compare and contrast them. Knapp points out that Google Analytics doesn’t provide accurate information on Facebook traffic.
• Run analyses as often as possible (or as makes sense), measuring to the extent the results will drive change in what you are doing. While you’re measuring, look beyond the top clicks and shares. If you avoid going deeper or looking at alternative views, you’ll miss other valuable insights.
• Don’t get caught up in your own preferences. If readers love something you do, even if you hate it, keep doing it anyway.

Social Media at Forbes

There is a 3-person core social media team at Forbes. Their efforts are complemented by many, many freelance bloggers who are paid (very well according to Alex) based on the hits on their blog posts. (Hey, Alex, where do I apply?)  - Mike Brown

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On the former topic, my response was it all depends on who borrowed the creative idea, if I wanted them to borrow it, & whether they matched up my ideas or content with other people. If they put me in good company, that can be quite a kick.

If you’re really intent on getting something done and think you have a creative idea to realize positive change, the best thing that can happen is others claiming ownership of your ideas. Maybe you accomplish this by being obvious and blatantly saying, “Here, TAKE MY IDEA!” Often though, you have to be much more subtle and kind of leave your creative idea “mentally” laying around for others to find and claim . . . much like they might pick a coin up off the ground and consider it found money.

Leave Your Ideaprints on a Creative Idea

As the #Ideachat group discussed idea ownership, my response was that in the world of social media, it seems you own an idea by being able to point to your first use and predominant sharing of it. I cited Joe Pulizzi and content marketing as a prime example. Joe put a term to the concept, developed it, and shared it for others to expand upon it. What was important was it was readily apparent Joe Pulizzi was the first person everyone remembers talking about content marketing as an idea.

As I tweeted during #Ideachat, when you put an idea out there for others to use, it’s a good idea to leave your “ideaprints” all over it, just as Joe did.

Just like finerprints, ideaprints are indicators you had your brain all over an idea before releasing it into the world. Maybe the idea was yours originally. Maybe you adapted the idea from something else. Either way, if you’ve added value to an idea, your ideaprints signal your brain touched the idea somewhere (ideally early) in its life.

I’m sure Seth Godin has written about something like ideaprints, and there’s a marketing company using the name, but here some ideas for how to place your ideaprints on an idea:

1. Secure the typical and appropriate legal protections available – copyright, trademark, patent
2. Develop a unique or at least distinctive name to describe the idea
3. Frequently use the distinctive name you created online and in other places
4. Develop your idea into a more fully fledged concept
5. Author a great deal of content about the idea that continues to expand on, describe, and make it more usable by others
6. Make it easy for others to advance the idea whether in total or in part
7. Create an organization that embodies your idea
8. Cultivate a group of people who will point back to you when others ask them where they heard of the idea
9. License the idea to others

There are definitely more ways to leave ideaprints, but amid our #Ideachat conversation, those were the first ones that came to mind.

Making It Obvious Your Brain Was All Over a Creative Idea

I think being adept at leaving ideaprints on your most important ideas is an important skill to hone.

One of the last #Ideachat topics covered whether challenges in attributing ideas in the 21st century will lead to more or less creativity. My answer was it depends on the attitude people have toward ideas. People who spend their time chasing down others to protect their ideas will spend a lot less time on generating ideas and a disproportionate amount of time on idea protection.

Far better to spend much of your time coming up with ideas, a little time being more obvious with your ideaprints, and most of your time making things happen with your ideas – whether it’s you or others doing big things with them! – Mike Brown

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The more I thought about this Dilbert comic (and trust me this is not a perspective based on schooled psychology) though, it illustrates a point at the heart of so many messages about creativity and innovation on this blog.

This potential employee claims his particular combination of ADHD, dyslexia, bipolar disorder, and schizophrenia definitely makes him creative, with Dilbert checking the Internet to find each of them does indeed correlate highly with creativity.

Who Is Creative and Who Is Not?

When you think about it, those conditions and other genetic or developmental issues people have that are considered outside the “norm” cause them to experience, process, and respond to life in very different ways than most of society does. Those differences may be more frequently perceived as “creative” specifically because they aren’t the typical responses of most people.

We see creativity in unique, or at least unusual, responses we wouldn’t have imagined. If everyone had been able to come up with comparable responses, they’d be run of the mill and not creative.

Learning from Dilbert on Creativity

That’s why it’s vital, if you want to be more consistently creative, to mine the perspectives you have or can manufacture that place you outside the norm. These atypical perspectives can cause you to experience, process, and respond in very different ways than everyone else might, thus enhancing your creativity.

Where do those atypical views come from in your life?

They can emerge from a variety of places, including these:

• Your distinctive talents and interests
• From how people with different roles than you approach things
• By looking at things the way a kid does in a grown up world
• Through doing things the way they’re done outside your industry
• Trying to mimic more extreme creative perspectives

Go find the perspectives where you aren’t “a normal” (in the words of the Dilbert comic) and create away with your atypical self! - Mike Brown

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Branding Decisions – What do you think of Stoner Drug?

Don’t think highway advertising isn’t effective.

I’m not sure if the sign was new, but on the way up to Nebraska City, I noticed a small highway sign for the soda fountain at Stoner Drug in Hamburg, IA. While running behind and unable to stop, I left early on my return trip to make time for a brief detour into Hamburg to get a photo of Stoner Drug!

The picture was a hit on Facebook, prompting questions about whether they sold Doritos, why they don’t have grass in front, and wondering about expansion plans for the store (particularly into Colorado and Washington).

While the brand name is memorable, you have to wonder if it’s memorable in the best possible way, even though it is, I presume, a family name on the family business. Do you think Stoner Drug is a hard working brand name in a good way?

More Branding Decisions – Butt Burner Hot Sauce

Speaking of branding decisions, here’s another intriguing brand name for a sauce I spotted in the gift shop at the Arbor Day farm. While the packaging at least presents an idea of what type of butt is going to get burned, like Stoner Drug, this name too raises a whole array of others possibilities that make it a memorable name.

Both Trees and People Outgrow Roots

Roots are important for trees and people.

Roots that have been in place a long time can be both beneficial and detrimental. This tree demonstrates that. It appears to be taking its roots out of the ground as it grows. This seemed an appropriate metaphor for anyone who has been doing the same thing (whether personally or in a career) for a long time. If you have, it may be a good time to ask yourself if your roots are still providing a firm foundation or whether you may not be growing as much because your roots aren’t doing the job they used to do.

The Creative Value of Strategic Constraints

This sign by wood bridge on the way to the Arbor Day Farm gift shop provides a great real life example of the beneficial creative value of strategic constraints.

While it’s convenient to imagine that constraints crunch creativity, carefully chosen strategic constraints can be a significant instigator for creative thinking. In the case of this bridge’s construction, requiring that the natural surroundings not be disturbed, increased the construction challenge dramatically. It also increased the creativity as well, though. By removing the typical construction approaches for a bridge of this type, the designers and builders had to devise different ways to build the bridge that turned out to not only be less expensive but also protective of the woodland ecosystem.

E.T. and Friend

When we last checked in on the E.T. pipe sculpture at Bohl’s in Nebraska City, NE, he was all by himself. Now, he’s been joined by a Tom Servo-looking friend in the Bohl’s front window. I can’t wait to see what new sculptures will join these two in the future! - Mike Brown

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