One is the loneliest number
Individual brainstorming doesn’t always produce a wider range of ideas. On the upside, there are no worries about what other people think or possibly being criticized about an idea so you are completely free to create any way you please. However, in the long run it’s simply not an effective way to develop ideas. It’s one sided, It’s not nearly as fun and what happens when your idea has reached it’s limit and you alone have exhausted all avenues? You don’t have anyone to help you take it to the next level.

It’s A Family Affair
Group brainstorming uses the experience, discipline and creativity of all group members. Ideas are easily developed in more depth and there is more opportunity for expanding ideas in more than one direction. Good sessions come from people who have experience exploring and developing ideas on their own and enjoy the experience of idea making with others. Teams that get the most out of brainstorming are the ones that have the best team culture around ideas and a process for going about finding, refining and harvesting ideas.

Brainstorming 101
Want an effective session? Follow these simple rules:

1. What the heck is our problem?
Understand the project goals before you begin and keep the session focused on those goals. Make sure no one idea or train of thought is followed for too long.

2. Know how to facilitate
A good facilitator knows how to run a session. Not only is it their job to prevent interruptions and fist fights over the last peanut M & M, they also have to be able to: Listen and help people express ideas. Limit the number of ideas so people have a chance to share. Encourage people to develop other people’s ideas or use other ideas to make new ones. Make the sure the brainstorm doesn’t get off track

3. You really ARE more creative with your socks on!
Comfort is the most important way to get great ideas. Work in an atmosphere that isn’t the norm. Coffee shop, meeting room, lobby, someone’s house, restaurant, zoo. Start out with small ideas, encourage the quiet folks to participate, throw out some crazy ideas to lighten the mood and have fun. Great ideas can come from some of the most random thoughts.

4. Establish ground rules
How are you going to run your session? Free for all? Formal hand raising? Freeze tag? Dodgeball? Assign tasks and reward play with positive reactions…or candy.

5. Postpone criticism
This isn’t the time or place to shoot anyone’s ideas down regardless of what you think of them. It not only stifles creativity and interrupts free flow of ideas, but it’s just not nice.

The Aftermath
Great ideas are created, brought to life, invented. So what happens to them after the session is over?

A. You should review and refine the ideas?

B. You should define goal-related criteria to evaluate ideas?

C. You should assign further investigation into potential avenues?

OR

D. You should bail?

The only way to make ideas useful is to refine and narrow them down. Come up with simple criteria for evaluating the ideas and go through them. Pass them around for further feedback if you must but don’t let it sit for another time.

Information brought to you by:

The Step by Step Guide to Brainstorming

Brainstorming

How to Run a Brianstorming Meeeting

But first, to illustrate this, I did a little experiment this last weekend with the beer making blog that’s updated by a few folks here at Pop Art. We planned this past Friday to drink our way around the world at the Portland International Beerfest, then do a beer review. I wanted to see firsthand how a linking strategy and keyword density strategy would work. Short answer: It worked really, really well.

Granted, it’s not like there’s a ton of competition over the Portland International Beerfest search term. But we drinkers and brewers tend to write a lot, and being the sort who are willing to pay $9 per six pack, we’re probably well-educated with a good income. Plus this is Portland, home of craft brew. My point is that this ain’t like competing over a zillion dollar search term like mesothelioma, but it’s a decent test.

Here’s how it went:

Friday: Drink. Eat. Get a lift home. Read for a bit. Zonk out.

1 HOUR WRITING, 1 HOUR MARKETING

Saturday: Get up, drink some water, eat some eggs, write the review. Terms to focus on: “Portland International Beerfest” and “list.” I figured “list” would be good because folks might want to know what’s on tap and in the bottle there. I made sure the search terms are in the title and H1 (the Title box in WordPress, depending on how you have it set up). Made sure they were near the beginning of the first paragraph. Then I sprinkled them together throughout, and dropped ‘em one more time for good measure at the end.

I waited an hour or so, then Googled it (sans quotes). “Portland International Beerfest.” Third page. “Portland International Beerfest list.” First page, last listing.
Sweet.

I then went in to the beer blogs that I normally read and comment on, as well as the forums where I’m a member, and posted links back to the site using the terms inside the anchor tag. Like this: “I just posted a review of the Portland International Beerfest list of awesomeness.”

Then I took some aspirin and went back to bed.

PROVING DAY

Monday: Headed into work, and did a quick search for my terms. Lo’ and behold, we were on the front page, fourth item, for “Portland International Beerfest.” And when you tacked “list” on there, we were No. 1. Killer. Our SEM wizard, Blu — who nearly won the Stein Hoist contest Friday with a whopping 5 minutes, by the way — gave me a thumbs up.
CREATIVE COPYWRITING AND SEM

Whoop-dee-do, though, right? Search engine marketing works. Duh. But getting it to work elegantly with branding? That’s where you earn your big bucks if you play it cool.

See, it’s easy for copywriters to get incredibly flustered with SEM. You’re basically given terms — often unwieldy and lacking poetry or rhythm — and told where to put them. Which can be very limiting, if you look at them that way.

SEM MAKES LEADS EASIER

I prefer (for my own sanity) to view them as building blocks. “Portland International Beerfest list” could be used in so many different ways in a lead sentence, all of them interesting. Being constrained is just another way of saying you’re focused. Wasn’t there a da Vinci quote about that? Anyway, here’s a few examples:

• The Portland International Beerfest list of awesomeness (my choice: hangovers do not breed creativity)
• I saw the Portland Internationational Beerfest list and said, “It’s like Christmas in July!”
• The Portland International Beerfest list couldn’t be less global: it might as well be the Portland European Beerfest list. There were maybe 10 non-European ales.
• One look at the Portland International Beerfest list told me I’d better bring enough cash for a cab ride home.

All of those work. They’re all interesting, decent lead sentences.

WORKING SEM INTO TITLES

I think headlines and titles are a little more difficult, because you’re already fighting hard for character real estate. But, just like leads, it’s all about attitude. When you’ve got long terms, like my example of Portland International Beerfest, you’re extremely constrai… Er, I mean, you’re extremely focused. So live with it.

Are you going to be able to pull off an Ogilvy special? “Lemon”? No. you’re not. But you’ll get your site higher on Google, letting customers find information they want, and hopefully generating goodwill for your client. And for 99% of the jobs out there — jobs where you’re conveying information rather than going gung-ho for branding — that’s something to hang your hat on.

And c’mon. You’re on the creative team, right? Then be creative. Throw out an insanely long headline, a la Leatherman or Redfeather Snowshoes. Plus designers love playing with type, so give ‘em a thrill. Here’s a few examples:

• Portland International Beerfest List of Awesomeness
• Portland International Beerfest List of Le Crappiest Ales in France*
• You’d Be an Idiot to Miss the Ales on Our List from the Portland International Beerfest

Get the point? Sweet. So there you’ve got it. I’m sure there’s a million strategies and tactics I’m overlooking — remember, I was hungover while I did this — so I look forward to your comments about search engine marketing and copywriting.
* Believe me, I tried them all, they were booooooring. Note: Chimay was not present.

Dave Selden: 10:11
very interesting article here:
http://www.gladwell.com/2004/2004_09_06_a_ketchup.html

Dave Selden: 10:11
I really like the “mind doesn’t know what the tongue wants” part
the fact that you can’t design a universal ketchup and please people
you have to design several ketchups that sub-groups can rally around

Thom Schoenborn: 10:14
reading:
“Try my ketchup!” Wigon said, over and over, to anyone who passed. “If you don’t try it, you’re doomed to eat Heinz the rest of your life.”

Dave Selden: 10:14
seriously
sarah and I don’t eat ketchup
I guess we would buy ketchup if it tasted better
not something I really ever thought about

Thom Schoenborn: 10:14
ketchup in australia is awesome.
no sugar.
just tomato and vinegar

Dave Selden: 10:15
wow

Thom Schoenborn: 10:15
with their bacon, which we call canadian bacon?
kick-ass.

Dave Selden: 10:15
ha
maybe I will make that next
british bacon is also awesome

Thom Schoenborn: 10:16
for sure:
“You know why you like it so much?” he would say, in his broad Boston accent, to the customers who seemed most impressed. “Because you’ve been eating bad ketchup.”

Dave Selden: 10:17
“If you are four—and I have a four-year-old—he doesn’t get to choose what he eats for dinner, in most cases,” Keller says. “But the one thing he can control is ketchup. It’s the one part of the food experience that he can customize and personalize.” As a result, Heinz came out with the so-called EZ Squirt bottle, made out of soft plastic with a conical nozzle. In homes where the EZ Squirt is used, ketchup consumption has grown by as much as twelve per cent.
Small children tend to be neophobic: once they hit two or three, they shrink from new tastes. That makes sense, evolutionarily, because through much of human history that is the age at which children would have first begun to gather and forage for themselves, and those who strayed from what was known and trusted would never have survived.”

Thom Schoenborn: 10:18
Interesting.
I like the concept of the multiple versions of perfection:
“Instead, working with the Campbell’s kitchens, he came up with forty-five varieties of spaghetti sauce. [snip]  When Moskowitz charted the results, he saw that everyone had a slightly different definition of what a perfect spaghetti sauce tasted like. If you sifted carefully through the data, though, you could find patterns, and Moskowitz learned that most people’s preferences fell into one of three broad groups: plain, spicy, and extra-chunky, and of those three the last was the most important. Why? Because at the time there was no extra-chunky spaghetti sauce in the supermarket.”

Dave Selden: 10:20
totally

Thom Schoenborn: 10:21
You can’t please all the people all the time, basically.

Dave Selden: 10:21
yeah

Thom Schoenborn: 10:21
“If I make one group happier, I piss off another group. We did this for coffee with General Foods, and we found that if you create only one product the best you can get across all the segments is a 60—if you’re lucky. That’s if you were to treat everybody as one big happy family. But if I do the sensory segmentation, I can get 70, 71, 72. Is that big? Ahhh. It’s a very big difference. In coffee, a 71 is something you’ll die for.”

Dave Selden: 10:21
totally

Thom Schoenborn: 10:21
in college, my magazine prof was the founder and editor of Guitar magazine.
about 10% of their subscriber base were bass players
they had, like, two sections of each issue dedicated to bass players.
and when they cut one of those sections, ONE SINGLE PAGE of editorial, they lost something like 8% of their subscriber base.

Dave Selden: 10:23
funny
that’s a lot

Thom Schoenborn: 10:23
in many ways, it’s about knowing not just what people like about your product — because people tend to like a lot of things about what you offer —
it’s about knowing about how passionate they are about those things.
which is a little different than this subject.
but they’re related.
We should just copy and paste this IM convo into a 72dpiiintheshade post.

Dave Selden: 10:24
do it.

• Steps in the UXD Design Process
• Tips and Tricks
• How the Usability, Graphic Designer, and Implementer roles worked together using the Blend and Design.

The cost to attend this event is FREE.

What: PDXUX - July Meeting

Topic: Using Expression Blend and Design

Who: Susan Adam, Cecilia Case, and Tony Tarr

When: Tuesday 07/17/2007
6:30 p.m. Mixer and Food
7:00 p.m. Housekeeping/Announcements
7:15 p.m. Presentation
8:30 p.m. Meeting Ends

Where: Pop Art, Inc.
(Community Conference Room on the 2nd floor)
718 SW Alder St
Portland, Oregon

(Give me a dollar Kelly)

The top 10 most annoying web words:

1. Folksonomy
2. Blogosphere
3. Blog
4. Netiquette
5. Blook
6. Webinar
7. Vlog
8. Social network
9. Cookie
10. Wiki, podcast and avatar

via MarketingCharts.com

The point is that creative executions which are daring and evocative can work twice as hard as mediocre executions for the same price. Throw that little anecdote into your next pitch. Tell ‘em you read it on the Internet…

Anyway, it’s also a great excuse to link you to this non-NIKE commercial, which is %&#@$%&ing hilarious. (Thanks, Ben.)

Raul is an Interactive Art Director from Brasil who has some pretty exciting personal work in his portfolio. I particularly love the pieces where collages photographs using really interesting vector masks.

Go visit his site and file it under inspiration.

A couple of Fridays ago I attended Forward07, an American Marketing Association conference on innovation and sustainability. I’ve attended a few conferences in the past year and none were as inspiring as this one. Huge thanks to all the folks who helped pull this one together.

The Challenge

Ray Anderson, CEO of Interface, was the first speaker of the day. He told his story in a very simple and authentic way without the aid of any of the usual presentation tools. His pure honesty and passion held the room in a way I have seen very few speakers pull off. More than a decade ago, Ray was 61 years old and had no concern for anything but his bottom line. He was challenged by Interface to have a stance on the environment and a month later he approached them with ‘Mission Zero.’ By 2020 his company would not only have zero footprint on the earth, but every day of production would be giving back to the earth. He believed that his company could make this a reality while dramatically increasing their margins (‘doing well by doing good’).

Permission to Fail

Ray spoke about how giving his staff permission to fail created an environment spawned innovation. One story that particularly impressed me was how an engineer’s idea to tear down their production line and reinstall it would cut energy usage dramatically. Because they installed all of the equipment prior to running the pipe, the plant had narrow diameter pipe winding throughout the entire line. The friction created by the narrow pipe and the excessive length caused by the winding resulted in the need for high power pumps to push fluid through the system. By tearing down the entire line, running large diameter pipe first and then installing the equipment, Interface was able to use pumps that ran on 1/14 of the power than its predecessors did. The money saved by not using 86% of the energy dramatically increased the companies margins and significantly reduced their footprint (‘doing well by doing good’).

Interface could have looked at the capital cost, the potential for failure and denied the engineer’s proposal. Thi’s is just one of many stories Ray told that illustrated how being less afraid of failure inspired the innovation that has made Interface an icon of sustainability.

Looking to Nature

Interface’s designers and engineeres looked to nature to see what it does well and what they could take from it. Among other things, their designers noted how nature isn’t perfect. That while humans have a natural drive towards perfection, they dream of a natural place when they imagine the ideal. They designed a rug tile production system that produces no tile the same. This resulted in their quality assurance people not being able to find any imperfect tiles, easier installation and zero waste.

Ray said that the ‘best way to have good ideas is to stop having bad ideas.’ It sounds simple but you can tell he really means it. By expecting exactly that from his company, they are on a strong path towards their mission for zero footprint. He is an inspiration and I believe his vision will fundamentally change the way business is done. As he finished his story, the crowed roared into a standing ovation. One woman stood and shouted that he should be President. I don’t think Ray wants to do that, but I hope he inspires the next one.

The Tools

The rest of the day was filled with a panel of sustainable businesses and some motivational fun with Kevin Carroll. Kevin spoke about the importance of play and surrounding ourselves with tools that get us excited. He challenged the crowd to ditch their mission statements in favor of ‘inspirational dreams.’ I couldn’t agree more with that idea… It is my experience that you can people and companies who expose their spirit and passions are magnets. People just want to be a part their lives, projects or work.

I could go on and on about this conference and all of the amazing stories I heard. The important thing is leaving feeling energized and inspired.

Via Geist