Tag Archives: creativity

The Beauty Of Small Marketing Budgets

by on June 4, 2011 in Marketing

April Dunford published a great post this week on the “beauty of constraints” in small marketing budgets:

Taking the money away often takes away all of the really obvious options. And that’s exactly where the magic happens. So we can’t just spend more to acquire new customers. Now what? Well, we could figure out ways to engage them to send more business our way, we could figure out ways to sell more to the customers we have, we could figure out ways to improve our customer retention. There are always a thousand things you can do with a small budget.

As someone who has spent his marketing career working for nonprofits and small, scrappy startups, I can definitely say I love the challenge of having to do a lot with a little. Necessity truly becomes the mother of invention.

Do yourself a favor and read April’s whole post.

Python Thursdays: In A World Full Of Supermen…

by on May 27, 2010 in Career

…Sometimes it’s the simple things that really differentiate who we are and what we can add to the world.

What our hero, Bicycle Repair Man, shows is that it doesn’t matter if we’re surrounded by awesomely powerful individuals. Our job is to dig down and discover what truly makes each of us unique and what skills we have that we can use in our own distinct way.

So what about you…how do you relate to our hero here?

Why Social Media is Like a Gigantic Refrigerator

by on August 27, 2009 in Social Media

Today, my youngest daughter, Katie, brought home something super-incredible and imaginative she did in art class. She was so proud of her work she practically burst through the front door so she could show me. And indeed, it was something to take pride in.

What did I do with it? Did I bury it under my papers or throw it aside with the bills? Nope. I hung it on the fridge so everyone in the family could admire it. And for Katie, it serves as a visible reminder of her own creative talents.

Isn’t this what social media is…a big whopping refrigerator? Each of us has the ability to create something magnificent and now share with the world. We get to be kids again complete with the same giddy excitement we once got when proudly sharing work.

Now, let’s flip this around a bit. As a company, are you creating a fridge for your customers to post their own proudly created content? Perhaps a video or pictures showing what they made using your product? Or a story about how your service made their day (or work) better? (Nonprofit organizations, you can feel free to ask yourself similar questions.) Imagine how much your customers will feel about your company if you give them a place to show off their best work? If they’re like Katie, they’ll be beaming from ear-to-ear.

Intuition and Innovation

by on April 14, 2009 in Business

Are you getting caught up trying to sell a process? Perhaps trying to sell a process that is probably easily replicable? Or worse, trying to sell a process that’s proprietary and mired in so much paranoid legalese and bureaucratic crap that the client really doesn’t know what they buying? Josh Kamler at tiny gigantic urges you to stop:

I’d say that intuition and innovation are similar beasts. That innovation doesn’t actually happen without intuition. The sooner you get your your clients to realize that they’ve bought not a process but a rare group of people who have the courage, creativity, humility, and perseverence to begin making a thing without knowing what it will be and who have the intuition to suddenly see it when they’ve stumbled across it, your services become way more valuable and way less common than some guaranteed proprietary process.

Sell what truly makes your service marketable – the unique genius of you and your people. All the other stuff isn’t really that remarkable.

BONUS: Rosa Say also wrote a post called When Made to Stick Will. You’ll find similarly intriguing ideas there.

When A Boring Presentation Just Won’t Do

by on April 25, 2007 in Work

I’ve been getting a little bored with the more traditional ways to document and share information and concepts with colleagues. Tables are uninspiring and mindmaps can only take you so far. Sometimes you need a more fine-tuned mechanism to share knowledge. Along to the rescue comes The Periodic Table of Visualization Methods from Ralph Lengler and Martin Eppler at Visual Literacy (via Kevin Kelly’s Cool Tools).

What’s particularly nifty is that as you hover over each element, you see the method in action. And bonus points for using the periodic tables as yet another visualization method. There are over 100 methods here so now I have no excuses for falling into an idea presentation funk again.