Imagine Michelangelo's dumpster. How many priceless works of art would we find that were simply not good enough for the master? Whether your goal is to expand your creative margin or to reduce it, we can help.
Your Creative MARGIN . . . of time and ideas
When I worked as Director of Web Site operations, my area was responsible for both the technical production and marketing presence. On the one hand, part of the activity of managing the technical production was predictable maintenance. On the other hand, keeping a fresh marketing image required constant generation of new ideas.
Given the size of our staff and tasks to do, the margin of time that we spent on production versus idea generation leaned heavily in favor of production. To counter this natural tendency, we settled into a pattern as a department taking time Friday afternoon to generate ideas. We called these sessions "Webteam Fridays." We talked for anywhere from thirty minutes to three hours depending on the flow of ideas. Sometimes we would simply list ideas on the whiteboard and then finish whatever outstanding tasks remained for the week. Other times, we got so excited about a particular idea that we would take an hour to flush it out into a project and production tasks.
One of the outputs that resulted from this consistency in creativity was a monthly rollout of a new sub-site to build repeat traffic. From all of the ideas generated, we chose one to be the highlighted feature on the site for a particular month. Within a three months, the site traffic doubled, then within three more months, it doubled again. The traffic continued to increase, and we watched how our featured sites gathered the hits.
One idea led to another that led to another. Then with production, the ideas led to marketable results.
Daniel J. Pfeifer, CreativeMargin, LLC Sachse, TX • (972)-442-0533 • creativemargin@gmail.com