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How to Develop an Endless Source of Ideas that Sell

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Your bottom line is bottoming out. Your customers are looking elsewhere. Your well of new ideas has run dry. What can you do? You could turn to your accountant for money-saving schemes, or hire a lawyer to re-structure your business. You could bring in a salesperson to drum up customers. I’ll bet you wouldn’t think a technique used by designers could help you out of a bad spot. The technique I’ll outline here is the secret to creating products and services your customers will buy. It’s a powerful way to keep your well of ideas overflowing. It’s a three-step process anyone can do. And when it’s done right, you can expect impressive results. The fountain of youth for your business When your well of new ideas runs dry, design thinking will get it bubbling up again. Design thinking is a technique that turns your business challenges on their heads, allowing you to see them from a different angle. It helps you discover new products and service that meet the needs of your market. And when your ideas meet a need, they sell. The secret to creating stuff your customers will buy Tim Brown of IDEO gave a lecture on design thinking at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and explained design thinking with a great analogy. Brown said that most new business ideas come in through one of three doors: The technical door , which is led by research and development thinking. The business door , which is led by standard value-oriented thinking like return on investment. The people door , which is led by design thinking. Design thinking is a human-centered process. If you focus on your customers when you’re developing new ideas, you’ll create products and services catered to them, and dramatically increase your chances of success. Inspiration: Design thinking starts here The first phase of the design thinking process is inspiration , and that comes from your customers. Find out what their struggles are, and discover what their daily lives are like. You can gather inspiration through: Observation: What can you see your customers struggling with? What do they complain about on Twitter and Facebook? What questions do you hear again and again? Interviews: Whether face-to-face or on the phone, speaking directly to your customers and asking for candid information about their challenges is invaluable. Speak to users on either extreme: power users and beginners. Your most valuable observations will come from the far ends of the spectrum. Role Play: Ask a friend to “mystery shop” your business, going through every interaction as a customer would. What’s their first contact like? How do they perceive the process? What would improve their experience? Surveys: Online surveys are easy and fast. Your goal in this phase is to understand the cognitive, emotional, and physical world your customers live in. Gather this information, and use it in the next step. Ideation: Brainstorming gone wild In this phase, Brainstorming Rule Number One applies: no idea is too outlandish to consider. Use a white board, large paper, or a computer file to field ideas. If you’re a solo entrepreneur, gather colleagues for this process. Feed them the initial data you gathered in the inspiration phase, and set them loose. Narrow down your ideas and pick the strongest one by prototyping. I know what you’re thinking: prototyping doesn’t sound like something a small business can afford to do, right? Prototyping your best ideas can be as simple as: Videotaping someone going through the motions of using your idea for a new product or service. Building quick models of physical products using cardboard boxes and tape. Create your product to size and see how it might feel in use. Build a mini-product that gives a taste of the benefits of the full thing. If you’re thinking of creating a membership site, build out a tiny sliver into a teleseminar or a $7 ebook to test the waters. Writing down stories about the journey your customer takes from the moment they realize they have a need, to the moment they discover your new product or service, to their interaction with it, and their post-purchase experience. Prototyping allows you to visualize what your idea would be like in use. It makes it “real,” and will give you strong clues about whether or not an idea is viable. Implementation: Make it so You’ve been inspired by your customers, and you’ve developed a new idea they will love. The last phase of the design thinking process is about implementation . This is where you will nail down your costs, determine your production needs, and figure out how to execute your best idea. As you set up a system to deliver your idea, think back on those customer stories you gathered, and the prototyping exercises you did. Use these experiences to develop a marketing story around your product or service that will tap into your customer’s needs. And of course, always focus your marketing around the benefits your customer will experience after purchasing. A three-part technique that helps businesses soar Gaining inspiration from your customers, developing ideas based on their needs, and making those ideas a reality are the three phases of design thinking that every business can implement. Harnessing this creative force will keep your well of ideas overflowing with products and services that connect with your customers needs, and help your business grow. About the author: Pamela Wilson helps small businesses grow with great design and marketing tips. Learn the basics with her free Design 101 e-course at Big Brand System.

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The Power Of Asking Questions… and Getting Answers

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Or should I say, the power of asking questions with a browser and then having users provide their own answers (content). From TechCrunch: WordPress developer Automattic has acquired Plinky from Thing Labs, the creators of social media application Brizzly. Plinky essentially aims to inspire content creators. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Plinky’s technology prompts you with an intriguing question or challenge and (like a question, or a challenge) and you have to answer. Depending on the prompt, your answer could contain photos, maps, playlists and more. You can then share your Plinky answers on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and others. For example, a sample question prompted from Plinky is “What’s your favorite summer memory?” WordPress has already added Plinky as a feature of its blogging platform to help writers get their creative juices flowing. Thing Labs, which was founded by a former Googler who worked on WordPress rival Blogger, actually started as “Plinky” and then changed its name last summer after shifting focus to developing Brizzly. The Power of Questions What other forms of online content could be generated by the Question and Answer format employed by Plinky?

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Bing Social Beta

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I was searching for Summer Solstice today in Google and saw a Tweet in their real time search results from “Bing Social”. Having never heard of Bing Social, I thought I would investigate further. Bing Social Sure enough, clicking through took me to the Bing Social Beta site. Bing Social Beta The Bing Social site is where Microsoft collects and posts the “Hottest Social Topics” from both Twitter and Facebook. While the topics featured in Bing Social may be hot, Microsoft is most likely using the social media streams to flesh out its fledgling search index. Whether the hot social topics Bing or any other search engine for that matter feature have any shelf life beyond the moment remains to be seen.

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Facebook Ads Guide

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Social media networking websites like Facebook are being used widely these days by businesses in many creative ways. Facebook and other social networks are used to build relationships and communicate company information with current and prospective customers. Now, Facebook ads becomes one of the highly profitable new methods Internet marketers and webmasters use to promote

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Facebook Ads Guide

How to Use Stories to Change the World

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If you have a blog, you tell stories. You may have dealt with the frustration of not having very many people see your stories, of not having enough subscribers or readers. Nevertheless, you keep on documenting your story in your blog posts, your Facebook status updates, your Twitter feed. You tell your stories and hope people will hear you. You’re lucky. The majority of people in Burma — a country that is brutally ruled by a military dictatorship — have no electricity, let alone access to the Internet. Which means it’s difficult to widely share stories about what they experience there. Right now, there are thousands of blogs detailing the difficulties of life as a single parent, but there aren’t many blogs describing what it’s like to live your entire life in a refugee camp or to survive a disaster like Cyclone Nargis, which killed more than 138,000 people in Burma. Those who manage to blog can suffer dire consequences for daring to do so. A 30-year-old blogger from Burma was sentenced to 20 years in prison for posting political satire. Weaving narratives about our lives is one of the things that makes us human The stories we tell are undeniably powerful. Stories allow us to connect with one another, to know each other as individuals rather than statistics. Yet those who are living through human rights crises have their stories written from a distance, in news blurbs and legal briefs. These stories rarely become as compelling as the ones you tell on your own blog, simply because they often lack the intimacy of a much fuller first-person narrative. Until now. Putting the human back into human rights My strategy to survive was to appease the soldiers and to make friends with them. I thought, if only we could make friends with these soldiers, then we would survive. But porters can die at any time. For example, if a soldier got angry and just shot me with his gun, nothing would happen to him. I would just die, like a chicken or a rat. To Tanintharyi Division, they send 500 porters every year. Of the 500, only 72 porters make it back to the prison. If you survive, you survive. I was a porter for nearly six months. ~ Lai Pa, 34-year-old man from Burma Perhaps you’ve read about the severe crackdown on monks protesting in the Saffron Revolution, or the destruction wrought by Cyclone Nargis. Although Burma is a hotbed of human rights abuses and repression, it is also home to 50 million individuals and exponentially more stories. This fall, Voice of Witness will release Nowhere to Be Home: Narratives from Survivors of Burma’s Military Regime . The book will delve into the diverse lives of people who have lived under Burma’s military junta, the State Peace and Development Council (SPDC). Voice of Witness is a nonprofit book series that empowers the men and women who have lived through human rights crises by letting them tell their stories in their own words. In Nowhere to Be Home , dozens of stories are told publically for the first time. Lai Pa was studying to become a preacher when he was imprisoned and forced to work as a porter for the military . Tang Mai, an LGBT rights activist talks about his strained relationship with his father, a famous ethnic Kachin rebel leader. Ye Myint Win was a former army general who fought against those very same rebels; his story is told alongside Tang Mai’s. You can read the short descriptions we’ve put here for you, but as you can see, they only scratch the surface as an introduction to the narrators. (All of those names, as you can imagine, have been changed to protect these people.) The book brings to light the voices of refugees, former political prisoners, migrant workers, farmers, artists, students, and activists. These vivid portraits do something that human rights reports don’t: they allow you to experience Burma through entire life stories of its people in their own words. Calling all bloggers: how can we share these stories? Bloggers are storytellers, and your stories give you power. We’re asking you to share some of what you’ve learned from your own experiences of telling your story publically, to help us imagine ways this book can extend beyond the reach of print. Tell us. How can we use the Internet to amplify the narratives in this book? How can we make their words echo as far and as wide as any post here on Copyblogger? We want to hear your thoughts about sharing stories, about how storytelling can change the world, and about how you would use social media to share these incredible stories collected from Burma. Please let us know in the comments! About the Authors : Maggie Lemere and Zoë West are the editors of Nowhere to Be Home: Narratives from Survivors of Burma’s Military Regime , the latest in the Voice of Witness book series. Voice of Witness was founded by author Dave Eggers and physician/human rights scholar Lola Vollen, and is the nonprofit division of McSweeney’s Books. If you’re inspired by the storytelling work done by the nonprofit book series Voice of Witness, you can make a donation here to support their work.

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How to Use Stories to Change the World