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Tips for Staying Creative Every Day So New Ideas Will Flow

By Diane Thieke on May 3, 2013 in Custom Content, Custom Media

I’m a creative person by nature. But even I − a brand journalist who is faced with the need to generate new ideas for custom content every…single…day − even I get burned out. You can’t create custom media without fresh ideas.

I do have a few tricks to help me find my creative mojo again.

Troll the Web. OK, admittedly, this sounds like a poor idea. And really, I wouldn’t recommend it as the FIRST thing to try. Maybe not even the last. But there are some amazing things on the Web. Museum websites are great sources of creative inspiration, especially for new types of custom media. Just don’t let yourself get TOO distracted or hours will go by in a flash. Oh…and stay away from Perez Hilton.
Watch a TEDTalk. I don’t consider this surfing the Web because I watch these on my iPad while doing the dishes. They either have me running back to the computer with 15 new ideas − or leave me up to my elbows in soap bubbles and tears.
Take a shower. Without singing. (I’m banned from singing in the house after a disastrous attempt at the Happy Birthday song a few years ago.) On slow days, I’m squeaky clean.
Play the “I wonder if” game. You know, ’I wonder if this story would be more interesting if told it in Q&A style.’ or ‘I wonder if things smell the same way to cats as they smell to us.’
Get outside. Take a run along the pond, walk to the local coffee shop, sit outside the local library and people watch. This often brings out the journalist in me, which often leads to new ideas.
Welcome the bad ideas. One thing I’ve learned over the years about the he process of generating new ideas or new ways to tell stories is that bad ideas often spark good ones. Don’t be afraid to let the dogs out.

Here’s a few other ways to stay creative. Can you think of others?

29 Ways to Stay Creative

29 Ways to Stay Creative infographic

Golden Gate Bridge is reflected in a soap bubble (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

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Thursday Reads: Annenberg, Content Marketing, Cinemagram

By Diane Thieke on April 19, 2012 in Thursday Reads

Here are some of the things worth reading, viewing, and checking out this week.

USC Annenberg released their GAP VII survey of the PR industry a couple of weeks ago, but PR Squared posted a nice summary of the research by Burghardt Tenderich, associate director of the center. Bottom line: PR has a seat at the table, social media and internal comms are on the rise, marketing/product PR is on the decline.
If you haven’t had enough of the iconic Steve Jobs after reading Walter Isaacson’s biography, Fast Company has the legacy tapes, which cover the years between Apple stints. Be sure to check out the quotes.
On the importance of headline writing: there’s just too much out there to read, so a headline has got to speak to you. Another reason for hiring a trained journalist for your marketing newsroom.
On storytelling: how characters move the brand story forward, from Spin Sucks.
Can traditional marketers transition to digital marketing? Personally, I think many will not. Here’s Mike Moran’s view.
McKinsey Quarterly discusses how companies can harness social media to shape consumer decision making. My favorite line: “Knowing that something works and understanding how it works are very different things.”

Launch of the Week:

MaryLee Sachs, author of The Changing MO of the CMO, launches her new consultancy to help CMOs deal with the rapidly shifting sands of marketing.

Product of the Week:

Enterprise customer intelligence company, FirstRain, launches FirstTweets, which filters out the junk tweets and delivers companies high-quality, business-relevant tweets. Reviews are promising so far, and I’m testing it out. Look for a future blog post.

Video of the Week:

2.5 million views and more than 30K likes. In 10 days. I think that qualifies as viral.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=faIFNkdq96U&w=560&h=315]

Design of the Week:

The folks at The Mechanism, who have lots of cool things on their blog (and do cool design work of their own), shared this Aussie site. It meets my (very high) standards for quality and creativity.

App of the Week:

Credit again to the Mechanism blog, but I too am having fun with Cinemagram. My cats, not so much.

Created with cinemagr.am

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Why Marketing Will Soon Look Like a Newsroom

By Diane Thieke on April 18, 2012 in Content Marketing

Credit: victoriapeckham

Social media is changing marketing, reshifting priorities. That’s clear in the spending trends: AdAge reports that 59% of survey respondents say they’ll spend more money on social media ads in the next 12 months, with social media advertising jumping to 27% from 22%. (The survey was conducted by Advertiser Perceptions.)

And it’s not just advertising: CMOs say they plan to increase their social media budgets to 10.8% in the next 12 months from current levels of 7.4%, according to the latest CMO Survey from Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business.

But social media marketing is different from traditional marketing, and a key reason is that it requires content – good, quality content that helps readers solve problems or understand issues. This is vastly different than traditional marketing, which relies on pithy and memorable campaign slogans.

This is why content marketing is the hot, new buzz word for marketers. There’s a lot of information available about how to create content that grabs the attention of your audience. (The Content Marketing Institute is an excellent resource.) But what does it mean for the structure of the marketing department as we know it?

Content marketing is going to require marketing heads to rethink the composition of their staff, the skill sets that are required, and the tools that they use. What’s a better place to look for a model than the newsroom, which has a strong track record of producing informative content? And by newsroom, I envision a hybrid of TV, print, magazine and online, with a dash of customer service thrown in.

▪ Hire an Editor in Chief. Eventually, CMOs will take on this role. But as the marketing newsroom evolves – along with the skill set of the CMO – the most important hire may be a former journalist or editor who understands editorial calendars, assignments, and most importantly, determining the editorial focus based on what’s important to the readers.

▪ Producers. Content is not one-dimensional. It can’t be merely words on a screen. It needs animation, images, video, audio, and graphics. Like TV producers, they have full creative responsibilities, making decisions about everything that appears in the final version, from script to spokesman.

▪ Writers. Tasked with researching and writing stories, posts, scripts, and status updates, in line with the editorial focus.

Community managers already do some of this, in addition to managing the company’s responses to questions from fans and followers. Perhaps this role will morph into the modern day equivalent of the editorial page editor.

I’ll be writing more about the marketing department of the future – the tools it will need and the skillsets of its employees – over the next few days. Stop back and let me know what you think – and how you are thinking about reorganizing your marketing staff to meet social media marketing challenges.

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Content Marketing Is Not New

By Diane Thieke on March 7, 2012 in Digital Media Marketing

This is an entirely fun infographic about content marketing, compliments of the Content Marketing Institute. Think content marketing is new? Not really…