A Different Look at Creativity Part II: the social media mix

Before we go any further…

I want to point out that what I am describ­ing here is a process, a way of look­ing at how we cre­ate whether it involves groups of peo­ple or indi­vid­u­als and what we need in the way of tools and envi­ron­ments to sup­port us along the way. The  con­cepts and processes are not lin­ear or pretty and admit­tedly leave lots of room for fur­ther explo­ration and development.

Let’s get going..

Now that we have the cre­ative spec­trum some­what sketched out let’s see how it can work with the social media. The pri­mary ele­ment of social media, in fact its’ key­stone is con­nec­tiv­ity at lev­els that far exceed what we could have imag­ined even a year ago. And… this con­nec­tiv­ity has dif­fer­ent lev­els of applic­a­bil­ity depend­ing on the users intent and goals.  Before we  look in detail at spe­cific social media let’s try to find what  Cre­ators, Mak­ers and Pro­duc­ers  need to suc­ceed, what tools are most use­ful to them. The brief list below sum­ma­rizes com­mon tools and meth­ods, some have been avail­able but lim­ited in their usefulness.

• Brain­storm­ing — This is one of the fun­da­men­tal tools of cre­ativ­ity. While it is pos­si­ble that it can be done alone,  in this con­text it is con­sid­ered best used inter­ac­tively with 2 or more participants.
• Col­lab­o­ra­tion –Whether between those work­ing in like media or dis­sim­i­lar media col­lab­o­ra­tion is often a tool for gen­er­at­ing new out­comes. Often new ways of see­ing the same problem/issue or a new direc­tion or con­cept emerges through col­lab­o­ra­tion and interaction
• Cri­tique and feed­back –In order for cre­atives to suc­cess­fully achieve their vision they need to engage the eyes, hearts and opin­ions of oth­ers as a real­ity check. Given their goal…does their con­cept or the­ory attain the desired outcome?
• Moral and pro­fes­sional Sup­port - Just as cri­tique and feed­back are impor­tant to the cre­ative process so is hav­ing access to moral and pro­fes­sional sup­port. This kind of sup­port can be every­thing from a col­league being a phone call away to a reg­u­lar mas­ter­mind group that pro­vides encour­age­ment and pro­fes­sional men­tor­ing. pro­vide  user friendly  tools for dialogue.
• Back­ground research — One of the early steps in a cre­ative ven­ture is back­ground research designed to find out what if any­thing has been done before and what the results were.
• Mar­ket research — Sep­a­rate from back­ground research is the par­tic­u­lar type of research linked to the brand­ing process. Mar­ket research is impor­tant in the con­cept stage as well as the pro­ducer stage, how­ever, the inten­sity of its use may vary through­out the spectrum.
• Client/customer sup­port — Good cus­tomer sup­port which can include help­ing cus­tomers use their prod­ucts, to get­ting usabil­ity feed­back is very important .
• Vis­i­bil­ity– Vis­i­bil­ity con­tributes heav­ily to a product’s suc­cess…  the more exten­sive the vis­i­bil­ity pos­si­bil­i­ties gen­er­ally the bet­ter the sales.  For vis­i­bil­ity to work it must give the users the abil­ity to be seen by their buyers.
• Customer/client com­mu­ni­ca­tion –Being able to com­mu­ni­cate in a direct and timely man­ner to  cus­tomers  keep them informed and up to date for new devel­op­ments is a strong deter­miner of success.
• Mar­ket con­nec­tion - Hav­ing reli­able chan­nels to con­nect to mar­kets is also very impor­tant to ensur­ing good com­mu­ni­ca­tion  with users and being able to respond to changes in mar­ket preferences.
• Rela­tion­ship devel­op­ment — The rel­a­tive ease with which poten­tial rela­tion­ships can be iden­ti­fied and devel­oped between Mak­ers and Pro­duc­ers and their mar­kets as well as amongst their col­leagues can­not be under­es­ti­mated. This fac­tor is par­tic­u­larly impor­tant now with the decline of tra­di­tional inter­rup­tion based marketing.

Now lets take a more focused look at  these in rela­tion to the Creators,Makers and Pro­duc­ers. A word of caution…this is at best an approx­i­ma­tion and for sim­plic­ity sake implies that the spec­trum over­lap areas will also include over­lap in social media usefulness.

Cre­ators

Since this part of the spec­trum leans heav­ily towards the con­cep­tual  ( see part 1)   tools that will be the most use­ful are the ones most likely to enhance cre­ative thought. Their pri­mary needs are:

• Brain­storm­ing
• Col­lab­o­ra­tion
• Cri­tique and feedback
• Moral and pro­fes­sional Support

Mak­ers

Again as described pre­vi­ously in part 1, this group starts to inter­act with the mar­ket while at the same time pro­vid­ing feed­back to the orig­i­nal cre­ators of the recipes and tem­plates they are refin­ing. Their pri­mary needs include:

• Vis­i­bil­ity
• Rela­tion­ship development
• Mar­ket and back­ground research
• Moral and pro­fes­sional support
• Cus­tomer communication
• Rela­tion­ship development
• Mar­ket connection

Pro­duc­ers

This part of the spectrum’s needs are quite dif­fer­ent than the oth­ers in that it is heav­ily mar­ket focused. The pri­mary needs of Pro­duc­ers are:

• Vis­i­bil­ity
• Rela­tion­ship development
• Mar­ket and back­ground research
• Cus­tomer communication
• Rela­tion­ship development
• Mar­ket connection

In sum­mary  the Cre­ative com­mu­nity needs the fol­low­ing envi­ron­ments and tools:

• Inter­ac­tive to eas­ily sprout and nur­ture cre­ative thought and inter­act with peers
• Rela­tion­ship build­ing to enable easy rela­tion­ship devel­op­ment with their mar­kets peers
• Mar­ket focused to help build and main­tain vis­i­bil­ity and dis­burse brand messages

The next step…

is to take a look at social media to see what tools are avail­able and which type of  media works best for Cre­ators, Mak­ers and Pro­duc­ers respec­tively. Let’s first look at what con­sti­tutes Social Media by definition…Wikipedia describes it as

“Social media are pri­mar­ily Inter­net– and mobile-based tools for shar­ing and dis­cussing infor­ma­tion among human beings. The term most often refers to activ­i­ties that inte­grate tech­nol­ogy, telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions and social inter­ac­tion, and the con­struc­tion of words, pic­tures, videos and audio. This inter­ac­tion, and the man­ner in which infor­ma­tion is pre­sented, depends on the var­ied per­spec­tives and “build­ing” of shared mean­ing among com­mu­ni­ties, as peo­ple share their sto­ries and experiences.”

Orga­niz­ing Social Media

• Blogs and Microblogs web site that allows indi­vid­u­als or groups to pro­duce an ongo­ing con­ver­sa­tion, microblogs limit uses to small bursts of information.
• Interactive/Social net­work­ing net­works that allow users to inter­act directly either in real time of very close to it.
• Social net­work aggre­ga­tion sites that gather all of the social media mes­sages and con­tent and cat­e­go­rize it for reading
• Events net­works online net­works that allow users to orga­nize users around spe­cific sub­jects and sched­ule live on-site meetings.
• Wikis a web site that allows col­lab­o­ra­tive edit­ing of its con­tent and struc­ture by it’s users
• Social book­mark­ing sites that allow users to save, rec­om­mend and com­ment on web content
• Opin­ion sites con­sumer eval­u­a­tion, review of prod­ucts and services
• Photo and Video shar­ing sites that pro­vide a means of shar­ing orga­niz­ing and shar­ing pho­to­graphic and video con­tent with users
• E-commerce sites that allow users to sell prod­ucts they cre­ated or are re-selling

Match­ing the needs with the tools

Now lets orga­nize these accord­ing to how they can help the cre­ative com­mu­nity with an eye on the spe­cific needs Iden­ti­fied earlier.

Brain­storm­ing — Collaboration

Microblogs / Pres­ence apps Twit­ter, Pownce and Jaiku
Photo shar­ing Flickr
Video shar­ing YouTube,
Inter­ac­tive Net­works shap­shifters, deviant art, Behance net­work. Like­mind, Ning
Wikipedia wiki’s, forums and mem­ber­ship sites

Cri­tique and feedback

Blogs & micro blogs Twit­ter, Pownce and Jaiku
Wikis PB wiki
Photo & video shar­ing Flickr,YouTube
Social/Interactive net­works shap­shifters, deviant art, Behance net­work. Like­mind, Ning
Wikipedia wiki’s, forums and mem­ber­ship sites
Opin­ion sites epinion,ask

Moral and pro­fes­sional Support

Social/ inter­ac­tive net­works Face­book, Myspace, LinkedIn, deviant art, Behance net­work Like­mind, Ning forums
Event Net­works Meetup

Back­ground research

E-commerce Etsy, e-bay
Wikipedia
Microblogs / Pres­ence apps Twit­ter, Pownce and Jaiku
Social book­mark­ing Deli­cious, StumbleUpon,Digg, Mixx, Red­dit
Event Net­works Meetup

Mar­ket research

Blogs
E-commerce Etsy, e-bay
Social/ inter­ac­tive net­works Face­book, Myspace, LinkedIn, shap­shifters, deviant art, Behance net­work Like­mind, Ning
Wikipedia wiki’s, forums and mem­ber­ship sites
Event Net­works Meetup

Vis­i­bil­ity

Blogs & micro blogs Twit­ter, Pownce and Jaiku, blog cat­a­logue, good blogs
Photo & video shar­ing Flickr,Youtube
Social/ inter­ac­tive net­works Face­book, Myspace, LinkedIn,  deviant art, Behance net­work, Ning
Event Net­works Meetup
E-commerce Etsy, e-bay

Customer/client com­mu­ni­ca­tion

Blogs & micro blogs Twit­ter, Pownce and Jaiku,
Photo & video shar­ing Flickr,Youtube
Social/ inter­ac­tive net­works Face­book, Myspace, LinkedIn, Ning site
Event Net­works Meetup
E-commerce Etsy, e-bay

Mar­ket connection

E-commerce Etsy, e-bay
Blogs & micro blogs Twit­ter, Pownce and Jaiku
Social/ inter­ac­tive net­works Face­book, Myspace, LinkedIn, Ning site

Rela­tion­ship development

Blogs & micro blogs Twit­ter, Pownce and Jaiku
Social/ inter­ac­tive net­works Face­book, Myspace, LinkedIn, Ning site
Event Net­works Meetup

Part 3.….

will will take a closer look at just what and how Cre­ators, Mak­ers and Pro­duc­ers can uti­lize social media from Face­book to Twit­ter to YouTube.