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The creative pause allows the space for your mind to drift, to imagine and to shift, opening it up to new ways of seeing. There’s just one small problem: The creative pause might soon become a thing of the past. When was the last time you remember being bored? Or even having a moment free from distractions?

A quick glance around and you’ll notice that it’s almost impossible to be bored in our 21st-century environment. Every bar now has at least one television blaring. And just as night follows day, your eyes will be drawn to the moving pictures above, sapping whatever creative thoughts you could be having. Or take, for example, the last time you were alone at a restaurant waiting for a friend to join you. Chances are you reached for your phone and did something with it, anything to avoid appearing like the lonely loser in the corner.

These days, I schedule a regular dose of boredom into my day. Furthermore, I don’t check messages if I’m waiting for a friend. I choose, instead, to watch people in bars, cafes, and restaurants. I don’t play games on my phone or my computer

If people are seeing stories from these papers on Google+, they either don't like them or they aren't bothering to tell Google. The New York Times, with over 360,000 followers, receives an average of 26,665 +1s per week. That's fewer than one +1d article a week for every 10 followers. The Times only posts to Google+ a few times per week, and it's not always posting links to NYTimes.com pages. But few of its Google+ posts have more than 50 +1s, and they theoretically reach 360,000 people.

What's even weirder is that The Washington Post, with 5% of the followers The New York Times has, gets more +1s than any other newspaper. With 33,206 +1s per week on average, the Post is the only major U.S. paper (with more than 200 followers) that gets a significant multiple of weekly +1s per follower. It gets 1.7 +1s per person encircling it, and the rest of the leaders get a small fraction of their follower count.

But so does WSJ.com, the #2 U.S newspaper in terms of Google+ followers, and its +1s are still a small fraction of its number of followers. All these papers have about the same level of activity on their Google+ pages, and their +1 activity on those posts is about the same.

Facebook didn't just buy a photo-sharing app. They bought an entire social network consisting of 30 million users, many of whom use the product constantly

it’s not how many followers you have, but how many relevant followers you have. Having 20,000 followers who don’t respond to anything you share is equivalent to shouting from the top of the Empire State Building and claiming all of New York City as your audience.

Storify now has 1.2 million users visiting its site as of March, up 50% from the prior month. During March, Storify’s stories were read 14 million times across all sites, including those were the feeds were embedded. For comparison’s sake, Storify, which launched into public beta this time last year, was averaging 6.5 million monthly views as of last August.

As user trends continue to shift from search to discovery, creating the structure and process to support that discovery requires a sophisticated content strategy.

Instead of requiring users to categorize each board they create, however, Pinterest’s strategy is to involve other users. When someone comes across an uncategorized board, they’re asked to help by selecting one of the 32 categories from a dropdown.  So while Pinterest gives its user community a lot of free reign when it comes to naming and organizing content, this strategy is supported by well-placed guidance to help the community improve the quality and reliability of the content. Pinterest strikes a balance between flexibility and structure by involving users in enhancing site categorization while lowering the barrier to entry for users who would rather not spend their time categorizing.

Promoting older but still relevant content. Creating and promoting new content is important, but leading users to older content may also be part of your content strategy.

Marketing strategies will maintain their mediocre successes as long as we keep expecting engagement and loyalty from our customers without giving them the same consideration. However, by investing time and resources to develop great gobs of gorgeous content with compelling, interesting messages worth sharing, the scales will tip, the pendulum will swing. 

Make transmedia your best friend.  Get the most value out of investing in content by including multiple platforms and varied content around singular campaigns. During the planning phase, consider the different ways to connect to your audience and decide ahead of time to develop and integrate several of these platforms into your approach. Behind-the-scenes still shots at a video shoot can be published to Instagram, and money-saver tips used as website copy can be turned into a series of illustrated JPEGs and posted to Pinterest. Of course, it’s not necessary to always use every platform, but it is necessary to consider each platform.

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.

It's not all about being different; it's about being better.

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."

In his classic article, "Small Wins," psychologist Karl Weick argued that people often become overwhelmed and discouraged when faced with massive and complex problems. He advocated recasting larger problems into smaller, tractable challenges that produce visible results, and maintained that the strategy of "small wins" can often generate more action and more complete solutions to major problems because it enables people to make slow, steady progress.

Ever wonder why people will so often write down an item they've already completed on their to-do list? It's so that they can have the satisfaction of immediately crossing it off and experiencing the sense of progress.

Stretch goals have a dangerous tendency to foster unethical behavior. In the early 1990s, Sears gave a sales quota of $147 per hour to its auto repair staff. Faced with this target, the staff overcharged for work and performed unnecessary repairs. Sears' Chairman at the time, Ed Brennan, acknowledged that the stretch goal gave employees a powerful incentive to deceive customers.

Instagram manufactured a predictable response inside Yin’s brain. Her behavior was reshaped by a reinforcement loop which, through repeated conditioning, created a connection between the things she sees in world around her and the app inside her pocket. When a product is able to become tightly coupled with a thought, an emotion, or a pre-existing habit, it creates an “internal trigger.” Unlike external triggers, which are sensory stimuli, like a phone ringing or an ad online telling us to “click here now!,” you can’t see, touch, or hear an internal trigger. Internal triggers manifest automatically in the mind and creating them is the brass ring of consumer technology. We check Twitter when we feel boredom. We pull up Facebook when we’re lonesome. The impulse to use these services is cued by emotions.

o get users using, Instagram followed a product design pattern familiar among habit-forming technologies, the desire engine.

The minimalist interface all but removes the need to think. With a click, a photo is taken and all kinds of sensory and social rewards ensue. Each photo taken and shared further commits the user to the app. Subsequently, users change not only their behavior, but also their minds.

Get ready for a world where whether you land a particular job doesn't depend so much on what's written on your resume, or even on glowing references former employers, but instead, on information about you floating around the web.

Taking a look at a candidate's online activity, which will also include public Facebook and Twitter postings, can tell you how much passion a person has for the subject matters they'll be dealing with, Bounds says. It can also give clues about how well regarded the candidate is, based on who's following them.

Bounds says the information Path.To collects this way will only be "additive"--it will act as bonus points, as it were, underlining someone's fit for a particular position. The information, he says, will never be used to knock points off a candidate's score.

Although you’re able to see that the user came from Facebook or Twitter to your sweepstakes rules, wouldn’t it be nice to be able to identify which tweet or post from your social outlets generated the most quality clicks to that page?Google URL Builder allows you to do just that and it’s a great way to see which variation of a tweet or post harnessed the most quality clicks.

The keywords that visitors searched are usually captured in the case of search engine referrals. This is true for both organic and paid search. If the a visitor is signed in to a Google account, however, Keyword will have the value “(not provided)”.

attention is an emotion-driven phenomenon. If we want to get and hold an audience’s attention, we need to trigger the amygdala to our advantage. Only when we have an audience’s attention can we then move them to rational argument.

Follow the rule of threes. Have three main points. But no more than three main points; no more than three topics; no more than three examples per topic. Group thoughts in threes; words in threes; actions in threes.

"It's interesting. Do I want everything I read to be broadcasted? To be honest, I'm not sure I always do," Herman says. "Which is why, on Storify at least, I cancel it when it's not something I want to share." Should readers have to be on guard and take that extra step? And what's the upside of frictionless sharing? Why is this good for readers? "I mean, clearly it's more meaningful when someone decides to actively share something," Herman says. "It would be bad if a share from just happening to read something through Open Graph got the same weight as something that you actually shared."

Instead of a willful act of sharing, which says to your Facebook friends, "This matters to me," frictionless sharing is just a broadcast of your Internet habits. There's no benefit for you except as a kind of vain performance, and there's very little benefit to your friends, since the signal-to-noise ratio goes way up.

[Facebook is] doing some tweaking with the algorithm to make it less prominent," Herman says. "I guess they're realizing, you know, maybe these things aren't as engaging as they thought they would be."