The omnipresence of social media has made it easy for businesses to gather and utilize consumer feedback. There are several benefits to utilize customer insights from brand monitoring on social media. You can use focus groups, surveys, and social media analytics to gather social mentions concerning your brand. It will enable you to understand what your customer wants from your brand.
So why is it necessary to gather customer insights from social media monitoring? Any social mention of your brand can enable you to engage with a customer personally and tackle problems. It will also allow you to thank your customers for their appreciation of your product or service and improve their brand loyalty.
As we mentioned, social media is omnipresent these days. Therefore mentions of your brand may not be restricted to your business pages or handles. There may be discussions on social media about your brand, where the name has not been tagged.
Therefore monitoring your brand through multiple avenues and tools is essential to gather insights so that you don’t miss out on mentions. Customer reviews are dynamic and ever-evolving, so you have to follow your brand mentions along with the further discussions on these posts.
Brand monitoring and social listening should be integral parts of your market research. The analysis of the data you gather can provide essential insights into customer behavior. Brand mentions can also enable you to track your purchases and identify the prime customers. The customer insights that you gather can help you in the following ways.
It will enable you to understand your customer’s expectations and habits.
You will be able to track the topics for discussions and interests related to your brand name on social media.
You won’t have to bear additional expenses to gather data about your customer’s engagement with your brand and your marketing campaigns.
You can improve the user experience by tracking the level of satisfaction at every stage of a customer’s interactions with your brand.
You can adjust your products and services according to the market and industry trends with confidence.
These are a few ways to use the insights you obtain through brand monitoring on social media.
Identity Customer Patterns
You can use the insights to identify existing and emerging consumer patterns. People from different places may respond in a different way to your products and services.
These insights can help with the standardization of your products and services so that they can satisfy the needs of your target audience globally. You can also utilize it to modify your merchandise according to consumer behavior and expectations.
Focus on Your Target Audience
Real-time insights about your brand can help you to focus on the right target audience. You can use the data gathered from brand monitoring tools to understand the consumer communities formed around your product.
For example, if you wish to sell bread in a certain region, you can use the monitoring tools to gather data about the preferences of your market. If you notice that more people prefer whole grain over gluten-free options, you can focus your marketing campaigns accordingly.
Customize Your Product
The insights can not only help you target your campaigns, but they can also help you customize your products. In the above example, you should provide more whole grain options than gluten-free loaves of bread for that region.
Similarly, if you notice that the demand for a white loaf is more in a certain region than brown loaves of bread, you can send more white loaves to that area. Each insight gathered from customers should be taken into account while customizing your products and services.
Renew Connections
Customer reactions to social media posts can allow you to renew your brand’s social connections. They can give you insights into the emerging sentiments in the community. You can also gather the keywords or phrases that are frequently used by your customers when they mention your brand.
For example, most customers want the products to be more inclusive of the different forms of abilities of individuals. There is a growing need for businesses to be accessible to people with disabilities. If you can make your products or services more inclusive, it can help you generate a social statement for your brand. You can also create special offers to renew your connection with various communities.
Set up Benchmarks
Insights gathered from brand monitoring on social media can allow you to set up benchmarks that can keep you ahead of your competition. The data you have accumulated can tell you the brand’s position in the market and how it is performing against the competition.
You can use the insights to modify the key performance indicators to enable you to achieve better results. The insights can also tell you where your competitors might be lacking, and you can use them to your advantage.
Most companies are aware of the need for brand monitoring on social media but fail to use the data gathered to their maximum advantage. Analyzing the data to obtain insights can prove extremely beneficial for the brand value and your business.
You can use the methods mentioned above to achieve the best possible outcome for your products and their presence in the market.
Digital events are becoming ever more relevant and so for organizers and platforms holders, times are exciting. With this new interest comes competition in the world of virtual events, however, and Forbes predicts that both in-house and third-party digital events will continue to undergo exponential growth over the next year.
This means that digital event planners and platforms are going to need to market their wares in creative ways in order to find their way through what is becoming an over-saturated market. Finding that ideal strategy is a matter of looking at trends in the wider marketing arena and matching them.
Learning your niche
Finding you out who you appeal to, and for what reason, is key to forming a cogent strategy. Look at your product strengths to start this process. Are you a fully-featured organizer that uses, or offers, a platform with lots of different features and functions?
Or are you more akin to the classic marketplace platforms, like Zoom and Skype, which – as CNN note – have gained popularity for their simple format? It’s really important to know your market and this is important within digital events. Look at your client base, and clients you want to start providing a service for and decide on what sort of events you can offer – this will allow you to focus your marketing spend in a much better fashion.
Be proactive
Entrepreneurs assert that proactive marketing is absolutely key for all B2B businesses. As a platform provider for digital events, that includes your business. It’s a good piece of advice – an over-saturated market means that it’s easy for customers to find good options, and more difficult to make sure they find the best option in yours.
It’s important to get a wide spread of marketing avenues, primarily through social media, but also through classic marketing networks. Most importantly of all, perhaps, is efforts made through search engine optimization, and having organic growth in that area of marketing.
SEO matters
Marketing for digital events is a different ball game to what it was a year ago. An increasingly lucrative market means huge amounts of competition, and it’s going to show in the difficulty of ineffective marketing. In many ways, returning to basics is the best way to proceed. Identify your niche and market it in a positive, natural way.
SEO should hold huge importance in your marketing strategy. According to figures reported by Moz.com, only 2.8% of people will click on sponsored results in their searches. Thankfully, modern SEO values webpages that naturally emphasize the quality of their content and products.
SEO rankings are increasingly influenced by the promotion of organic content – that is, content and webpages that are written not to look into the technical specifications of a search engine algorithm, but sound human. When planning your website and online advertising content, focus on this factor. Look to naturally show just why your platform is right for your niche; the keywords and search terms you want to get involved with should come naturally.
The bottom line
What will have to change is the marketing mindset. The fundamental questions in the coming years will not be how to deploy this or that new technology, but how to can solve fundamental marketing problems, such as how to earn consumers’ trust and how to create experiences that are more impactful, useful, productive, and beneficial.
Back in the 90s, markets were still based on linear value chains dominated by one or two industry giants. We are quickly moving from a world of hierarchies to one dominated by networks and ecosystems. That changes how we need to develop and grow.
Social networking is not about farming followers, it’s a way of cultivating relationships. How many times have you seen companies requesting people to friend them on Facebook? Like farming, followers was the name of the game. Sad but true. The truth is that a social media plan and its marketing tactics are really about cultivating relationships with potential customers. Fan ‘skins’, by themselves, are of very little value.
What is the importance of social media in your business? Dialog with customers for sure. What about reading your content and remembering? Appreciating your help? Marketing? Building relationships? We believe it is all of these things, but the bottom line goal is relationship building.
Related post: Social Media Campaign … How to Create an Eye-popping One
In the ever-changing landscape of social networking, you might be wondering if you are getting the most out of your business’s social media marketing tactics? Here we define social media community engagement as the process of gaining website customer traffic, attention, interaction, and ultimately relationships through social media sites.
Have you ever thought about how to build positive social media community engagement?
This task starts with what customers want and need. Most people want to: feel needed, be valued, be appreciated, be fulfilled, share emotions, laugh and be happy, succeed and be inspired. Make them feel something that feels unique to what other brands are blasting at them. To do this you must know who your community is. You must know how to catch and hold their attention.
So let’s examine our recommended game plan to build positive social media marketing tactics for community engagement:
During the Sochi Olympics, Coca-Cola hosted a contest/series called #CokeGames. The gist of it was that they created simple Olympics-inspired games like Bottle Cap Hockey, Coke Curling, Ice Cube Ski Jump.
Then, they asked their followers to play along by filming and uploading short videos of the Coke fan playing the game. The incentive was an opportunity to win a $100 gift card.
Your small business could adopt this idea, using any big local event as inspiration. It might be a local seafood festival or perhaps a local hockey team championship game. These local events happen all the time and offer great opportunities for the attention of your brand and therefore your relationship building.
Tell short stories
Not sure what content your fans want? Prototype and test your ideas! Try posting different types of status updates, related and not related to your product and company. Also, use your social media insights to see what your readers are engaging with the most, and then deliver more of it.
Many brands build TV commercials and then share them with fans on their social media sites. A great example is with the Guinness ad we discussed in our article on Guinness marketing using storytelling. This technique used subtle messaging with a great story to appeal to fans. The story’s light touch made sharing the story seem less like an advertisement
Doing a great job of creating campaigns that tell short stories and have subtle messaging is an effective marketing tactic.
If you’re inexperienced in video marketing, that’s okay. There is a very large variety of articles on the topic, and a good place to learn. But remember the best way to learn is by doing and practicing. Start your video creations with free tools like Vine and Instagram.
Show appreciation to other brands
Sharing company branded media highlights of synergistic partners of your business can be a big win-win. It starts with finding ‘soft’ synergistic partners that could easily help spread each other’s messages.
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Employ user-generated content
Eye-catching photos, hashtags, and tagging are all good ways to support engagement and sharing. They can all be used effectively building on user-generated content.
Dove used the hashtag option with their #beautyis campaign. The campaign was branded but relied on user-generated content like fan pictures using the product to tap into a younger demographic. Their approach was to focus on customer input to help generate traffic and engagement without the hard sell.
You’ll find that brand campaigns permit good consistency in marketing messages across multiple social media sites
Give updates on sales and discounts
Give your fans what they want: a heads-up on sales or discounts. These types of rewards keep them returning to your website. Fans love to see this kind of information on social media. According to a Syncapse study, 42% of respondents said they like a brand to give “a coupon or discount.”
Stimulate conversation with thought-provoking questions
How do you create fan conversation? One great way we have found is through asking fans a thought-provoking question. Use questions that relate to your brand.
For example, Internet Explorer asked how people imagine the web in 5 years? Remember that you need to be part of the community and give your answer.
When asked to share their vision of the future, fans had fun sharing their thoughts and others used the Q&A as a way to voice their opinions on IE’s products.
Show your fans the fun
It’s always appropriate for a brand to show its personality. If it’s a personality that wants to be a little weird occasionally, go ahead and get a little weird.
Skittles is a great example of this tactic. Yes, most of their posts are silly, but it’s working for Skittles.
A typical day’s posts can include observations such as “Really boring pirates carry pigeons on their shoulders” and shots from the page’s ongoing BFF series, in which it posts photos from users posing with their beloved Skittles.
If you’re a product-based company, ask your users to send photos of themselves using your product or service in exchange for a shot at a prize, or for the honor of being featured on the page.
Share interesting news about your company
Got some great company news to share? If your business just won an award or competition, share the news. Jeep wasn’t shy when the 2014 Jeep Patriot won a Kelley Blue Book 5-year cost to own award. They announced the award on social media. It was a great way to share good news and promote a product without overtly selling.
Post fun facts and popular topics
Not all of your company’s posts should be brand-centric, but that doesn’t mean they can’t be branded. Kit Kat posts fun facts and takes advantage of popular topics, but also includes their tagline, “Break Time. Anytime.” on the images they share.
You should always look to tap into a trending local topic, particularly if it relates to your products and services. Find useful creative visual designs to reinforce the message.
Social media marketing tactics … crowdsource ideas
Always use any and all ways to gain customer insights that you can employ. One way to is to crowdsource ideas from customers. We have written about two companies that have used this technique very successfully. ( See our 2 crowdsourcing articles … one on Starbucks and one on Legos.)
My Starbucks Idea website is at once a crowdsourcing tool, a market research method that brings customer priorities to light, an online community, and an effective internet marketing tool.
Encourage customers to give their opinions and reward the best ideas. It’s a great example of how a business can use social media as a mini–focus group and learn what customers really want.
Use social media as a customer service/ experience gateway
There are many ways a brand can use social media to help manage customer service and experience. Start small, just collecting all inputs, good and bad. And then grow from there.
For example, the Olive Garden showcases their food with “Yum!”-inducing photos to draw attention to their social media as a way to solicit customer service insights. That’s to be expected of a restaurant.
What’s more impressive, though, is that Olive Garden uses their platforms as a gateway to customer service. They encourage customers to chat with their guest relations team about experiences at their restaurant.
Don’t you think you can follow this model? You certainly don’t have to be a restaurant. How serious are you about customer service and customer insight engagement?
You don’t have to make the social network your main source for support, but you should respond and interact with your fans to answer their questions. You’ll not only boost engagement but also show that you’re human and you care about their opinions and questions.
Follow the 70/20/10 Rule
Here is an important guideline to keep in mind for all of your social media sites. Follow the 70/20/10 guideline … not a rule, but a guideline. Let us break that down for you. The majority (70%) of content that a social media site page puts up should be brand- and business-building, meaning it’s information that is valuable to your followers. Content shared from other sources makes up 20% and the remaining 10% or less (NEVER more) is self-promotional.
Apply the 70/20/10 rule to your own content mix and generate more interest for your social media and increase your customer engagement.
Inspire your community
In any social media site, you need to learn what inspires visitors to visit your site. This means you try many sources of content and visual content and learn what attract the most customer targets. And is sticky enough to keep them.
For example, the Quicksilver brand page plays to their audience with stunning images of ocean waves and surfers and acknowledges sponsors and events. All of their content reflects their mission to “inspire people to seek new adventures.”
In one update, they posted an image from a video of a professional surfer. It would have been easy enough to just post the video on their page, but they chose to help drive traffic to a website they thought their users would like. They were thinking of the customer first and that got them a lot of feedback.
Take advantage of the visual design
First and foremost, prioritize visual design in your efforts. Presenting your content in a visual format has a number of benefits. First, humans recognize and process images much faster than text; this is why visual content has much greater appeal. A study by 3M showed that 90% of the information sent to the brain is visual, and visuals are processed 60,000 times faster than text.
Second, using a diversity of image types makes your content continuously fresh, which encourages readers to explore more. In a visual design, the combination of photography, illustration, videos and data visualization keeps the eyes interested and moving around the page. More time on site means more engagement with your brand.
Employ brand specific APPs
As we move through time, more and more customers are using smartphone technology for everything to do with marketing, shopping, and purchasing. Find some good mobile APPS that could help your business and offer them to your customers, including information about how they could be of help to them.
Social media plan … Build email subscription lists
Like all pages on social media, most brands use their pages to introduce new products, share video, talk about upcoming events, and grow their email and customer base lists..
Here is an example, your business can build their email subscription list by creating a photo album to promote a new product or service.
Another example, if customers want to be reminded when a future product (coming soon) will be available, they can sign up for an email alert. A nice seamless way to engage consumers and move them through the sales funnel.
Respond to everyone
No matter what you do, if you want to build engagement you have to be engaging with all customers and potential customers. What does this mean? Do a great job of responding to most comments.
Tag people in a comment stream to let them know that you’ve responded to their inquiry and/or appreciate their comment.
Social media strategy outline … employ cross-channel incentives
It is vital that businesses integrate their marketing in all channels. Tie your inputs in social media to your newspaper ads and your in-store marketing activities.
Here is an example: Williams-Sonoma, a brand with a full-featured online store and over 250 brick-and-mortar locations in the U.S., invites social media fans to in-store events. Not only will this help spread the word; it’s also a good way to entice in-person shoppers, who may have happened upon the event, to stay in-the-know by becoming social media fans, too.
Certainly local small business doesn’t have this scale, but the example applies to small businesses as well.
Capture customer inputs and insights
An engaged social media audience can serve as an ongoing, cost-effective way to discover what fans like. Wrapping the information up in a quarterly report or more impromptu sharing of information could also help keep fans engaged.
Not sure what content your fans want? Prototype, test, and test some more. Try posting different types of status updates, related and not related to your product and company. Also, use your social media to see what your fans are engaging with the most, and then deliver more of it.
As an example, the Zillow brand uses social media to share real estate in specific regions of the U.S., but that’s not all. Zillow leverages their access to fans to capture a lot of information about preferences for room styles and settings.
The brand uses questions to solicit those opinions. On their page, you’ll notice that they use both open-ended and multiple-choice questions for market research. Certainly a good idea for most businesses, big and small.
The bottom line
In this article, we’ve explored a multitude of creative ways brands use social media status updates to increase engagement. The key takeaway is to know your audience and what they’re most likely to respond to. Give them more of that!
It’s OK to promote your company and products, but do it in a way that capitalizes on your audience’s deepest interests and connects with them on a personal level. Avoid selling.
What do you think? What kinds of social media updates have worked well for your company? What other status update approaches can you share? Please leave your comments below.
Need some help in capturing more customers from your social media marketing or advertising? Creative ideas to help the differentiation with your customers?
Call today for a FREE consultation or a FREE quote. Learn about some options to scope your job.
Call Mike at 607-725-8240.
All you get is what you bring to the fight. And that fight gets better every day you learn and apply new ideas.
When things are not what you want them to be, what’s most important is your next step. Call today.
Test. Learn. Improve. Repeat.
Are you devoting enough energy to innovating your social media strategy?
Do you have a lesson about making your advertising better you can share with this community? Have any questions or comments to add in the section below?
Digital Spark Marketing will stretch your thinking and your ability to adapt to change. We also provide some fun and inspiration along the way. Call us for a free quote today. You will be amazed at how reasonable we will be.
More reading on social media marketing and advertising from Digital Spark Marketing’s Library:
Are You Employing the Smashing Value of Creative Stories
How Small Businesses Win Social Media Marketing Wars
The Ultimate Guide to Creative Social Media Marketing
Mike Schoultz is a digital marketing and customer service expert. With 48 years of business experience, he consults on and writes about topics to help improve the performance of small business. Find him on G+, Facebook, Twitter, Digital Spark Marketing, and LinkedIn.
Are you considering a rebrand or brand refresh? With its numerous benefits, branding can’t take the backseat, yet it easily skips most marketers’ minds. Overwhelmed by operations such as product development and production, lead generation, and managing clients, to mention a few, consistent professional branding services and efforts can easily be overlooked.
That’s why it is important to consider enlisting branding professionals. A branding workshop could be all it takes to turn your efforts around, and with a professional holding your hand all through, you can hit a significant milestone within no time.
Branding workshop brings your leadership teams together, allowing them to voice their opinion. Allowing all voices to be heard goes a long way in facilitating smooth operations, as everyone is on board in pursuance of a common objective. With an effective facilitator, a branding workshop creates an excellent platform to build the foundation for brand strategy.
Branding workshop is the foundation stone to a successful quest, an opportunity to extract key attributes that distinguishes your venture from the competitors. As you consider it, however, you might ignore the value a professional branding service delivers. Here are some of the top benefits the professionals bring to the table.
An outsider’s perspective
The internal marketing team’s bias can easily blindside their effectiveness in devising a solid branding strategy. Their quests are typically driven by the business’ goals, a concern that makes it harder to focus on the bigger picture. An outsider’s perspective brings in the much-needed balance, ensuring that your strategies aren’t in any way biased. With a 360-degrees analysis of your organization, the professionals are better positioned to tailor a practical branding strategy to drive your progress.
Experience and expertise
Branding professionals have accumulated cross-industry experience in their years of operation, a significant consideration that accelerates your progress. They won’t be experimenting with your business, as they have fine-tuned their strategies to ensure that your branding quest doesn’t miss an opportunity. From message development to delivery, the professionals know how to communicate best and capture your target audience’s attention.
Ensuring that you’ve explored your full potential is their core function, and with such exposure, the professionals can fast-track your quest to enjoy an effective branding strategy.
Time-saving
Designating enough time to focus on branding as you juggle between other functions isn’t that straightforward. Instead of interrupting your busy schedule, it is easier for branding to take the back seat, a consideration that can significantly affect the endeavor.
What’s more, as branding isn’t your area of expertise, should you concentrate on it, it might consume a considerable portion of your time, affecting other areas. The professionals allow you to focus on your core functions as they work on branding, freeing up considerable time. This facilitates the much-needed balance, ensuring that no part of your organization takes a hit.
Cost-effective
Enlisting a branding professional might feel like an unnecessary expense. However, this is far from the truth. From facilitating a productive branding workshop where everyone, regardless of their opinion, gets a chance to contribute to facilitating the development of practical strategies, the professionals have a lot to offer. Compared to what comes out of your pocket, the professionals deliver a lot more with a significant ROI.
This is not to mention the time saved that could be utilized in more productive areas and the extended brand reach and awareness leading to qualified lead generation, improving sales revenue.
Enlisting professional branding services offers a lot. However, such contributions can only be realized if you hire a reliable and reputable service. Due diligence is advised to ensure that you choose an experienced service from the numerous services in the competitive market.
The good news about focusing on customer experience is that it can make you very successful. It doesn’t have to cost more to deliver a great experience than it does to deliver a lousy experience. Yet, you can charge more for a great customer experience journey. Plus, it could reduce your costs through higher retention and increased referrals.
The challenge in focusing on customer experience is that it’s not easy and it’s not fast. It takes a lot of work and a lot of time. It requires that we constantly and diligently connect with our customers to discover what they want and how we’re doing. It’s an ongoing, never-ending process.
Oh, one more thing. When we focus on selling experience as our value add, we have to be very good. Average does not cut it.
Average performers will lose in the experience economy.
If our customers come to us and stay with us because of the experience we deliver, they will tie emotion to that experience. In fact, in the experience economy, we are selling emotional content more than physical goods or intangible services. For people to remember us, those emotions need to be memorable.
Think about your own experiences. If you eat at a restaurant and everything is pretty much as you expect it to be, then what’s memorable about it? Nothing. So meeting our customer’s expectations means we become a blank space in their memories.
For our customer’s experience to be memorable it has to be positive but also unexpected.
A few years back my wife and I visited Hoover Dam. It was the first time for both of us. If you’ve been there, you’ll understand why it’s a memorable experience no matter what. But beyond the usual “wonder of the world” type memory, we both have two other memories of our visit that make it stand out in a positive way.
Hoover Dam,
One is the McDonald’s in Boulder City. It the most unusual McDonald’s I’ve ever seen. Crystal light fixtures, marble, glass, steel, and tile abound in the trendy decor that befits a west coast bistro more than a small town fast food joint. And the landscape around the building is filled with metal figurines of children playing. They were created by a local artist.
It was fun. It was aesthetically pleasing. It was completely unexpected. Therefore, it will stay in my memory for a long time as an important part of our Hoover Dam experience.
The other memorable part of our Hoover Dam visit were the chipmunks.
By the cafe/gift shop at the dam site, are dozens of cute little chipmunks that earn their keep entertaining the guests. They are wild but friendly and comfortable with people. If you have food, they’ll eat it out of your hand.
By the time we left the chipmunk area, a sizable crowd had developed. They were clearly a hit.
So like the cool McDonald’s restaurant, the friendly chipmunks will also be a memorable part of our visit to the Hoover Dam, for the same reason: they presented us with a positive and unexpected experience.
To win in customer experience you have to help your customers have the experiences they desire plus more. The average is not memorable. You have to be unexpectedly good on a regular and consistent basis. Do this and you’ll have people talking about your business and coming back again and again.
So what’s the conclusion? The conclusion is there is no conclusion. There is only the next step. And that next step is completely up to you. But believe in the effectiveness of word of mouth marketing created by remarkable customer service. And put it to good use.
It’s up to you to keep improving your creative marketing strategies. Lessons are all around you. In this case, your competitor may be providing ideas and or inspiration. But the key is in knowing that it is within you already.
All you get is what you bring to the fight. And that fight gets better every day you learn and apply new lessons.
When things go wrong, what’s most important is your next step.
Try. Learn. Improve. Repeat.
Are you devoting enough energy to improving your marketing, branding, and advertising?
Do you have a lesson about making your marketing strategy better you can share with this community? Have any questions or comments to add in the section below?
Digital Spark Marketing will stretch your thinking and your ability to adapt to change. We also provide some fun and inspiration along the way. Call us for a free quote today. You will be amazed at how reasonable we will be.
More reading on customer experience from Digital Spark Marketing’s Library:
Mike Schoultz is a digital marketing and customer service expert. With 48 years of business experience, he consults on and writes about topics to help improve the performance of a small business. Find him on G+, Facebook, Twitter, Digital Spark Marketing, and LinkedIn.
It’s a question we should always ask and yet we often find so difficult to answer. How an organization handles this question (and the answers) will determine its ultimate service success. If you consistently offer what your customers really want, you will be successful.
“When you are a customer, what makes you most satisfied?”
I kept track of what they said and I tabulated the results. I removed responses that had to do with specific products or services because I was looking for information that would be helpful across many industries and organizations.
Know more than I do (about your product or service).
Be easy to work with.
Help me get what I came for.
Smile.
Always give a good smile.
Acknowledge my presence.
Show me you care.
Be honest.
Offer alternatives if you don’t have what I want.
High quality and low prices.
Do what you say you’re going to do.
Keep me informed.
(The results are in ranked order from the most popular response.)
I don’t claim this survey has any scientific significance or statistical validity. (It’s not meant to).
But it is based on real answers from real people so I think it can be useful for many organizations as they work to improve their customer service.
People know what they want when they are customers, believe me. Based on how people responded, I think many of them feel they are not getting what they want.
This list of 12 customer wishes seems basic and intuitive. Yet I don’t believe most organizations are delivering these things to all their customers all the time.
If they were, this list would have been much shorter. People wouldn’t bother mentioning them if they were getting them on a regular basis.
The bottom line
Yet, what is really needed is basic curiosity – the desire to learn things rather than to know things. All too often, we strive to rattle off facts rather than promote understanding. With a little imagination and some thought, we can all do our little part to increase the overall knowledge of the world. True knowledge begins with wonder.
Need some help in building better customer service for your customers? Have you noticed the growing importance of customer service you provide, especially for your marketing? Creative ideas to help enhance your word of mouth marketing?
All you get is what you bring to the fight. And that fight gets better every day you learn and apply new ideas for your service to customers.
When things are not what you want them to be, what’s most important is your next step.
Test. Learn. Improve. Repeat.
Are you devoting enough energy to improving your continuous learning for yourself and your team?
Mike Schoultz is the founder of Digital Spark Marketing, a digital marketing and customer service agency. With 40 years of business experience, he blogs on topics that relate to improving the performance of your business. Find him on Twitter, and LinkedIn.
Digital Spark Marketing will stretch your thinking and your ability to adapt to change. We also provide some fun and inspiration along the way.
More reading on customer service from Digital Spark Marketing’s Library:
Stunning Customer Service Lessons and Their Examples
It makes sense that if you improve customer service, you will increase customer loyalty. But improving customer service is not necessarily easy. It takes more than a seminar or a motivational speaker. It takes effort and time to make a sustainable improvement in the level of service you deliver your customers.
Not long ago I was talking with a friend about customer service. Among the many good ideas he mentioned to improve customer service, one stood out. He said, “If you want to improve customer service in your company, get a role model.” So with thanks to my friend for his thought starter, here are some suggestions on how to find (or create) a service model in your company.
Almost every business has someone who stands out in how they care for customers. They care about people and it shows. They always take an extra step or two for their customers. They’re friendly, courteous, warm, patient, and knowledgeable about what your company does. They listen well and they are focused on helping customers get what they want. They follow through and they follow up.
They are the people your customers ask for when they come back. And they’re the employees your customers write letters about, telling you how wonderful they are.
These are people you want others to emulate. Your first step is to define what you want in your business service. What personality traits and behaviors do you want in your people? Then prioritize them (because you’ll never get them all). Paint a picture of your ideal employee, from your customer’s perspective. These are your standards.
You should include employees and customers in this process. Get their input. Ask them to share their views on what they should expect from your company. They will give you an incredible amount of valuable information.
Step two, watch, listen, and learn. Pay attention to your employees as they take care of your customers. Watch what they do and how they do it.
As you do this, remember the ideal employee profile you created in step one. Make notes of how various employees measure against your standards. Then list these employees and rank them.
If you have one employee who is a perfect (or almost perfect) fit great. You have your first model. If not, pick a couple who offer the best match. Make sure the people you select cover all the standards you created earlier. This way you will be able to model all the important aspects of service to the rest of your employees.
If you don’t have any employees who come close to meeting your standards, then you need to think about adding or replacing staff.
Once you have one or more models, you then need to find ways to transfer their Amazing Service behaviors to the rest of your employees. Here are some suggestions.
Publish your service standards.
Print, distribute, and post your service standards. Make sure all your employees know what they are and what they mean. If you want great results, let your customers know what your service standards are too. Use them to make a statement about what they can expect from your company.
Service standards.
Use posters, emails, flyers. Make laminated cards to give to every employee. Put them on customer receipts, signs, menus, brochures, websites – anywhere your customers and employees will see them
Record your models in action.
Use audio or video to record your service models working with customers. Show these in staff meetings on a regular and consistent basis.
Highlight when and how the employee is doing things that meet or exceed your Amazing Service standards. Note: avoid focusing on what they do wrong in these sessions. No one likes to get criticized by a group of their peers. It will make the process less effective.
Have regular coaching sessions
Schedule regular meetings with your staff to coach them to your service standards. Use role-playing as a coaching tool in these sessions. Pick one standard for each meeting.
Prepare several staff before the meeting to play the parts. Let them know you’re serious about using it as a tool for improvement. Make it fun but useful.
Reward employees who deliver the best service
Set up a program to reward and recognize employees who are “caught” delivering the best service. Create ways to acknowledge their efforts publicly. Give prizes, plaques, or other incentives to employees who demonstrate the service standards you are looking for.
Reward employees for noticing when other employees deliver great service.
This is key. As an owner or manager, you can’t be everywhere, so you need to engage all your employees to help. Develop ways to reward employees for observing and “turning in” other employees who deliver great service. If employees are looking for the best service, it means they’re thinking about it.
Plus, it means they’re engaged in the process. To observe a fellow employee delivering the best service, they need to know what it is. They need to understand your standards.
Involve your customers.
Engaging employees to observe and report Amazing Service is good. Getting customers to do it is great. Find ways to get them involved in the process.
Let them know what your standards are and encourage them to nominate employees for recognition and rewards. Make it easy for them to do this. The more engaged your customers are in this, the more loyal they will be.
The bottom line
When we think of improving customer service, we usually think of training. But that will only take us so far. To have a measurable and sustainable improvement, you need to focus on it constantly.
Finding and using role models is an effective way to do this. Try this for 60 days and you’ll see a significant improvement in the quality of your customer service.
Need some help in building better customer service for your customers? Have you noticed the growing importance of customer service you provide, especially for your marketing? Creative ideas to help enhance your word of mouth marketing?
All you get is what you bring to the fight. And that fight gets better every day you learn and apply new ideas for your service to customers.
When things are not what you want them to be, what’s most important is your next step.
Test. Learn. Improve. Repeat.
Are you devoting enough energy to improving your continuous learning for yourself and your team?
Mike Schoultz is the founder of Digital Spark Marketing, a digital marketing and customer service agency. With 40 years of business experience, he blogs on topics that relate to improving the performance of your business. Find him on Twitter, and LinkedIn.
Digital Spark Marketing will stretch your thinking and your ability to adapt to change. We also provide some fun and inspiration along the way.
More reading on customer service from Digital Spark Marketing’s Library:
Stunning Customer Service Lessons and Their Examples
How does your organization come up with new ideas? And how do they use those ideas to create successful new products, services, businesses, and solutions? To be most successful, you must do reading and study to eliminate these myths of innovation research.
The problem is never how to get new ideas into your mind, but how to eliminate the old ideas.
We tend to think of innovation as an individual effort. It’s much easier to visualize someone like Thomas Edison, Steve Jobs or Elon Musk, in a flash of inspiration, coming up with a brilliant idea than it is to imagine a vast, collective effort. Yet make no mistake. Innovation is a team sport and great innovators are great collaborators.
This year marks the 50th anniversary of the Apollo mission which put a man on the moon, one of the vastest collective efforts in history. It involved 400,000 scientists, engineers, and technicians working across government, academia, and private industry. It was, above all, a public effort that mobilized resources across all facets of society.
Do you always drive to work the same way? Most likely. Do you read the same type of publications? Often. How about TV and the Internet? Watching the same group of shows or using the same set of websites is also a common habit. When you do this, how do you feel? You get a lot of familiar and comfortable feelings.
But true innovation often doesn’t make us comfortable. It makes us uncomfortable. And yet, it is in that discomfort that the new ways, the new ideas, and the new feelings come to light. When you drive to work via a different route, you see different places and sights. If you go to the newsstand and peruse the magazines that you never otherwise look at, you will see things you simply would never think about otherwise.
Given these results, let’s examine these myths of innovation:
People love change
Myth
Many people believe everybody loves to change and be changed.
Fact
The simple fact is that there is a ton of people who resist any change. They are very risk-averse, and change makes them very uncomfortable.
Innovative research … rewards
Myth
Many people believe that the best ideas come where the best incentive rewards are offered.
Fact
Daniel Pink discussed research in his book “Drive” where rewards were shown to have a modest effect on generating new ideas at best and negative effect in the worst situations. Pink demonstrated that with the complex and more creative style of 21stcentury jobs, traditional rewards could lead to less of what is wanted and more of what is not wanted.
Completely new
Myth
The belief is that most innovations are composed of totally new thoughts.
Fact
The simple fact is new ideas are built from the combining of older ideas. The novelty comes from the application of the idea or combination of idea and application, not the idea itself.
Innovative research ideas … experience and expertise
Myth
Team members often sit back in the hope that the smartest or most experienced among them will come through. Smart is certainly important, as is experience, but the best innovations come from those on the fringes of the subject area or an entirely different subject area expertise.
Fact
Those who continuously come up with the newest ideas are ones who are great at cultivating minds from different fields and can most efficiently connect the dots. Old lessons from a different field applied to the new field.
Collaboration.
Innovative research technologies … collaboration
Myth
We can certainly find many examples of teams where cohesiveness abound, but innovation was severely lacking.
Fact
But the simple fact is that conflict is equally as important as cohesiveness in generating ideas. Many companies build conflict into the ideation process for this reason.
Innovation rarely happens in a vacuum. As the author Steve Johnson says, chance favors the connected minds. When people are together, talking, laughing, thinking, exploring — they’re going to throw out ideas. These ideas trigger something in someone else’s mind, and it snowballs. Before long, this group of folks has developed a creative change that wouldn’t have been possible without the collective collaboration.
See our article on Generating Ideas by Convergent Thinking
Best mousetrap
Myth
The saying goes that if you have the best mousetrap, the world will beat a path to your door.
Fact
This path is not the usual case, however. Often the best innovations are rejected initially. There are many examples … here are two good ones. Kodak invented the digital camera and never took it to market. Smith Corona built a superb word processor and yet decided to stay with the typewriter, its bread and butter.
Epiphany
Myth
Many assume that the best insights come to us in a flash of brilliance.
Fact
The best ideas typically require a time of incubation in our subconscious. We do best when we constantly shift from one task to another to allow our minds to do something different for our best idea germination.
Best ideas win
Myth
The cream always rises to the top. And the best innovations are like cream.
Fact
But the simple fact is that the best ones are not necessarily or readily recognized as the best. Most often, they never get to the winner’s circle.
Your genes.
Your genes
Myth
The best ideas come from the best combination of genes.
Fact
No evidence supports an “idea” gene or personality type. On the other hand, there is a wealth of evidence that shows there is potential inside of everyone. The best place to see this is in young children.
Lone wolf
Myth
Most people tend to believe that the best innovation comes from single, very smart individuals.
Fact
The truth is that most breakthrough innovations come from collaborative teams. For example, Thomas Edison had 15 other inventors working with him. Likewise, Michelangelo had 13 other painters helping paint the Sistine Chapel. The best teams are diverse and include both new and more experienced collaborators.
Ok, now we have overcome these myths on innovation, here are some useful ways how to help move toward a more innovative culture in your business:
Be a detective
Creatives and innovators always have enquiring minds. Are you and the team asking enough questions to get deeper and understand the problem as much as you can?
Myths of innovation … foster adaptability
Change and adaptability have a great ability to drive innovative thinking. Innovative thinking is best when built around a process and can be taught. There are many courses that teach people different innovative techniques. Give your employees the opportunity to acquire skills that will help them become more productive and proficient in what they are doing.
Foster risk-taking
Zappos as a company is known as much for its culture as for its innovative business model. The company has built a business that is growing rapidly by allowing individuals the freedom to take creative risks without that overwhelming sense of fear or judgment.
They tell their employees to say what you think, even if it is controversial. Make tough decisions without agonizing excessively. Take smart risks. Question actions inconsistent with business values.
Here is another interesting example: A software company in Boston gives each team member two “corporate get-out-of-jail-free” cards each year. The cards allow the holder to take risks and suffer no repercussions for mistakes associated with them. At annual reviews, leaders question their team members if the cards are not used. It is a great way to encourage risk-taking and experimentation. Think this company comes up with amazing ideas? Absolutely.
Readily accept mistakes and failure
There is no success without failure. Ask any successful person and they will confirm that they have failed in life but that their failures made them stronger and even more determined to go on. It is perfectly OK to fail as long as we learn from our mistakes. Your employees should not fear failure because it will kill their desire to create new and unusual ideas.
In many companies, people are so afraid of making mistakes that they don’t pursue their dreams. The simply follow the rules and keep their heads down, which drives nothing but mediocrity.
James Dyson, the inventor of the Dyson Vacuum cleaner, “failed” at more than 5,100 prototypes before getting it just right. In fact, nearly every breakthrough innovation in history came after countless setbacks, mistakes, and “failures.” The best innovators and achievers weren’t necessarily smarter or inherently more talented. They simply released their fear of failure and kept trying. They didn’t let setbacks or misfires extinguish their curiosity, imagination, and ability to change.
Failing means taking risks and increasing the rate of experimentation… and exploring. Some bets will pay off; some will fail. The key is to fail quickly. The speed of business has increased dramatically and every minute counts. The best businesses try lots of ideas and let the losers go quickly and with no remorse.
Divergent thinking
Try the quantity approach to innovations. Use brainstorming to improve divergent thinking. Study and then connect ideas to get new ideas.
Add play to the equation
When looking for fresh new thinking to solve a problem, shake things up by adding some fun and play with the process. It always can shed the stress and pressure on a team
Experiment
Do as much experimentation as you can. Don’t worry about failures and allow the team to question any and all assumptions and consider even the craziest ideas.
The bottom line
As we change at a faster and faster pace, ideas adequate yesterday are no longer are good enough. And with digital disruption facing an increasing number of industries, most firms must come up with the best ideas for change or move to a slow failure. The myths of new ideas must be set aside to let the new idea facts take over.
All you get is what you bring to the fight. And that fight gets better every day you learn and apply new innovative ideas.
When things are not what you want them to be, what’s most important is your next step.
Test. Learn. Improve. Repeat.
Do you have a lesson about making your innovation learning better you can share with this community? Have any questions or comments to add in the section below?
Mike Schoultz is the founder of Digital Spark Marketing, a digital marketing and customer service agency. With 40 years of business experience, he blogs on topics that relate to improving the performance of business. Find him on Twitter, and LinkedIn.
Digital Spark Marketing will stretch your thinking and your ability to adapt to change. We also provide some fun and inspiration along the way.
More reading on creativity and innovation from Digital Spark Marketing’s Library:
Learn How to Think What No One Else Thinks
Generating Ideas by Convergent Thinking
Amazon and Managing Innovation … the Jeff Bezos Vision
Relying entirely on driving traffic and making as many sales might not be the best strategy for running an online business. If you want to build a sustainable venture, you will need to spend a lot of time raising brand awareness and build your reputation online.
Of course, if you are still relatively new to the world of eCommerce, reputation might not take your priority as much. But preparing for the future is also heavily encouraged. If nothing else, this article will be a good reference for when that time comes. But as for those who are trying to focus on the bigger picture and want to take action right now, follow the steps mentioned below right now.
Step #1 – Learn About Customer Satisfaction
Starting with the basics is always a good course of action. There are a lot of sources on the internet on how you can learn about customer satisfaction. Oberlo and their research in which they measure customer satisfaction is a good example.
At the end of the day, it is all about keeping your customers happy. If you cannot ensure that people will not bother visiting your store ever again. Not to mention recommending the business to their friends and family. A positive word of mouth is a good indication of your brand doing well.
Step #2 – Offer Multiple Payment Methods
Other payment methods.
Not everyone has the option to use a credit card. And providing multiple payment options should be a good incentive to get more people to your store. People will mention you to their friends and family. Flexibility tends to be overlooked quite a lot.
Do not neglect such payment methods like PayPal and Payoneer. Something like cryptocurrency is also worth exploring.
Step #3 – Go Pro-Environment
More and more brands are taking the pro-environment approach. And it seems that people have also become aware of the problem our planet is facing. If you harm the environment, there will be a lot of damage control necessary.
It might be impossible to change every single aspect of your business, but try to make an effort and show that you care about the environment. Your reputation will jump immediately.
Charity work is another way to show that you are more than just a business with nothing but profits in mind. If you have the resources to spare, dedicate them to something that will improve the world.
Maybe you can create a volunteer program? Or maybe you could fund a program that would improve the lives of people living in local communities? It is part of good PR, but if you are interested in building a great reputation, charity work is certainly something to consider.
Step #5 – Cooperate With Influencers
Cooperating with others and creating Instagram stories about it is worth exploring as well. And if you want to reach as many people as you can, then there is no better option than influencers.
Influencers can be found on social media as well as specific platforms. Be sure that you work with someone who has a good reputation. If they show you in a positive light, then you can expect an even bigger influx of new customers. Not to mention raising brand awareness.
Step #6 – Provide Valuable Content
Providing valuable content on a regular basis is another thing that will guarantee you more positive attention from people. Of course, the most difficult part is finding a channel and providing such content.
Social media is one of the suggestions that come to mind. Starting a blog also has its merits, including opportunities to invite guest posters as well as SEO improvements.
Paying more attention to customers is a great way to show that you care about them genuinely. Ensuring great customer support is one of the ways to reach that point.
Loyalty programs are another. You can create a VIP system with points that can be later exchanged for various perks, such as free shipping or discounts. As for the method of acquiring such points, customers can get them by posting reviews, spending money, or spending time on the store browsing.
Step #8 – Engage Customers
Engage your customers. Initiate the conversation. Reply to their comments on channels like social media and forums. Communication is important. Show that there is a real person behind there and not a money-seeking corporation that is trying to act all nice for the sake of profits.
Step #9 – Avoid Posting Fake Reviews
Despite what some might think, there are still a lot of companies that order fake reviews to boost their ratings. This kind of behavior is going to catch up to you eventually. And when that happens, you may find that getting out of the situation unscathed is more or less impossible.
Peter Drucker once said: Within five years, if you’re in the same business you are in now, you’re going to be out of business. That is a pretty harsh statement from Peter Drucker, isn’t it? Jeff Bezos would certainly agree, though … just look at Amazon over the past decade-plus.
He has established Amazon as a leader with innovation in business lessons. And he certainly knows much about innovative growth opportunities. No question. But most businesses would have a hard time agreeing, in our opinion.
We tend to think of innovation as an individual effort. It’s much easier to visualize someone like Thomas Edison, Steve Jobs, or Elon Musk, in a flash of inspiration, coming up with a brilliant idea than it is to imagine a vast, collective effort. Yet make no mistake. Innovation is a team sport and great innovators are great collaborators.
This year marks the 50th anniversary of the Apollo mission which put a man on the moon, one of the vastest collective efforts in history. It involved 400,000 scientists, engineers, and technicians working across government, academia, and private industry. It was, above all, a public effort that mobilized resources across all facets of society.
Today, the moonshot seems like a relic from another era, when we expected, and often welcomed, government to play a bigger role in our lives. Yet the challenges we face now, such as climate change, energy, manufacturing, and healthcare are, in many ways, far more complex than going to the moon and government needs to play a role in solving them.
I like to read … why? To be entertained, to learn new things, and to stimulate thinking. Jeff Bezos is a favorite author of mine, especially when the articles deal with business innovators and leadership. I have a set of five authors that I selected over a decade ago to be my silent mentors … they mentor through their writings and presentations. Jeff Bezos is one of those five guides.
Yes … all five do stimulate a lot of thinking and learning, but they all have a great knack for entertaining while they teach and silently mentor. They also share many other common attributes that make them such successful mentors for me.
It probably is not necessary to tell you a little about Jeff Bezos. He gained a solid reputation for uncanny business acumen, unique innovation strategies, and substantial risk-taking during his almost 20 years as Amazon’s CEO. He remains a highly regarded figure in business circles due to his innovative management strategies, leadership style, and of course his success.
In this blog, we have selected eight favorite topics of Bezos and used quotations and a compendium of lessons from many of his writings, articles, and presentations to focus on what he teaches us on each. We use these thoughts regularly in our work with client teams.
Innovation in business … customer-centric focus
Focusing on the customer makes a company more resilient.
At Amazon, there is a standard line of thinking: Start with the customer and work backward.
Bezos has mentioned many times that you focus on customer needs and then work backward from there.
When you work backward, you start with the client and their needs and problems. This is the opposite of what some companies do, which is: they think up ideas, build a product, and then see if customers like it.
Vision. We are always fascinated by this skill. And it is a great skill to have in our view. Does it mean you see everything? Certainly not. It does say that you have the ability to see what many cannot. And then act on these. Vision doesn’t count without action. And not without managing innovation.
For years, I’ve been fascinated by Jeff Bezos’ vision. We write a lot about him and Amazon. They are a great company to follow because of the Bezos vision. And his ability to make good bets on his vision. While everything may seem rosy at Amazon these days, for years, it was incredible to see just how much criticism there was towards some of Bezos’ decisions.
That idea of staying the course for the long term has been the key to Bezos’s success. Vision requires the long term. As does innovation.
We are stubborn on vision. We are flexible on details.
Innovation in business examples … company brand
A brand for a company is like a reputation for a person. You can earn reputation by trying to do hard things well.
Amazon’s brand reflects Bezos’s personality, beliefs, and thinking. And the culture continues to grow and develop.
Benefits of innovation in business
Amazon, we believe, has one of the very best innovative cultures in an industry built on constant innovation and change. Why may you ask?
We believe there several good reasons. First, as one of the creators of the e-commerce industry, he well knows the industry is in its infancy and is built on a foundation of new technology and constant introduction of new ways of doing things … he knows their future is based on those trends.
Business is all about capturing intellect from every person. The way to engender enthusiasm it to allow employees far more freedom and far more responsibility.
One of Bezos’s primary beliefs is that me-too companies have not done that well over time. So you need to invent and be willing to be misunderstood. All disrupters are inventors. And me-too companies are not inventors.
Innovation in Business.
Internet technology
An important driver of Bezos’s innovative decision making is that the web in general and Amazon, in particular, are still in chapter one.
The operative assumption today is that someone, somewhere, has a better idea; and the operative compulsion is to find out who has that better idea, learn it, and put it into action – fast.
Company evolution
Change, BEFORE you have to. Change is a big part of the reality in business. New ideas are the lifeblood of business. And the basis for creative change.
Experimentation
Bezos knows that to do new things well, you must be good at trying new ideas in many areas as experiments. These experiments, he realizes, will not all work as planned, and a high percentage will fail. He knows and accepts this without worry.
I love this quote from Bezos:
If you double the number of experiments you do per year, you’re going to double your inventiveness.
If you ask most CEOs, they’ll tell you that experimentation is imperative for their business. It’s how innovations are born and how they stay competitive in the market. Automotive companies have concept cars; food companies experiment with new foods and flavors; retail companies experiment with the placement of products and store atmosphere; drug companies are built on experimentation; tech companies have “labs” like Google Labs; and many high performing companies, like Google, allow their employees to experiment. Even sports teams experiment with new plays and players. Experimentation is everywhere and is always happening.
At Amazon, experimentation, and willingness to invent have always been a part of the culture. It’s not secondary or something that has to be done because everyone else does it.
Business innovation … little fear of failure
We were willing to go down a bunch of dark passageways, and occasionally we find something that actually works.
So, his mind never lets him get in a place where he thinks they can’t afford to take these bets because the bad case never seems that bad. And to have that point of view requires a corporate culture that does a few things. Very few business leaders think that way or take that point of view.
And what does Jeff Bezos have to show for their patience and persistence? Simply one of the most dominant, enduring, and valuable enterprises that the Internet boom has yet produced.
The bottom line
The truth is that there is no one truth to innovation. Not IBM, Google nor Amazon has hit on the “right” way to innovate, but they have found the right way for them. It is how those practices have become so deeply embedded into the fabric of their organizations over time that makes the difference.
If you want to innovate, you need to find your own path.
To find a real business success story, you have to try many avenues … and experience some failures along the way. Bezos knows this lesson well, doesn’t he?
Yes, there are probably many, many current great authors and leaders with these attributes, but you’ll be hard-pressed to find a better innovation silent mentor than Jeff Bezos.
You can’t make anything or anyone grow; you can only provide the right conditions. Jeff Bezos as a guide selection is very efficient at providing components of the right conditions. Innovation and customer focus were two of his key interests.
So, who are your favorite silent mentors, and what sets them apart for you? Any comments or questions to add below?
So what’s the conclusion? The conclusion is there is no conclusion. There is only the next step. And that next step is entirely up to you.
It’s up to you to keep improving your management and leadership skills. Lessons are all around you. In many situations, your competitor may be providing ideas and or inspiration. But the key is in knowing that it is within you already.
All you get is what you bring to the fight. And that struggle gets better every day you learn and apply new lessons.
When things go wrong, what’s most important is your next step.
Test. Learn. Improve. Repeat.
Are you devoting enough energy to continually improving your ability to be a business innovator?
Mike Schoultz is the founder of Digital Spark Marketing, a digital marketing and customer service agency. With 40 years of business experience, he blogs on topics that relate to improving the performance of your business. Find them on Twitter, and LinkedIn.
Digital Spark Marketing will stretch your thinking and your ability to adapt to change. We also provide some fun and inspiration along the way.
More reading on creativity and innovation from Digital Spark Marketing’s Library:
Learn How to Think What No One Else Thinks
Generating Ideas by Convergent Thinking
Amazon and Managing Innovation … the Jeff Bezos Vision
