You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with.
– Jim Rohn
Doodling, FTW!
Growing up, my mother has always told me I was a doodler and writer. I didn’t believe her until she pulled out a giant box full of notebooks, sticky notes and scratch paper with squiggles, diagrams and random thoughts written down that spanned from my childhood and throughout my college years. Two thoughts ran through my head. 1) “Wow, my mom saved all this stuff?” and 2) “Wow, what was I thinking??”
Good to know that all that brainstorming and doodling was productive. =)
Why We Reject Creative Ideas
We all agree that creativity is highly valuable, but why is that we’re still resistant to creative ideas? The news site ScienceDaily explains some interesting findings.
Based on the experiments at the University of Pennsylvania:
- Creative ideas are by definition novel, and novelty can trigger feelings of uncertainty that make most people uncomfortable.
- People dismiss creative ideas in favor of ideas that are purely practical — tried and true.
- Objective evidence shoring up the validity of a creative proposal does not motivate people to accept it.
- Anti-creativity bias is so subtle that people are unaware of it, which can interfere with their ability to recognize a creative idea.
I’ve Got Social Media! How About You?
This past Thursday I attended the first Got Social Media conference and had a very refreshing experience. I was surrounded by tons of people who were enthusiastic, thirsty to learn and all of them with a streak of ambition.
Throughout the day, various subjects oriented around communications were discussed from a beginning to end kind of fashion; what communication is and the value and purpose it serves, the metrics involved in quanitfying the effectiveness of communications, the future direction of communicating and its experiential shift, tactical approaches to stir buzz marketing, a reality check about women and internet (which by the way makes up 52% of the entire web user population!) and the evolution of web technology.
There were some great presentations with valuable messages and I especially loved the ones that sparked curiosity. For me, those are the ones that usually stick. =)
A personal favorite from the event was the presentation by Stephen Anderson. His discussion tied in a number of different psychological/social behavioral elements and how in the future he believes the focus will shift towards the experience of browsing. In an “off-line” conversation I had with him, he talked about how it used to be the programmers and developers who ran websites, and now it’s the web designers and in the future it’ll be the psychologists and those involved in the social sciences. After thinking about for a bit, I think he’s right. As websites and internet users become more sophisticated, the development team will have to also. You can already see it on Nike.com and UnderArmour.com. It’s pretty clear that they’re selling emotion and experience, not just the shoes and tshirts.
With all that I’ve learned, I think that in the future, successful websites will be the ones that are able to replicate real in-person behaviors and tendencies in an online environment. In his presentation, Chris Bernard said that studies revealed that women shop for longer periods of time and spend more money when they shop with a friend or in a group. The question now is, how can you create an environment to simulate this kind of behavior on the internet? It’s something to think about.
Hello, My Name Is Monica
I finished reading Hello, My Name Is Scott the other day and I think his experience and theory are pretty valid. I’ve worked enough in different retail industries to acknowledge and understand level of impact as something simple as a nametag can have.
I think the most obvious and most recent experience I had with nametags was during the summer before my senior year of college. Having zero restaurant industry experience, I made a conscious decision to work at one to get me through the summer while I took summer school. I’ve heard how insanely rough working as a server could be because of extreme physical, emotional and stress demands the nature of the job requires (I believed them after working at a steakhouse), but it didn’t stop me. At the time I was more interested in understanding how a restaurant operated. Anyway, until about two weeks into the job, every employee in the restaurant was required to wear a spiffy coppery magnetic nametag. It was nothing out of the ordinary. Once in awhile, after I had given my introductory steakhouse spiel, I received “thanks” followed by my name. I didn’t really notice when someone didn’t acknowledge me by my name, but it definitely stood out when they did. I have to admit, like Scott said in his book, it made you feel a little more appreciated – which by the way is a sure approach of getting you extraordinary service from your server. I also noticed that when I had conversations with various customers, most likely than not, it all started because of my name. I’ve received comments from people singing the Lou Bega’s, Mambo No.5 song to me “…a little bit of Monica in my life” all the way to referring to the Monica Lewinsky ordeal. Surprise, surprise!
Let’s just say I had some pretty interesting conversations. However, by the third week, our managers notified us that we were NOT to wear our nametags anymore because of restaurant policies. I asked why, but no one could give me a satisfying answer. It didn’t take very long to realize that the number of conversations I had with people dropped and when people needed to talk to me, I was referred to as the Asian girl. Eh. Even to this day I’m curious as to why the nametags got abolished. A lot of people took notice to it (and by people I’m referring to customers). Oh well.I think that Scott was right in saying that the nametag acts as a type of social icebreaker and in most situations, that’s all you need to make new friends. Kudos Scott! for being gutsy and so dedicated to your philanthropic steps towards making a friendlier society!