This is the third in a five-part series that looks into social media marketing moving into 2021. Part One examined the marketing industry’s ongoing challenge with understanding and processing its data, and how this contributes to poor decision-making related to social media marketing.
Read moreBook Excerpt: A Triumph of Hope Part Four: The Case for Social Media in Customer Care
This the fourth in a five-part series that looks into social media marketing moving into 2021. Part One examined the marketing industry’s ongoing challenge with understanding and processing its data, and how this contributes to poor decision-making related to social media marketing.
Read moreBook Excerpt: A Triumph of Hope Part Five: The Shift from Social Media Marketing to Social Care
Header Photo by Dawid Zawiła on Unsplash
This is the last in a five-part series that looks into social media marketing moving into 2021. Part One examined the marketing industry’s ongoing challenge with understanding and processing its data, and how this contributes to poor decision-making related to social media marketing.
Read moreThree Over Four on the Innovative Agency Podcast
Had the pleasure of having a dialog with the Innovative Agency podcast last week. We talked about leadership, marketing, and the Three Over Four approach to building trust with clients and within the marketing industry in general.
Read moreProcess vs. Product
I’m interested in the business-minded pursuit of understanding creativity. I’m not sure what to do with it, but I’m interested.
One thought that keeps coming to mind: The creative processes that I’m most familiar with don’t start with outcome. I can’t help but wonder if this is why businesses are tripping over the concept and have such a hard time integrating it into their working environments.
Business, by its nature, solves a problem for someone. If there’s no problem to be solved, there’s no market. No market, no money.
The creative processes that business minds are trying to learn from start in a very different place. A place of expression, not fixing. Exploring the problem, not solving it.
If you have a minute contrast a few articles: This nice snippet from the book Universal Mind of Bill Evans: The Creative Process and Self-Teaching is the great Bill Evans exposing how sophisticated the creative process really is. How the problem is the thing. How jumping ahead to the end of “a thing in a way that is so general [that you] can’t possibly build on that. If [you] build on that, [you’re] building on top of confusion and vagueness and [you] can’t possibly progress.”
Contrast that with this article where Webby Awards founder Tiffany Shlain walks us through what seems to be a rather linear process for her. Not that she isn’t brilliantly creative. She is. But there’s a difference here. Bill Evans is engulfed in the problem while Shlain clearly has a finished, tangible product in mind. Shlain focuses a the project, the making of a thing so solid it has an armature, a thing that needs to marinate, something to snuggle.
Which begs the question. Is the creative process in the expression-first art world an applicable model for the market-first business world?
Just starting to put some of these thoughts out there (involved in the problem). What do you think?
P.S. Not for nothing, but my favorite Bill Evans album is The Tokyo Concert.
Image: Creative Commons. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/You_Must_Believe_in_Spring
A one night stand with Ignite Denver
The whole Mudra crew was in a funk. Having just wrapped a 6-show run of Gyaan, a major production that dealt with heavy themes that we all put pretty much everything we had into producing and performing, we were down like Charlie Brown.
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