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What are the key steps of the invention process? I describe it with my model, the Innovation Engine. First, there's an internal part. People normally start with imagination, being able to conjure ideas up in your mind. You need a base of knowledge with which you can work; if you don't have a base of knowledge, then you don't have a toolbox for your imagination. You also have to have the motivation and drive to solve the problem, because getting beyond the obvious answers requires a tremendous amount of activation energy.You need the imagination, you need the knowledge, and you need the attitude, which is the spark for this process, but there are also a lot of external factors that people do not take into account. What are these external factors?You need an environment where creativity is supported: everything from the physical space you're in, to the people you're with, the rules, the rewards, the constraints, the culture, and the resources present. All of these things have a huge impact on how an individual, a team, or an organization functions from a creative perspective.

How can managers create an environment nourishing to creativity? I've talked to some executives about this question, and they say, "My job as a manager is to create a habitat that fosters innovation." The innovation engine can get sparked anywhere--it's a kind of Möbius cube--there's no beginning and no end. If you're a manager, your job is to create a habitat that stimulates the imagination of your team, of your employees, of your colleagues.

One of the most common things that people say during a brainstorming session is "let me build on that." It’s a great way, even if you're going to take a tangential turn from what someone just said, to validate what they said and come up with an interesting segue to something else. You want to keep moving forward and going beyond the first wave of ideas and the second wave of ideas and keep pushing. The worst way to brainstorm is when everyone has their own ideas and nobody has taken [one another’s ideas] in different directions. Everyone feels a sense of ownership for their own idea, and then when you make the decision about what you're going to do, you have a lot of "Well, I like my idea," "I like my idea."

social media is becoming a skill, not a job. Companies like Intel and Dell and IBM are leading the way in broadly distributed social participation, giving thousands of employees the opportunity to win hearts and mind in social and with smart content.

This decentralization of social communication has widespread ramifications for social media management software vendors, as it puts additional emphasis on triage and workflow tools.

The days of one social media manager handling Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin and the rest is coming to a close (as is the era of the one or two person content marketing team) and the same way all of us have a corporate email address and phone number, we’ll all (or nearly all) have a role to play on behalf of the company in social and content marketing, eventually.

kids are building a personal brand from an early age. Their digital footprint will have an impact on their future. Where they end up getting admitted to college, getting a job, and more. Social media will help connect them with like-minded individuals, including mentors, that share similar interests and aspirations that can help them achieve their long-term goals.

Facebook has a minimum age restriction of 13 years old to create an account. But according to Consumer Reports, last year 78% of parents helped create their children’s Facebook pages and 7.5 million users are under the age of 13 and lied about the age associated with the account.

After getting into a discussion with the third graders, we learned that several of them had abandoned their Facebook accounts because that’s where their parents were. They knew that the adult powers that be are a hop, skip, and a click away from monitoring the kid’s accounts on Facebook. The third-grade solution was to hop from Facebook to Instagram (which, ironically, Facebook also owns). In some cases, kids said they created new, rogue Facebook accounts where they connected with their friends and used their old ones as a decoy for parental supervision.

Sixty-nine percent of the heads of households in the U.S. play computer and video games. And 97% of young people — your emerging talent pool — play them

Endless sameness. People come to work and, without climactic events, do essentially the same thing every day forever — like a mountain climber who never sees a peak ahead.

Little sense of personal achievement. Most people lack sharply measured goals. They can work diligently every day but never have a significant success — or failure.

people who claimed their “usual” workweeks were longer than 75 hours were off, on average, by about 25 hours. You can guess in which direction. Those who claimed that a “usual” workweek was 65–74 hours were off by close to 20 hours. Those claiming a 55–64-hour workweek were still about 10 hours north of the truth. Subtracting these errors, you can see that most people top out at fewer than 60 work hours per week.

We live in a competitive world, and boasting about the number of hours we work has become a way to demonstrate how devoted we are to our jobs.

These days, developing a successful online presence requires approaching traditional digital efforts like link-building, web traffic, lead generation, and sales from a decidedly more editorial, content-rich approach: a hybrid marketing and storytelling strategy that drives customer actions by creating, documenting, distributing, and optimizing content. Some companies have created their own internal content development departments or are working with agencies to create everything from infographics to documentaries that highlight where the values, interests, and personality of brand and customer overlap. Coca Cola believes so strongly in the power of content that they are relying on this approach to help them double the size of their business by 2020.

While your office probably looks a lot different than a newsroom, approaching content strategy by thinking like a magazine publisher or a television producer is an effective way to approach content development and promotion. Utilizing influential voices to develop and promote content can help ensure that you meet the first requirement of securing readership and viewers--be interesting.

The people who already create for you: We often hear “write about what you know” because it comes easiest. Identify the talented storytellers within your own walls. Those with an intimate knowledge of company activities are primed to create impactful content, even on a tight deadline. Identify employees who are weekend filmmakers, amateur photographers, poets, and guitar players and invite them to bring these talents to the table.

Teams are often tempted to show off by producing brilliant technical solutions that amaze their peers and management. But often customers would prefer a product that just works effortlessly. From a customer's point of view, the best solutions solve a problem in the simplest way and hide the work that developers are so proud of.

"When you start looking at a problem and it seems really simple, you don't really understand the complexity of the problem. And your solutions are way too oversimplified. Then you get into the problem, and you see it's really complicated. And you come up with all these convoluted solutions....That's where most people stop." Not Apple. It keeps on plugging away. "The really great person will keep on going," said Jobs, "and find...the key underlying principle of the problem and come up with a beautiful, elegant solution that works."

Development teams often assume that their products are done when no more features can be added. Perhaps their logic should be the reverse: Products get closer to perfection when no more features can be eliminated. As Leonardo da Vinci once said, "Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication."

organizational psychologists. Work, they say, is "elastic," meaning that it stretches and shrinks to fit the time allotted.

Parkinson's Law: work expands to fill the time available for its completion.

an elderly lady of leisure can spend the entire day in writing and despatching a postcard to her niece at Bognor Regis. An hour will be spent in finding the postcard, another in hunting for spectacles, half-an-hour in a search for the address, an hour and a quarter in composition, and twenty minutes in deciding whether or not to take an umbrella when going to the pillar-box in the next street. The total effort which would occupy a busy man for three minutes all told may in this fashion leave another person prostrate after a day of doubt, anxiety and toil.

Three out of four workers access social media on the job from their mobile devices at least once a day, and 60% access it multiple times, according to a survey of more than 1,100 employees in North America

But they’re not goofing off, the survey shows. Nearly half said connecting with co-workers was the top reason they used social media at work, followed by connecting with others on a fun social platform and connecting with customers.

Other leading reasons for using social media at work included having a platform for sharing work-related content and collaborating to drive new ideas and innovative thinking.

Facebook’s algorithm uses a number of factors to establish which posts should be shown to users. Previously called EdgeRank, the algorithm now has more than 1,000 contributing factors, but it still focuses on three main influences: affinity, weight, and Time.

Affinity is defined by a user’s relationship with the person or page that created the specific Facebook object — essentially how much the user interacts with that person or page.

Time, the last major factor, takes into account how recent the action occurred, which, in Facebook vernacular, is called time decay.

“If you’re designing a website and not thinking about the user experience on mobile and tablets, you’re going to disappoint a lot of users,” he warns. Designer Tom Muller thinks big brands getting on board will lead to agencies “increasingly using responsive design as a major selling point, persuading clients to future-proof digital marketing communications”. When doing so, Clearleft founder Andy Budd believes we’ll see an end to retrofitting RWD into existing products: “Instead, RWD will be a key element for a company’s mobile strategy, baked in from the start.” Because of this, Budd predicts standalone mobile-optimised sites and native apps will go into decline: “This will reduce the number of mobile apps that are website clones, and force companies to design unique mobile experiences targeted towards specific customers and behaviours.”

During 2012, the average site size crept over a megabyte, which designer/developer Mat Marquis describes as “pretty gross”, but he reckons there’s a trend towards “leaner, faster, more efficient websites” – and hopes it sticks. He adds: “Loosing a gigantic website onto the web isn’t much different from building a site that requires browser ‘X’: it’s putting the onus on users, for our own sakes.”

Designer and writer Stephanie Rieger reckons that although people now know “web design isn’t print,” they’ve “forgotten it’s actually software, and performance is therefore a critical UX factor”.

Rando only launched in March but the anti-social photo-sharing app that deliberately eschews the standard social network clutter of likes and comments and connections – simply letting users share random photos with random strangers and get random snaps in return — has blasted past five million photo shares after a little over two months in the wild. It is now averaging around 200,000 shares per day, says its creator ustwo.

For half that time Rando was iOS only, with its Android app not launching til April. Platform spread aside, the huge point here is that Rando has ditched all the self-congratulatory, endorphin-boosting hooks that apparently keep people tethered to their social networks. Yet managed to grow regardless. As Rando’s tagline pithily put it: ‘You have no friends’. The photos you share here will never be liked, never be favourited, and if they are shared outside Rando to other social networks, a feature Rando most definitely does not enable within its app, you likely won’t ever know anything about it. It’s a very rare digital social blackhole — but one that’s proving surprisingly popular (and all without any embedded social shares to grow virally), even while it’s refreshingly ego-free

factor in the rumblings about teens’ declining interest in traditional social networks and Rando could be something of a canary in the social networking coalmine, picking up subtle traces of Facebook fatigue, and identifying a growing appetite among mobile owners at least to take back some control and reintroduce a little private space by slamming shut those social doors. The rise of mobile messaging apps is another key trend to factor in here, apps which put private communication first, and social comms as a secondary add on. Certain age groups’ attention is arguably increasingly shifting to these more contained communications mediums — channels which offer both private and public comms within the one app, as Facebook does, but which aren’t centrally focused on publicly broadcast personal content. Rather they put the intimacy of one-to-one messaging at their core. Some, like China’s WeChat, even include serendipitous discovery features that are similar to Rando — like its Drift Bottle stranger messaging feature. 

In a 2013 survey by Econsultancy, 55% of marketers globally are planning on increasing their digital marketing budgets this year, with 39% of them planning on reallocating existing budgets toward digital channels.

This is a permanent shift, not a passing trend. Products and services must deliver value while telling engaging stories through a multitude of digital devices and within a network of multiple brands, services, and platforms.

Marketing and product teams need to work more closely. Copywriting and story teams must collaborate with user experience teams.

Share breaking news updates: Lavrusik and Hershkowitz said posts that included the terms “breaking” or “breaking news” saw engagement 57 percent higher than non-breaking news posts

Use a conversational tone and include analysis: Posts with a personal tone or clever language saw engagement of 120 percent above the average, and posts with analysis received 20 percent more referral clicks.

Start conversations by asking questions and responding: Posts with prompts for conversation of questions saw engagement 70 percent above the average

anticipatory systems. 

Increasingly, rather than waiting for us to tell them what we want, in the form of a search query or command, they'll prompt us with suggestions.

Here's a simple definition of anticipatory systems. Think of them as artificially intelligent services that are aware of external context — including ambient inputs like time of day, social connections, upcoming meetings, local weather, traffic and more.

Ticlr.com is an example of how Facebook is evolving into a network of networks, a trend that could someday remove any sense of a website having a beginning and end

The Winchester, Mass.-based company depends on getting permission to use members' Facebook contacts in order to make it easy for them to send gifts purchased on Ticlr.com. The gifts can be big to celebrate birthdays and anniversaries or small to break the ice when trying to get a first date.

Tradesparq.com reflects a social networking trend in which sites leverage who a person knows as a way to add credibility to potential business deals. Without LinkedIn, Tradesparq.com would be just another business-to-business site. With the professional network, the company can use a buyer's LinkedIn contacts to put him in touch with people who know the Chinese supplier bidding on a product request.

The impact of social media is harder to measure than, say, the effectiveness of banner ads, because social media are often used to build brand loyalty. A person may see an ad or promoted social media message but choose not to click through, then search for the product later, and finally make a purchase on a third, fourth or fifth visit to the company's website. While social media didn't have a direct hand in the click-through and sale, it did have a hand in how the brand made a conversion.

Too many brands - GM included - rely on likes (which can be artificially inflated) and direct click-throughs (which don't always result in sales). And while the industry is making strides to help brands better measure what they get for their social media buck, there is still a ways to go, Chou said. Social marketing by brands "is just terrible right now," he observed. "I can't tell you exactly what it should be, but I can tell you it sucks right now. People just shout."

Right now, marketers can’t easily measure a follower who doesn’t click on links or interact directly with a brand’s Facebook page or Twitter feed. That will change as social media tracking gets better.

About 42% of study participants have multiple accounts — and the percentage jumps to 61% for those between the ages of 18 and 34. The average person also manages 3.1 email addresses compared with 2.6 from last year.

Although 52% of respondents said they have considered taking a “vacation” from one or more social networks in the past year, only 24% said they will likely follow through. Why? FOMO, of course.

a prudent client—the kind you really want—will choose a web partner on the strength of the entire package. Doing otherwise, selecting on a matrix of numbers, dates, and line items, is an exercise in foolishness, akin to buying a car without knowing the make and model. Relationships, even in business, are founded on and strengthened by mutual compatibility. Proposing to work together on a project is remarkably similar to proposing marriage (despite the obvious and important differences): it ought to be a decision based on both emotion and reason, supported by a high degree of trust. In writing a proposal, you are making the case for the appropriateness of your new life together. These early, hesitant steps toward knowing one another better are crucial.

At some point later in the document, include the contact information for a few of your best clients. References reassure the reader that you are who you claim to be. You might also wish to provide a brief overview of some previous projects similar to the project on which you are bidding. Business is as much (if not more) about people as it is about dollars and cents, deliverables and timelines. If your company is difficult to relate to because your proposal is generic, it shouldn’t surprise you when you are inevitably forgotten.

Meticulously evaluate every client before issuing a proposal. Once you do, don’t panic if they walk because you stuck to your philosophical guns. You just saved yourself bucket-loads of stress and misery.