Creativity

Is Innovation Dead?

/ Jeff Hora / 1 Comment

“Innovation” has become a flat buzz-word in business. I think we may have finally beat it into unremitting grayness, which is unfortunate. If ever we have been in need of creative and unusual solutions to problems, it is this moment in which we find ourselves. Even the concept of “disruptive innovation” has become something of a totem that has lost meaning.

I have been in discussions of how some organizations choose to approach this kind of process. Some pat themselves on the back if they can manage to agree on changing the color of the cloth covering the cubicles, and others destroy productivity and morale by nuking the team, process and business plan almost monthly. Certainly, what works for one may not work for another, but taking well-written best practices and lessons learned from an book or article (or motivational speaker…) and then rounding your team into a room and delivering it as this quarter’s way out of a business problem without due research and context probably won’t work.

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How To Solve the Biggest Problem with Diversity

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There was an item on the local news the other night that I found fascinating. A number of students at the university campus were holding a rally advocating for a Diversity Center as a gathering place that would acknowledge the diversity of the campus and provide a place and programs that would focus on that aspect of their identity.  Given the cash-strapped condition of higher education, my immediate thought was “re-inaugurate the Student Union as the Student Diversity Center and you’re done!”

As I let this information further settle, I began to wonder about the surface focus that our culture has taken in the intervening years between the concepts of Student Union and Student Diversity, what that says about our culture, and the dangers and opportunities this presents, both for our culture, and then, turning the thought on its side, for business.  Yeah, I have an exciting thought life….

Blogging – Speak If You Have Something to Say

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A question I received this week was, “How often should a business post to their blog?” This is a very common question and usually driven by a small business owner’s fear of having to spend a lot of time creating the post and the frequency of posting for the effectiveness of the effort. In new bloggers’ nightmares, it takes hours to write a 400 word post and she has to do this every day. Neither of those is true.

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TIPS: 3 Views of Content

/ Jeff Hora / 2 Comments

The online world is utterly obsessed with content. This takes a number of forms, from articles and blogs to photos, graphics of any kind, videos, podcasts, and any re-mix thereof. It is an attention economy and if you can get your customers and visitors to focus on JUST YOU for a bit, you have achieved something pretty impressive.

However, this is only getting harder to do well. If you have the goal of creating or highlighting something of real value and relevance to your audience (as opposed to distraction or “click-bait”…) you have to be thoughtful, intentional and resourceful while balancing the other needs of your business and life. While the standing approach can still be called “Fail Fast” or “Do It Wrong Quickly“, you still need to cultivate an acute awareness of the real value of what you publish to your audience. There are numerous articles, sites, books and courses about content marketing available. Still, navigating it all as a solopreneur or small business owner can seem like panning for gold, and you just don’t feel like you’ve got the time or resources. You’ve got a business to create and run.

I’ll keep this to the point to save you time: here are three views of content that can help you use the resources you have more effectively. Frame your efforts with these in mind and you will find you come closer to “hitting the mark.”

  • Make it interesting – There’s the stuff you’re interested in and there’s the stuff your audience is interested in. Drive laser focus on the latter, include the former and do your best to leave ‘overt selling’ out of it. Don’t be a pimp. Remember, only roughly 1 out of every 20 pieces published should be considered selling.
  • Make it relevant and useful – Jay Baer says to publish stuff your audience would be willing to pay for. The greater the utility and relevance of what you publish, the more valuable you are to your audience, which will bring them back to you frequently….and when you DO sell, they will listen.
  • Be truly “value add“ – Don’t just shove articles and links onto your stream and let your audience figure it out. Comment….give them a clue or a question or a contrarian point of view. Provide a reason to care and click through.

Do you have any views of content you feel are foundational? Share in the comments and make your case.

Related articles

Co-working and #H2H

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Citizen Space, a coworking space in San Franci...

Citizen Space, a coworking space in San Francisco, CA. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

According to the U.S. Census, more than half (51.6 percent) of all businesses that responded to the 2007 Survey of Business Owners (SBO) were operated primarily from someone’s home in 2007. Just over 72 percent are sole proprietorships.

What does this mean?
It means there are a lot of us sitting in a room by ourselves a lot of the time.  When the need to focus is keen, this can be really helpful. However, we are human beings, and none of us operates all that well in a workplace vacuum.

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The Shower of Inspiration

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water stream from shower in close-up, showing ...

water stream from shower in close-up, showing droplets (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I read an interesting interview in the New York Times last weekend with Brian Halligan, CEO and Founder of Hubspot. While a fairly standard interview for the Business section, I was caught by something he said about himself….he told the interviewer that he is “a huge nap guy.” By this, he says that he has found that when he comes up with good ideas, they tend to happen when he is either falling into or coming out of a nap. With the goal of thinking more and working less, he is working to engineer more opportunities like this (yes, naps…) into his life, and is encouraging others to do so as well.

I think that’s cool. The awareness to know when you have moments of inspiration is something few people have. Also, I could use a nap most of the time….

This got me thinking along several lines.

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First Thoughts in a New Community

/ Jeff Hora / 2 Comments
2012_09_17 Community Management IMG_0841

2012_09_17 Community Management IMG_0841 (Photo credit: joelogon)

OK, so I’m stepping away from the fire hose for a moment. I’m today wrapping up, if that even makes sense when you’re on the road, week #5 in my new gig as Senior Community Manager at SDL. Collecting and prioritizing my thoughts and experiences will likely take some time, if only because so many of them do not categorize very simply.

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MOOCs and Measurement

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Lees hier hoe je een MOOC kunt opzetten! Massi...

Lees hier hoe je een MOOC kunt opzetten! Massive Open Online Courses deel 1 door Inge de Waard http://t.co/RbLAijLd @Ignatia (Photo credit: Trendmatcher)

I’ve noted a sea change in education and learning about which there has been quite a bit of virtual ink spilled.  The phenomenon known as a MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) has been added to the education lexicon, much to the joy of futurists, learners everywhere, and to the consternation of a number of university and college administrators.  Like most things, I can see the light and the dark, along with the difficult.

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Coming up for air

/ Jeff Hora / 1 Comment
Korg M3 Music Workstation Sampler

Image via Wikipedia

It’s true…..this space has been as dead as a bag of hammers for a couple of months. I’ve switched companies and jobs, and that has made for a very exciting and immersive few weeks.

I’ve switched jobs before.  I worked for my previous employer for 14 years and had a number of positions, each a challenge and none of them easy.  Learning the ropes, discovering who were the go-to people on the team, what were the local processes for getting things done and re-jiggering my goals and deliverables for the new gig always took a bit of time, but the corporate culture was basically the same (there were actually some differences between business groups, but I learned early on that was the norm for my company).  I didn’t have to learn a new repository of information, a new information discovery tree or deal with a new way of thinking about what we did, as a company.

THAT has changed.

Boy Howdy….

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Short and…….sweet?

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Readers own scan of the PD document

Image via Wikipedia

When I sit down to write, my first instinct is to spend time noodling on a topic I might have captured previously or something that I’m confronting or working through right now. I feel that somehow whatever I could come up with in a stream-of-consciousness sessions might resemble a walk through an unsightly neighborhood and not have much coherence. I need to give myself a break and realize that there is more coherence to following a path of thought than I give credit to the desire to write.

This is just such a post.

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