Jon Samsel

THE BUSINESS OF WRITING SMARTER

1-Day or 2-Day Power Writing Seminar

Instructor: Jon Samsel

Who this course is intended for: Companies looking to train their marketing/communication staff on the importance of writing and the skills required to help a brand become successful online. Website writing best practices, search engine optimization (SEO), and storytelling are emphasized. Ideal for novice to intermediate level-staff looking to quickly boost their proficiency. No prior programming skills needed.

Inquiries: 310-402-2890 or email jsamsel@gmail.com

IMPORTANCE OF WRITING

Famed management consultant, Peter Drucker, said, “As soon as you take one step up the career ladder your effectiveness depends on your ability to communicate your thoughts in writing.” In other words, if you want to be noticed within or outside your organization, you have to be able to express yourself-clearly and concisely.

The same can be said when you are an employee representing a company online, whether that’s on a corporate website, press release, training module, marketing campaign, social media site or email. Your writing is a critical extension of your company’s brand — so it’s important that business leaders invest in assisting their employees become the best ambassadors of communication possible.

• Your writing creates an image
• Text is the universal language of the web
• Being readable and findable is critical
• Great writing attracts customers

WHAT YOU’LL LEARN FROM THIS COURSE

The purpose of the training course is to help you become a better web writer, whether you are writing for humans or for search engines. You will increase your knowledge of today’s effective writing techniques, better understand the emotional mechanics of storytelling, and learn how to apply winning search engine marketing best practices.

• How to make your website more relevant
• What must be done to get good search engine rankings
• Best ways to submit, subscribe & syndicate to be found
• Why stories matter and how best to exploit them
• Customers who interact are more likely to transact
• The difference between branding and direct response content
• How extending text & tags to multiple media to amplify your reach
• How usability testing can be used to validate your choices
• How to monitor and track your success over time

COURSE REVIEW

Web Writing

• Writing for humans
• Text elements of a high-impact website
• Designing content structure
• Tailoring your writing to different audiences and needs
• Editing & testing text for clarity, concision & response
• Writing to sell: persuasion & direct response
• Social media writing & representing the brand voice
• Syndication: The power of web distribution
• Measuring success with text tools

SEO

• Writing for engines & bots
• SEO basics
• Business planning & goal setting
• Keyword selection, relevancy, and density
• Competitive assessment
• Code: titles, meta tags, URLs & site maps
• Copy writing
• Offsite SEO & social search
• Measuring success with SEO tools

Storytelling

• Writing for emotional engagement
• Integrated marketing: The holy grail of marketers
• The new PR: Participation not propaganda
• Advertelling: Successful brands are about people
• Word of mouth matters when the experience is the brand
• Ratings, testimonials and user generated content
• Educational training, kiosks and demos
• Narrative stories & branded entertainment

FORMAT

One-day or tow-day tutorial encompassing lectures, live demos and exercises. Real-world examples are used to highlight points throughout the day. Copies of the presentation slides and exercises with be provided to all attendees.

INSTRUCTOR BIO

Jon Samsel is a published author, speaker, instructor, consultant and thought leader in the areas of branding, online marketing and writing. He has worked as an online marketing executive at Fortune 100 companies such as Bank of America, Ford and Countrywide where he was responsible for a broad range of marketing activities such as paid and organic search marketing, display advertising, DRTV, social media engagement, mobile marketing, and multivariate testing, including the task of coordinating teams of designers, programmers, copywriters and others involved.

His book, ‘Dead Ahead: The Web Dilemma and the New Rules of Business,’ co-authored with Laurie Windham and published back in 1999, predicted many of the changes the Internet has had on businesses and organizational processes. Jon’s book, ‘Writing for Interactive Media,’ first published in 1995, has been utilized as a textbook in over 40 colleges and universities throughout the US and Canada. He wrote and produced, ‘The Killer Content Workbook,’ for Apple, Inc., one of the first interactive PDF’s ever created to incorporate text, audio, video, embedded forms and interactive user response.

Jon is an adjunct writing instructor at UCLA and UC Irvine where he has taught courses in multimedia, fiction and non-fiction writing. Jon has co-authored four published books, edited 12 books/directories, and is a published poet and Hollywood screenwriter. Jon is an online marketing/writing consultant and a regular seminar speaker for Richmond Events.

COMPLIMENTARY VALUE ADDS

Free 1-Year Premium Subscription to Heardable.com

Heardable is the world’s first and only online brand optimization platform. All workshop attendees will receive a 1-year premium subscription to Heardable.com (a $2,999 value) redeemable via a special promotional code provided at the end of the class.

Free copy of writing for interactive media

All workshop attendees will receive a free copy of Jon Samsel and Darryl Wimberley’s book, ‘Writing for Interactive Media.’

PRICING

Custom class configurations and pricing available upon request.

TESTIMONIALS

‘Jon has an amazing understanding of consumer insights and behavior as they relate to online usability– skills that bring immediate value to strategic consulting projects. Understanding, and leveraging the technology through best practices and innovation are critical success factors, and Jon is clearly one of the best in his field. –Christophe Bertrand, Senior Director of Product Marketing at Hitachi Data Systems

‘Jon’s vision and in-depth knowledge of both the business and creative aspects of new media production is truly remarkable. This is a man truly “gets it” and empowers those around him to do their best work. Bottom line – Jon is a rare commodity, a visionary in the area of online direct response marketing and a creative powerhouse.’  –David Greene, Owner of Creative-Spark

JON SAMSEL
Digital Brand Strategist, Author & Web Consultant
310-402-2890
jsamsel@gmail.com
jon.samsel @ skype
jonsamsel.com - blog
linkedin.com/in/jonsamsel @ linkedIn
twitter.com/jonsamsel @ twitter

I was recently invited to be part of a private beta for a new brand optimization/analytics platform called Heardable. The new service measures how well a brand is doing online, issuing a Heardable Score for every URL you scan into their tool. There is even a comparison scan tool that allows users to scan up to five domain names at once.

The platform examines over 40 unique on-site and off-site brand variables, including a website’s code, inbound links, usability, social brand presence, mobile readiness, and other unique characteristics. The highest possible Heardable Score that can be achieved is 1000. A score between 401-600 is average.

The tools on the site are very cool, with results displayed via an attractive AJAX interface that slides in and out to reveal more detailed information when prompted. My assessment after about one hour of use: Heardable is an extremely functional, insightful, and highly addictive platform that will surely appeal to online marketers. By addictive I refer to the fact that I couldn’t stop scanning URL’s that popped into my head. I wanted to see how each brand scored.

Perhaps the best part of Heardable is The Heardable 100, a ranked list of the top 100 Heardable Scores by brand. You may be surprised by which brand is currently ranked #1. (Hint: It’s a popular celebrity gossip site whose name is a play on socialite, Paris Hilton). According to the company founders, the Heardable platform will soon add hundreds of thousands of pre-ranked lists of brands, by category, which will be a very helpful (and time saving) research tool.

I think brand managers and C-level marketers are really going to like Heardable because it’s an easy way to measure how one brand is performing against a competitor, across multiple variables, plus providing drill-downs into exactly how and why one brand is doing better than the other. Kinda like opening the hood of your competitor’s brand and seeing their online strategy in action. Sweet!

So I decided to examine one category of brands that is near and near to my heart — advertising agencies. After, all, one might assume that the top creative minds in the land would have built websites that truly showcases their talents — both creatively and functionally. After all, they are pitching online marketing strategies and tactics every day to clients (and potential clients). Surely their own sites would have higher than average Heardable Scores, right?

Sadly, my scans revealed just the opposite. Instead of stellar scores, most creative agencies fell into the ‘poor’ or ‘below average’ range. Not what most of us would expect from today’s top-tier marketing agencies. Note to agencies: Don’t let your clients use this tool or you may be in trouble!

To put things into perspective, everyday brands scored better than expected — with higher Heardable Scores than most creative agencies I tested.

• Sears.com (573)
• Weightwatchers.com (531)
• Brides.com (442)
• Airtran.com (438)

Hat’s off to R/GA, an integrated, interactive agency that seems to practice what they preach with a Heardable Score of 537. R/GA had the best score of all agencies I scanned.

Here is a list of the advertising agencies that I scanned, rank ordered by Heardable Score. Any surprises? Be sure to Tweet about it.

Recently, I wrote a blog post titled, “Which SEO Agencies Practice What They Preach?” The article generated a lot of comments from professionals within the creative agency world–most of them lukewarm. Respondents fell into two camps: 1) Those who disagreed with the methodology of utilizing a free site grading service to evaluate and compare SEO companies, 2) Those who were embarrassed by the results. After rereading my post, I not only stand by my words, but I have decided to expand the concept of comparing leading class companies by WebsiteGrader Score into a regular feature on my blog.

Why compare firms by WebsiteGrader Score? Because looking under the hood can tell you a lot about what companies are doing to promote their brands–both on site and off site.

So which category would I zero in on next? Well, it didn’t take me long to decide. I stumbled across an interesting article by Linda Tischler published on FastCompany.com on Feb 11, 2009 titled, “The Fast Company 50: The Most Innovative Companies in Design” that purported to profile extraordinary design enterprises across the nation, part of a larger article looking at firms across various industries.

Prepping the List to Grade

I had only heard of two of the design companies profiled by Fast Company, so I looked up each company on Google and verified the corporate URL for each firm. Then went to Websitegrader.com and evaluated each site.

Here are the top 10 design firms ranked by Fast Company along with their WSG score:

1. Ideo 98.3
2. Marcel Wanders Studio 71.0
3. Rockwell Group 77.0
4. Pentagram 97.3
   
5. Whipsaw 53.0
   
6. Ammunition 71.0
7. Frog design 95.0
8. Fuseproject 88.0
9. Smart Design 93.0
10. NewDealDesign 59.0

Big Ah-Ha’s

Ideo had the highest WebsiteGrader score and they were also ranked #1 design firm by Fast Company. That’s a fairly compelling confirmation that this firm is as good as they appear to be. Pentagram, Frog Design and Smart Design each scored above 90%, so my takeaway is that they each made a respectable showing and deserve some props.

Most of the other firms on the list scored lower than I would have expected. These are not big dumb brands…these are cutting-edge design companies. It just doesn’t seem acceptable that any of the firms on this list score below ninety percent, yet 6 out of 10 did!

The two design firms that scored that lowest were Whipsaw and NewDealDesign. Yes, it’s true both sites were built using Flash. But in 2009, there are plenty of ways to optimize a Flash website in a way that makes them accessible to humans, search engines, and social media sites. These two firms, for whatever reason, chose not to put the extra effort in to make their online content and code up to par. Tsk, tsk.

Digging under the hood at NewDealDesign.com, you will see that basic SEO best practices were not performed at all. According to WebsiteGrader, meta descriptions and keywords were missing from the NewDealDesign website. Images on the site were missing ALT text. There were a surprisingly low number of pages indexed by Yahoo: 26. One of the most important measures for a website is how many other sites link to it. The more links the better. NewDealDesign had only 577 inbound links, and the domain is 9 years and 9 months old. One would surmise that a leading design firm would have many, many more inbound links. No blog, no RSS feeds and no contact forms were detected on the site either.

In Conclusion: There May Be A ‘Return On Awesomeness’ After All

To be fair, NewDealDesign appears to be an offline design firm (packaged goods, industrial design, etc.) and doesn’t appear to offer web strategy & design services. Their client list is impressive: Puma, Samsung, Microsoft, Epson, Dell, HP, Kensington, Nokia, Logitech, SAP, Sun, Toshiba, Verison, and more.

But some of other design firms included on The Fast Company Most Innovative Companies list appear to do a fair amount of web strategy & design work. It seems fair to expect a design company’s website and online brand strategy to be deployed professionally and thoroughly. It surprises me when this is not the case–and the Fast Company list of innovative design firms did not disappoint.

So while many of the design firms profiled in this post failed the ‘practice what you preach’ smell test, they appear to be lauded by the press for their exceptional creative abilities nonetheless.  And the fact that they are being hired by the world’s top brands to transform the ordinary into extrordinary–through design–may be proof positive that generating a ‘return on awesomeness’ is possible after all.

1. Apple’s design process revealed!
2. Hilarious video about ‘Death By Committee’ group decision making processes. Love the logo designs!
3. Naming tools to help get your creative juices flowing.
4. The Components of a Writing Business Plan.
5. Website up-time tool.
6. What every web designer needs: A handy Lorem Ipsum generator!
7. An online font tester!
8. 100 things on the Internet that might be of interest to you.
9. Type in a word to find rhymes, synonyms, definitions, and more.
10. Life of Pi - Interactive promo. The mood that this creates is almost like a movie. Awesome.
11. The website is down: Sales guy vs. web dude. Funny!
12. ZeFrank’s song about social networking
13. Good site for hiring freelancers to work on social media gigs or web dev projects.
14. Quantcast - Free, competitive website analytics.
15. See every mouse movement and every click on your website. Record & more.
16. Fun brain teasers and exercises.
17. Need to quickly translate text into another foreign language?
18. Nice gift idea - give a personalized book to your child or relative.
19. SEO tool. How many desired .edu or .gov links does your site have?
20. Over 1,500 stories about coffee’s impact on real lives. Very cleaver marketing.
21. Social search engine. Pretty cool.
22. Where’s WaldObama? 1,474 mega-pixel picture of the Inauguration. Wow.
23. Mint or Rudder - which is best online tool to manage your money?
24. Runners. Track your distance, pace, progress & calories with this cool NIKE tool.
25. Looking for the perfect Web 2.0 domain name? Try Dot-o-mator.
26. Download free Web 2.0 logo designs!
27. UGC traffic to triple by 2012, according to Cisco.
28. UGC / user reviews are critical. See latest Nielsen findings.
29. “The Crying Game” of viral marketing. So well done. Click till you see the surprise ending!
30. U.S. real estate prices from 1980-present plotted to a roller coaster ride!
31. I just love Howcast - learn about almost anything!
32. Creepy girl. Watch as her eyes follow your cursor.
33. Amazing interactive simulation by Motorola.
34. Heatmap simulation for any image you upload. Sweet.
35. Design for Emotion and Flow.
36. Website User Journeys, Needs, and Trust: A Volkswagen Case Study.
37. Very helpful usability blog site by Craig Tomlin.
38. Net Promoter Score: Pro’s? Con’s? Full of bologna?
39. Get Elastic’s landing page optimization webinar recap.
40. Consumer purchase preferences by zip code.
41. Free version of the Word of Mouth Manual Volume II.
42. Social media marketing case study: Will It Blend.
43. Free 34 page ebook - The New Rules of Viral Marketing.
44. Social Web Analytics eBook 2008.
45. Introduction to Good Usability - Free PDF Ebook.
46. How to think virally w/ Jeff Benjamin, the creator of  Subservient Chicken.
47. Customer Feedback Usability Insights.
48. 5 new skills for the future of marketing.
49. Bring Holistic Awareness to Your Design.
50. Long live the Cluetrain Manifesto! 95 theses ahead of their time.

Source: http://twitter.com/jonsamsel

What type of website experience causes visitors to come back repeatedly? Great ones! Oh, if creating awesome website were only that easy, we’d all have one. Right?

While tactical approaches to designing websites vary widely, successful web strategies are based on a few simple principles –– something I first wrote about nine years ago in a book I co-authored with Laurie Windham about doing business online. In that book, “Dead Ahead: The Web Dilemma and the New Rules of Business,” Laurie and I warned businesses that they needed to fulfill the demands of their site visitors, or face their wrath.

The four demands of the empowered customer are:

1. Give me what I need when I need it
2. Don’t waste my time
3. Give me meaningful content, not fluff
4. Don’t exploit me

When you factor the demands of the empowered customer together, you realize that people want a Holistic Experience that is based on their interpretation of the rules. Playing on that concept, a Holistic Website integrates marketing, sales and customer usage activities to enable shopping, buying, receiving, and consuming –– in one cohesive site. It puts the user in the center of the universe, anticipating, stimulating and facilitating their behavior. It fulfills the promise of the company’s value proposition by satisfying user needs.

Companies who can combine these holistic insights with solid user centric design and testing will find themselves much better prepared to develop a website that truly delights their customers.

Doing business in multiple languages requires a company to rely on qualified internal resources and expert consultants to translate and localize their content. By managing the cross-cultural language mix in their global corporate communications, firms can increase their chance of success while avoiding common communications bloopers.

Below is a link to an article on localization and translation that JBI Localization’s Jacques Boulanger provided to me several years ago for a CD-ROM project I was producing for Apple Computer. The information is still very relevant today.

Translation and Localization: Managing the Language and Cross-Cultural Mix in Global Corporate Communications

After several requests, I have decided to publish my eight stage website planning process. If you are a web designer or developer tasked with building a new website, or if you are a web executive contemplating a redesign of your corporate site, think of this outline as a handy checklist for each stage in the web planning process–from discovery through optimization.

I have also included a PowerPoint version of the 8 stage website planning process here.

Stage 1: Discover
Purpose of site
Top 5 business goals
Top 5 user goals
Approximate page count
Style, tone & brand positioning
Top 5 unique features
Traffic sources
Onsite advertising
Calls to action / lead routing
Domain name / URL
How site complements current strategy
How site augments current strategy
Websites this site might emulate
Competitive sites
Timeline / launch date(s)
Definition of successful launch

Stage 2: Plan
Project team & roles
Financial overview
Marketing overview
Communications overview
Project management process
Key project phases
Content requirements
Assumptions & dependencies
Visitor personas & task paths
Major site features & functionality
Design, navigation & architecture
Publishing platform/CMS
Databases, integration & technologies
Tracking & reporting
Natural search & ADA requirements
Hosting & service level agreements

Stage 3: Build
Wireframes & design mock-ups
New content / rights clearance
API’s and RSS feeds
Prototype pages
Usability testing
Searchability testing
Source codes & phone #’s
Landing pages / transactive pages
Legal & compliance
Change control process
Quality control
Staging & user acceptance testing

Stage 4: Publish
Article creation / RSS feeds
Asset management
Publishing sign off process
Syndication
Publishing calendar
Subject matter experts / moderators
User generated content
Multimedia publishing
Publishing platform/CMS
Legal & compliance sign off

Stage 5: Maintain
Up-time requirements
System administration
Software/hardware upgrades
Hosting/security
Documentation
Capacity
Page load times
System performance tuning
Back-up/archiving

Stage 6: Market
Paid campaigns
Natural campaigns
Inbound link building
Landing page overflow
Inter/Intra site linking
Syndication of content
Campaign tracking & reporting
Integrated / stand alone
URL promotion

Stage 7: Measure
Analytic packages
Tagging, tracking & reporting
Cookies & logic
Campaign set up / mods
Natural vs. paid breakout
Tracking to goals
Social / delayed response
Banner performance
LP funnel performance
Site load time / up time

Stage 8: Optimize
Direct response testing
Multivariate testing
Landing page testing
Banner ad testing
Best practice sharing

You’ve heard of the hot dog on a stick, right? Well, an entire website crammed on to a homepage is just as juicy and delicious. Check out TheRichKids.com or click on the image to the left. Hard to stomach, ain’t it?

Usually relegated to the design bowels of those annoying vitamin cures and weight loss scams, websites like this somehow manage to cram every direct response cliché into a single never-ending, vertically scrolling page.

I suppose some of these websites must be making money or else they would not be live for very long. Perhaps this type of site design is proof positive that direct response marketing really does work. Thank you Ronco!

Even though websites on a stick defy every rule of good web design, visitors must surely find themselves mousing down the elongated home page much like a driver caught in a traffic jam, rubbernecking a crash scene. Gotta…see…the…carnage.

Go direct response!

So you need to create, design or develop a landing page that converts  visits into sales–where do you begin?

First, let’s define what a landing page is. Typically, a landing page is a web page that supports an online marketing campaign and is designed to capture leads or convert visitors into sales. Often, landing pages are separate and distinct from a main website, have unique website addresses, and allow for end-to-end campaign tracking (via unique phone numbers and/or source code tracking appended to the URL).

Typical landing page elements are:

1. Header masthead (logo, tagline, phone number)
2. Hero shot (a graphic representation of the benefit of the product or service you are selling)
3. Headline text and supporting text
4. An offer (50% off your first order, free shipping)
5. A time ticker (limited time offer with an expiration date) to create a sense of urgency
6. Calls to action (call now with a phone number, fill out this form with a form on the page, engage in live chat with a link to start a chat session)
7. Direct response elements (red arrow that directs the eye to a specific action, yellow highlighter effect that draws the eye to an offer of benefit, big bold 1-800 number, etc)
8. Customer testimonials or product reviews (to build trust and re-enforce visitor’s purchase decision)
9. Trust marks such as BBB, McAfee or VeriSign
10. Product or service comparisons

Studying your competitor’s landing pages may seem like a logical place to start, but keep in mind that other companies may have created their landing pages with entirely different goals in mind. This may not be a simple apples to apples comparison, as your goals may be different than those of competing firms. It can’t hurt to know what your competitors are doing, just don’t copy them.

Additionally, competitive landing pages you identify may not be performing very well. The visit-to-lead ratios, for example, on company Y’s landing page may be 2%, far below your target goal of 7%, so copying what others are doing in not always the smartest move.

When you are ready to start a new landing page design and development process, I recommend you start by identifying of few important elements having to do with your goals and objectives.

10 step landing page development process:

1. Identify the baseline visit-to-lead ratio you are trying to beat (ie: 3%)
2. Spell out the desired mix of lead transaction type you want (ie: 70% phone, 30% form)
3. Name the optimal product mix (ie: 50% premium brand dogfood, 30% animal toys, 20% grooming products)
4. Recognize your desired customer mix (ie: 90% repeat/existing customers, 10% once-and-gone customers)
5. List the source of the traffic to your landing page (ie: paid search, banner ads, etc)
6. Identify the time of year this landing page will be used (to gauge whether or not this could/should impact the design)
7. Name your color choices such as background, accent, fonts, images, etc (evaluate brand must-have colors vs. those colors that we know stimulate user response online and consider new combinations)
8. Form placement: Place the entire form on the page vs. a multi-part form vs. a form that is one click away (any combination of which can radically impact results)
9. Smart forms & on-site help: Certain form elements, for example, are known to impact conversions
10. Think of additional ancillary elements you may need, such as live chat, audio, flash animation, video, calculators, click to call, collapsible design elements using AJAX or the like–which are all elements that can impact landing page performance

Once each of these steps is performed, design several new landing pages, varying the tone, style and layout. Then test your new pages. Only testing with a live audience will reveal the winning landing page design. Online visitors are a funny breed. Often, the ‘best’ design perform poorly and ‘ugly’ designs yield great results. From a brand perspective, try to find a landing page that you are proud to display to the world, yet one that fulfills your sales goals.

I encourage you to consider a wildcard design now and again that breaks all the rules. This is one way to radically out-perform, or lose to your control landing page. But breakthrough landing page designs often come about by trying something different. Good luck and happy testing!

Everything starts with an idea. Think about it. Paintings, cars, songs, airplane designs, companies, buildings—and even books.

Developing an idea is where work and time come into the picture. When you go with an idea, it may carry you to unknown areas, to the heights of satisfaction or to the depths of depression when you get bogged down with it.

In the superb novel, The Fountainhead, by Ann Rand, architect Howard Roark states that “the creative artist has a unique right to the original ideas he produces and develops. Others cannot make use of this creative work without agreement and compensation. What is reflected in The Fountainhead is the truth that “everything is built upon something else in creation.” Play with a single basic idea and what happens? More ideas present themselves to you.

The act of creating means to shift qualities or elements from one thing to another. Hollywood has been doing this for decades, lifting (some say stealing) a key element from an old classic film and building a new film from or around it.

The creative process takes varying amounts of time, depending upon the desired result. A book obviously takes much longer to create than an article, short story, or song. There are exceptions to this when you consider prolific authors like Barbara Cartland, Isaac Asimov and Ray Bradbury. They could turn out a new book in a week and often did so.

Creative ideas may evolve into creative problems, real puzzlers for their originators. They then require much more thought and effort to work your way through the sticky areas. Thomas Edison spent ten, twenty years, and longer on some of his creative inventions.

As writers, marketers and artists, it’s imperative that we use our creativity to link unrelated concepts in a way that allows for bold new solutions to spring up. One way to start is to look at the same thing as everyone else and then think of something different.

EXERCISE #1

Imagine that you’re a contractor for a major builder. You’ve been hired to convert a dilapidated warehouse into office space. However, there is one problem. The previous owner of the building left behind 5 million unused cotton balls.

Your assignment is to think of creative things to do with the cotton balls before the new office space is completed. List a few ideas.

EXERCISE #2

Suppose for a moment that you are a development executive at an interactive media publisher. One day, the head honcho ushers you into her office and proclaims that the company is dramatically shifting its development strategy. Due to a cash crunch, the firm will now develop innovative games based solely on properties in the public domain.

Your responsibility is to come up with some test concepts for a new title based on the nursery rhyme, Jack and Jill. Harking back to your childhood, you recount the story: Jack and Jill went up the hill to fetch a pail of water. Jack fell down and broke his crown and Jill came tumbling after. Jot down a few variations of the story.

EXERCISE #3

You’re a marketing assistant for a large manufacturer. You have been assigned a project that may help land you a promotion if completed to your employer’s satisfaction. Your mission is to come up with a list of unique names for the following new consumer products in development:

• A hair brush that doubles as a portable telephone
• Auto body paint that changes color every few days
• An inflatable bicycle helmet

As you focus your creative energies on the various tasks outlined above, you may find one or more of the challenges difficult to complete. Don’t give up!

Remember to use your knowledge and experience to help stimulate extraordinary ideas. Use your wackiest thoughts and your strangest solutions to help break down the mental barriers that stand in your way. Go on. Have some fun.

So how did you do with the cotton balls in Exercise #1? What creative solutions did you come up with?

Here a few examples I thought of:

• Stuff the cotton balls into the walls of the building (in place of standard insulation)
• Dip the cotton balls in caramel and market them as exotic confections
• Sell the cotton balls to an aspirin manufacturer (and pocket the cash!)
• Make fashion accessories out of them

The cotton ball exercise demonstrates on interesting point. When cotton balls are taken out of their usual context, many more uses for the items become possible. I’m not predicting that carmel-covered cotton balls will become a candy craze anytime soon. However, when we place cotton balls in the food category, our minds can suddenly find all sorts of exotic new uses for cotton. Cotton candy anyone?

How did you do with the Jack and Jill exercise? As a development executive placed in an extraordinary situation, you have been pushed off your routine path and forced to “think of something different.” When approaching the story of Jack and Jill, one might first pose a series of questions to help formulate a new approach to a familiar set of circumstances.

Questions such as:

• What caused Jack to fall down?
• Why was Jack wearing a crown?
• What caused Jill to come tumbling after?

Or perhaps alternative situations such as:

• What if Jack and Joe went up the hill?
• What if the hill was a pyramid instead of a hill?

By posing a few simple analytical questions and altering at least one key element familiar to our story, whole new creative ideas suddenly become possible. For example:

Jack and Jill climbed up a pyramid to fetch a golden amulet. Jill tripped Jack and he fell down. Jill snatched his crown, scooped up the amulet and was never seen in the city again.

With a little more tinkering, the concept could be expanded into a full-blown adventure game concept–– a Jack and Jill meets Torin’s Passage:

On a day that starts like any other, young Jack learns that the world he knows is about to change forever. A mysterious warlock, known only as Jillian, puts his parents under an evil spell and snatches his father’s magic crown, then vanishes into the vast labyrinth of the black pyramid. Knowing only the sound of the Jillian’s voice, Jack vows to find her, force her to relinquish his father’s crown, and release his parents from bondage. Thus begins an exciting adventure that will take Jack to the five inner worlds of the black pyramid––a world filled with danger and fantasy. Use your wits to help Jack solve many challenging riddles, as he discovers more about himself than he could ever have imagined.

How did you make out with exercise #3? Given the task of having to create unique names for new products in development, how did you fare? Write down your ideas next to the brilliant ideas I came up with:

A hair brush that doubles as portable telephone:

• Telebrush Magic
• Hairphone
• Your idea?

Auto body paint that changes color every few days:

• Mood Paint
• Liquid Skin
• Your idea?

An inflatable bicycle helmet:

• Airhead
• BrainSafe
• Your idea?