By Jason Grill, on Fri Aug 30, 2013 at 10:00 AM ET In the last few years the words “content marketing” have become buzzwords in the corporate business, marketing, digital and media space. But what is it really? Content marketing as defined by the Content Marketing Institute (CMI):
Content marketing is a marketing technique of creating and distributing relevant and valuable content to attract, acquire and engage a clearly defined and understood target audience – with the objective of driving profitable customer action.
Content marketing is becoming the new black from both a quantity and quality standpoint for individuals throughout the world. Some have stumbled into this world. Businesses both large and small are realizing that in order to compete they must embrace this new era of interaction and develop true content marketing programs. Content marketing is becoming a disruptive force. In the past marketing pros have relied on production, publishing and promotional amplifications tools. Content is the fuel that makes all of those platforms run. However, a few blog posts or an email campaign won’t suffice anymore.
Relevant content coming from a business through a thought leadership perspective has proven to have such a valuable effect to attract and retain customers. It’s not hokey, it’s not a pitch and it’s not everyday sales, it truly has become almost an educational and informative way to deliver knowledge and content to build brand loyalty and awareness. A study by Roper Public Affairs shows that 80% of business decision makers prefer to get company information in article form rather than in an advertisement. Seventy percent say content marketing makes them feel closer to a company, while 60 percent say that company content helps them make better product decisions. “Content marketing works because it delivers relevant proof of value,” says interactive content marketing strategist Mark O’Renick. Quality content marketing will engage consumers to look at a business differently in many instances.
Many C-suite, advertising and marketing executives believe their company has great content to shoot out and share in the public arena, however they don’t feel they can do this quick enough or keep it moving through a streamlined process. Spreadsheets, emails and project management systems have all been used by marketing teams in recent times to churn out content on a routine basis. This has led to a whole new industry of technology solutions that make your typical marketing editorial calendar look like a thing of the stone age.
 A Kansas City, Missouri based startup, DivvyHQ, realized that content marketing is the present and the future of marketing. Their founders, both from the digital agency world, developed an ideation, planning and production workflow specialty tool to help businesses and online publishers embrace content marketing and collaboration, but in a manner that allows the user or users to do so in a more efficient way without all the headaches. Simply put, DivvyHQ aims to take content marketers out of spreadsheet, email, storage and organizational hell and alleviate the challenging manual and laborious process. Corporations such as Intel, Toyota, Bed Bath & Beyond, Walmart, Sprint, H & R Block, Travelocity and Adobe have all worked with DivvyHQ. PR and media giants Ogilvy, Edelman and the National Geographic Channel have also used the product to streamline their content needs.
“Despite the traditional publishing industry taking a beating over the last decade, companies can learn a lot from the day-to-day planning methods, scheduling tools and production processes that help publishers hit deadlines and crank out great content every day,” says content marketing expert Brody Dorland.
Companies and enterprise level organizations who handle multiple individuals and tasks are finding out they need a way to plan, divide and conquer their content marketing and editorial needs on the cloud. They have discovered they also need ways to break down the internal silos in the workplace. Some have used the old fashioned approach and tried breaking down physical walls in their office to get their employees and content producers to talk. There is an easier way. Virtual, real-time sharing and collaboration significantly improves these situations and breaks down silo walls.
Dorland believes, “Simplifying things and leveraging the cloud to help global, decentralized content teams collaborate, share assets and increase the quantity and quality of their content output is huge right now.”
The content marketing phenomenon isn’t going away. Content collaboration and team calendaring is on the upswing. The spreadsheet free editorial calendar is the new king of the castle. Companies both large and small are yearning and will continue to yearn for high-powered specific content marketing tools to help take their business to the next level.
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Jason Grill: Content Marketing is the New Black
By Erica and Matt Chua, on Mon Aug 26, 2013 at 1:30 PM ET Most days on the road we spent the majority of time trying to meet our basic physiological needs. Finding safe food, water and a place to sleep often took the entire day with no time to climb to higher levels of Maslow’s Pyramid. However, some countries made it easy. In Bolivia we had no problem finding a good meal, cheap- we headed to the markets.
Eating local fare is key to understanding a place’s culture and traditions. However, this doesn’t mean you have to dive headfirst into the most exotic dishes or sample something that is sure to make you sick- it just means broadening your horizons a little bit. Ask questions and have fun at the market. Remember this is the perfect opportunity to hang out with the locals.
The markets in Sucre, La Paz and Tarabuco are bustling, bright and spark your curiosity to explore further. They offer a wide variety of fresh and prepared foods at affordable prices along with textiles, juices and plenty of coca leaves. Rarely was I let down by meals at the market because I didn’t have to rely on a complicated game of charades to ask for what I wanted. I could point to the chicken and know that’s what would arrive on my plate.
Bolivian food is basic at best, but it’s hearty. The women that get up early every morning to create pot after pot of bubbling stew, steamed vegetables and heaps of pasta are proud of their food and often have a loyal following of regulars. I often would take a stroll around the tables to see what everyone was eating before I made my decision. I found I could trust the locals taste, so if they were all favoring the mystery stew that’s what I ordered too.
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Erica and Matt Chua: Bolivian Markets
By Saul Kaplan, on Mon Aug 26, 2013 at 8:30 AM ET Innovators leap across learning curves exploring new ways to deliver value the way Tarzan swung from vine to vine across the jungle. Innovators thrive on the steepest part of the learning curve where the changing rate of learning is the greatest. Watch how innovators manage their careers and lives. They always put themselves on a steep learning curve. I know I always have. Staying on a steep learning curve is the most important decision criterion for any career decision an innovator makes. Along the way innovators make many career moves none of which are primarily about titles, offices, number of direct reports, or money. Innovators believe those things are more likely to happen if they keep themselves on steep learning curves. Every choice to take a new tack or direction is about the next learning curve. Innovators are self aware enough to know they do their best work while learning at a rapid rate and are bored to tears when they aren’t. Steep learning curves matter most.
I have known many people who sacrificed learning curves for money and other extrinsic rewards and in the long run most ended up unhappy. In my experience innovators who follow their passions and are in it for the learning always end up happier and making more money anyway.
 The tricky part for innovators is to know when to leap from one learning curve to the next the way Tarzan traversed vines to move through the jungle. Innovators get restless when any curve starts to flatten out. Instead of enjoying the flat part of the curve where it takes less effort to produce more output, innovators get bored and want to find new learning curves where they can benefit from a rapidly changing rate of learning. If the goal for innovators is to get better faster the only way to accomplish it is to live on the edge where the knowledge flows are the richest. It isn’t the most comfortable place to be. It’s understandable most suffer the pain of the steep part of the learning curve, not for the kick of learning, but to finally reach the flat part of the curve. No urgency to move to another curve once the plateau is reached. It is comfortable on the flat part of the curve where the workload lessens and rewards are only available to those that have paid their dues and put in the time to climb up the curve. Yet innovators seem to extract what they need from the steep part of the curve and leap off to do it again moving on to the steep part of the next curve just when the effort required to further climb the current curve gets easier.
Innovators are less interested in climbing further up learning curves than jumping from curve to curve. They are like Tarzan (no loin cloth jokes please) traveling through the forest by jumping from vine to vine. Innovators learn from each curve and cross-pollinate other curves with their interdisciplinary experiences. Innovators are disruptive to those clinging to a single learning curve. Picture the disruption caused while hanging on to a vine for dear life when Tarzan gives his bone jarring animalistic jungle cry before jumping on and swinging across the jungle leaping to the next vine. That’s how disruption works. Ideas from each learning curve are combined and recombined to create new ways to deliver value and solve problems. Hanging around on a single curve as the rate of learning slows down is no way to get through the jungle. Innovators with the benefit of leaping across learning curves will enable disruption and get through the forest faster. Maybe an innovator’s jungle cry like Tarzan’s would help speed the innovation process.
By John Y. Brown III, on Wed Aug 21, 2013 at 12:00 PM ET  Click here to order Since I was recently part of a book on dealing effectively with crisis, this piece caught my attention.
AOL CEO brashly and brazenly fired an employee on a conference call last week. An audio of the firing was released to the internet embarrassing the CEO. He today apologized to everyone on the call (1000 employees) via email.
That is a start. But struck me as more of a CYA response than a genuine and heartfelt apology.
He may have had good reason for firing this individual. I don’t know. But if he truly wanted to apologize he should do so on the same (or more personal) medium where the behavior occurred. In this case, a conference call.
 An email is just slightly more personal than a text message.
Or classified ad making a declaration.
If Mr. Armstrong truly wanted to make a real apology that his employees could trust and use to reconsider their thoughts about last weeks’ inflammatory firing incident he could have dug a little deeper, been a little less public, and a little more personal than a blast email with a stock mea culpa.
Just my two cents.
By Jason Grill, on Tue Aug 20, 2013 at 1:30 PM ET From Missouri.com:
A few months ago, we announced that we were searching for the top 10 consultants across all industries. We are excited to announce that we’ve found the consultants who have actively utilized their expertise, leadership, and talent to build companies that achieve success by helping their clients reach — and exceed — their goals.
The “Top 10 Consultants” is a list of today’s leading consultants whose expertise spans from startups to big businesses across industries ranging from mobile to entertainment. They allow their passion to fuel their creativity and excitement, and their dedication to their industries makes each of the individuals some of the most sought-after experts in their respective fields.
1. Rameet Chawla: Founder of Fueled, an award-winning design and development company based in New York and London, Rameet Chawla is also the founder of the Fueled Collective, a co-working space comprised of over 25 startups in downtown Manhattan. Combining a decade of experience building Web and mobile applications with his innate sense of style, Chawla has created apps for a wide range of industry clients from high-end fashion brands to successful tech startups. Always up for a challenge, Chawla is passionate about building and being involved in disruptive technology ventures.
 2. George Cogan: Partner of Bain & Company’s Silicon Valley office and the head of Bain’s global technology practice, George Cogan has more than 12 years of management consulting experience. He has led major client relationships in strategy development and organization restructuring for numerous international corporations. His broad range of expertise focuses on technology-driven businesses, including semiconductor components, computer hardware, storage and other peripherals, several software segments, information services, and telecommunications. His functional expertise includes corporate and divisional strategy, marketing strategy, new product and new business development, sales force and channel effectiveness, customer loyalty, and organizational design.
 3. Joey Coleman: Joey Coleman is the chief experience composer at Design Symphony, a customer experience branding firm that specializes in creating unique, attention-grabbing customer experiences. He has been a lead consultant for clients that range from individual entrepreneurs, startups, and small businesses to non-profits, government entities, and Fortune 500 companies. For over a decade, Coleman has worked with clients that include NASA, Hyatt Hotels, and Zappos. Joey is a recognized expert in customer experience design, an award-winning speaker at national and international conferences, and has taught business and creativity courses at both the college and graduate school levels.
 4. Jason Fisher: Jason Zone Fisher has spent his entire life in the entertainment industry. At the age of 9, Jason landed the lead child role in the Cleveland Play House’s production of “Conversations with My Father.” After a number of other theatrical and film roles, Jason co-hosted two-time Emmy-nominated “Browns Blitz” on NBC. Moving forward with his passion, Jason went on to found his own production company: In-The-Zone Productions. He directed, wrote, and produced “Swing State,” his feature documentary film directorial debut. Jason’s experience in the entertainment industry has made him a sought-after consultant for major brands such as Gillette, Nestle’s Butterfinger, Esurance, Progressive, and Skype.
 5. Matthew Goldfarb: Matthew Goldfarb is a professional copywriter who has spent the past 12 years creating award-winning ad campaigns for some of the largest companies in the world. His experience spans conceptual and long-form copywriting to TV, print, interactive, and integrated copywriting. As founder and chief renegade officer, Goldfarb is now bringing his expertise toCorporate Renegade, a company that aims to make its small business owner and entrepreneur clients stand out.
 6. Michael Goldstein: Michael Goldstein is the founder of Exhilarator, a startup accelerator that helps consumer Internet startups get traction and funding. He has founded five businesses and sold three, including DealPal to XL Marketing in 2010 and Magazine-of-the-Month to Magazines.com in 2004. As a serial entrepreneur with 15 years of experience, Michael’s focus is on e-commerce, online content, and subscription businesses. He has a passion for growing startups, and he has been involved with multiple startup businesses as a consultant and mentor.
 7. Jason Grill: Television analyst for Fox 4 WDAF in Kansas City, a regular contributor to The Wall Street Journal Radio Network, and founder, producer, and host of the “Entrepreneur KC Show” on KMBZ Business Channel, Jason Grill is a true entrepreneur. He is a member of the advisory board of Neighbor.ly, SquareOffs, and the Partnership for Technology Innovation. Jason offers his consulting expertise in publications such as The Huffington Post, Politico, KC Business, Politix and The Recovering Politician. As an expert consultant, Jason has worked in the White House for a senior advisor to former Vice President Al Gore and an advisor to former President Bill Clinton.
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Jason Grill: Top Ten Consultants
By Saul Kaplan, on Mon Aug 19, 2013 at 8:30 AM ET Nooks and crannies are important to both English muffins and innovation.
I haven’t been able to get a picture of a lightly toasted Thomas’ English muffin with butter and strawberry preserves oozing into those marvelous nooks and crannies out of my head. Maybe it’s because I’m resisting the temptation while on one of my frequent short-lived diet and exercise delusions. More likely it’s because of a story that caught my eye last week about an executive who left the company (Bimbo Bakeries, I’m not kidding) that makes Thomas’ English Muffins to join the arch enemy, Hostess Brands. It seems that Bimbo is suing to prevent the executive from joining Hostess because they suspect he has absconded with and will divulge the secret of how to make English muffins with perfect nooks and crannies.
You heard right. The row is about protecting the trade secret for creating nooks and crannies in an English muffin. Bimbo claims there are only seven people who possess the trade secret and of course the executive leaving to make Twinkies is one of them. I find it hard to believe that only seven people have the know-how necessary to create great nooks and crannies. It sounds more like a marketing ploy. But what do I know. I thought it was just using a fork to split the muffin! Think about it. Samuel Bath Thomas left England headed for America in 1874 with a recipe for his muffin baked on hot griddles. Surely in over 135 years more than seven people have accumulated the know-how for nooks and crannies. And how are we to know if Samuel Thomas didn’t borrow the formula before heading for fame and fortune in America. Not to accuse Samuel Thomas of pilfering the recipe and starting an English muffin revolution but it does sound eerily similar to Samuel Slater escaping England with the trade secrets for the textile mill, which of course started the U.S. Industrial Revolution!
 No surprise that nooks and crannies are the secret to a great English muffin. Those air pockets allow for both perfect toasting and a natural repository for the aforementioned butter and jam. So Bimbo Bakery goes to incredible lengths to protect its know-how. Instead of recipes they use codebooks. Employees are on a need to know basis and only have access to the pages of the codebook necessary to complete their specific task. They are shielded from the information and people in departments working on other tasks. It doesn’t sound like a formula for innovation but then maybe Bimbo isn’t interested in innovation. Perhaps they are just obsessed with protecting the status quo for the nooks and crannies of English muffin making.
Nooks and crannies are also the secret to great innovation. Innovators thrive in nooks and crannies and refuse to stay in any silo barred from communicating across them. They know freely exploring nooks and crannies is the only way to get better faster. Nooks and crannies increase the surface area an innovator can expose to the best knowledge flows and new ideas. With more surface area comes greater exposure to and absorption of a broader range of ideas, experiences, and capabilities. A thoughtfully comprised network of unusual suspects increases an innovator’s surface area. Social media platforms are just nooks and crannies on steroids to an innovator.
Innovators also know that most important innovations emerge from the nooks and crannies between silos, disciplines, and industry sectors. It is by combining and recombining ideas and capabilities from across silos that innovators create new ways to deliver value. System solutions for the big social challenges of our time including education, health care, and energy, will only be found if we get more comfortable in the nooks and crannies between us. Pass the strawberry preserves.
By Jonathan Miller, on Fri Aug 16, 2013 at 10:00 AM ET
An excerpt from The RP’s latest column in The Daily Beast:
The right is right: President Obama is waging a War on Coal. But his fierce, regulatory-based offensive was an inevitable consequence of the GOP’s unrelenting war on the President and his climate policy. Unless the two sides sign a truce — and put meaningful energy into breakthrough cleaner coal technologies — not only will rural Appalachia be devastated in the crossfire, but our planet’s long term health will suffer.
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Nestled into the Appalachian hills, hollers, and hamlets of my old Kentucky home, you’ll find a largely poor but proud people, mostly united by a passion for God, Wildcat basketball and a simple black mineral that serves as the bedrock of the region’s sense of self. Thanks to more than a century’s worth of deep family connections to the mining vocation, as well as a brilliant decade-long public relations campaign waged by the industry, most Eastern Kentuckians share a profound emotional tie to the black rock, and a jaundiced resentment toward those outsider elites who want to deprive them of their geological birthright.
So, as the coal business suffers markedly — just last week, a study revealed that Kentucky coal jobs are at their lowest level since the state started counting in 1927 — most locals follow the lead of their political leadership and level their fury against President Obama’s “War on Coal.” And while the resurgence of cheap natural gas is the primary factor in Appalachian coal’s declining competitiveness, there’s no question that a significant threat to the economic viability of the region has been posed by the Obama EPA’s increased regulation of coal powered plants and mining projects (only one permit has been issued in the past three years for new or expanded surface mining in Eastern Kentucky).
The good news is that a middle ground can be reached that helps boost the region’s economy, while promoting energy independence and a healthier global environment: development of affordable, cutting-edge technologies that enable coal combustion with dramatically reduced greenhouse gas emissions. The challenge is that any broadbased employment of cleaner coal solutions will require both sides of the debate to reach for common ground. And that’s a daunting prospect given our hyper-partisan, polarized system.
Click here to read “How to End the War on Coal”
By Artur Davis, on Thu Aug 15, 2013 at 1:30 PM ET Yes, it is possible for Republicans to craft an appeal that is friendly to blue collar, downscale whites that does not amount to warmed over race-baiting. From this blog to thoughtful conservatives like Reihan Salam and Ross Douthat, the point has been made repeatedly that a pro working class message actually ought to bolster Republicans with blacks and Latinos, and that a renewed emphasis on upward mobility should resonate with whites as well as minorities caught in the tow of economic anxiety.
But to be fair about it, there is also a version of a white working class pitch that does looks pretty much exactly like thinly disguised backlash politics. It plays out when the argument against immigration reform transitions to warnings about alien cultures convoluting our national identity; when the GOP’s most conspicuous discretionary spending cuts would be food stamps; when virtually every complaint of racial discrimination is dismissed as professional activism or “divisiveness”; and when the outrage over government assistance seems most strident when the recipients are perceived (often wrongly) to be black or brown.
Therein, another dilemma for Republicans during this period of reevaluation: any serious strategy requires Republicans to go well beyond drop-bys on black radio stations or college campuses, or ratcheting up the ad budget for black publications, to the heavier lift of separating conservatism from its excesses. Outreach that moves voting numbers must consist of a conservative vision more interested in closing gaps and inequality than in widening those divisions.
In practical terms, that does not mean that Republicans abandon skepticism over programs that maximize their enrollment without making any dent in poverty or need. Certainly, it does not mean that Republicans ought to accept a stacked deck in which opposition to liberal priorities is conceded as turning back the clock of progress. But it should not be implausible for the conservative movement to get more comfortable denouncing its outliers, like Georgia’s anti-immigration provocateur, DA King, who is doing a pitch perfect imitation of a Latino baiting xenophobe even if he somehow isn’t one (because of his wealth and propensity for lavishing money attacking opponents, a riskier, therefore, more meaningful move than the distancing that happens every so many months from a character like Iowa’s immigrant bashing Rep. Steve King).
 Nor should it be so difficult for Republicans to start pairing controversial, but defensible stances with sensitivity toward certain minority fears. For example, enthusiasm for voter ID needs to be balanced with support for restoring rights for at least some released felons, namely non-violent ones who are reconnecting with their communities and showing a commitment to function as law abiding citizens. Rather than denigrating food stamps across the board, congressional Republicans ought to shift their aim toward entirely legitimate reform—like restructuring the earned income tax credit into a monthly draw that might, for low wage workers, replace food stamps—and the occasional misuse of nutrition assistance shouldn’t sound more morally offensive to conservatives than the payment of over a billion dollars in farm subsidies to landowners who have not planted a crop since the turn of the century.
And this is a point worth dwelling on for Republicans: it is not that the conservative agenda per se alienates minority voters, but that the impetus behind that agenda can seem so devoid of compassion and so distrustful of the vulnerable. And in the same vein, an electoral appeal intended to shore up Republicans with working class voters need not contribute to racial polarization, not unless it appears that the only low wage Americans who move the right are the ones who are white.
By John Y. Brown III, on Mon Aug 12, 2013 at 12:00 PM ET
Question: Is it possible for a 4000 pound vehicle to vanish?
Answer: Yes. But it costs $124 to make it come back.
Today in Lexington I had lunch with a client and when I returned to my car in the parking lot it wasn’t a matter of not remembering the slot I parked or seeing my car after it had been dented by another driver and left without any explanation. It was a matter of just not being ther…e at all. Poof!
I got a sinking feeling in my stomach. My usual defense mechanism for when I feel frustration, disappointment or anger coming on is to make a wisecrack to distract form the tension.
I went inside and asked for the towing company and called:
Me: “Do you have a Maroon Honda Accord?”
Operator at towing service: “Yes. We are on Manchester Lane and you can pick it up.”
Me: “How much is it to pick up?”
Operator at towing service: “$124”
Me: “Geez. You are kidding me?”
Operator at towing service: “No. I’m not”
Me: For $248 could you tow it back to where you picked it up? I don’t have a car to get to you.”
Operator at towing service: “No. We have to see a picture ID and proof of ownership before we can move the car.”
Later while paying my towing fee I asked the clerk if they had a punch card that offered a gift or prize after the 5th or 10th tow….like a car air freshener.
Clerk at towing service: No. Please sign here”
I then looked proudly at my car who was sitting there so unassuming and out of place. I wanted to ask the clerk if my car had behaved better than the other towed cars. But didn’t. I knew the feeble attempt at humor wouldn’t have been received well.
And yet I was proud of my car. it looked cleaner and not like an automotive miscreant like many of the others. “C’mon,” I said. “Let’s get you out of here. You don’t belong in this place. I’ve sprung you.”
And I grinned to myself. Which just goes to show you if you do somethign stupid and try to deflect attention from it by making other people laugh and that doesn’t work. You still have yourself to laugh at yourself. It works. And sounds so silly trying to explain it will help you laugh even louder at yourself until you no longer are mad at yourself.
Of course it helps if you have your same sense of humor. ; )
By Saul Kaplan, on Mon Aug 12, 2013 at 8:30 AM ET Magic happens in the interstitial space between silos, disciplines, organizations, and sectors. The word interstitial comes from the Latin “interstitium” which was derived from “inter” meaning “between” and “sistere” meaning “to stand” therefore to stand between. Optimum learning, innovation, problem solving, and value creation happens when we stand between.
To fully realize the potential of the 21st century we must get more comfortable and better at standing between. The imperative is to go from interdisciplinary to trans-disciplinary. Only by celebrating the interstitial space between us will we invent new disciplines and system approaches to enable transformation in our important social systems including education, health care, energy, and entrepreneurship.
And yet we spend most of our time in silos. It is comfortable there. We know the language spoken. We know what is expected and our roles. We know the people who inhabit our silos. There are clear rules dictating our behavior within silos and even clearer rules if we dare to dip our toes into the interstitial space outside of well-marked boundaries. Incentives, performance reviews, and job ladders all reinforce insularity. While technology screams permeability, organization infrastructure and operating norms lean against it. Standing in between anything is often considered a career-limiting move.
Most organizations aren’t 21st century ready. Industrial era structures with hierarchical reporting relationships designed around functions will inevitably give way to networked operating models fluidly connecting capabilities both within and outside the organization. Enabling infrastructure and operating norms will celebrate and reinforce interstitial spaces. Standing between disciplines will become the norm rather than the exception. The enabling technology is already here. We don’t need to invent anything new. It isn’t technology that is getting in our way. It is humans and the organizations we live in that are both stubbornly resistant to change and hesitant to fully explore interstitial spaces. Organizations will either transform themselves to capitalize on the value in interstitial spaces or they will be disrupted in the market by others that do. And for those leaders who think they can wait it out. You can’t, the transition has already started and its pace is quickening. Just ask the youngest in your organization. Waiting is not a strategy and will fail.
 It is easy to see the potential from enabling random collisions of unusual suspects. Just check out any social media platform. Social media is a hotspot for random collisions. You don’t need to hang out in these virtual places long to know they are populated with very unusual suspects. Interstitial spaces are ubiquitous and magic happens every day. We can bring this magic into our organizations, meetings, and gatherings. We just have to resist the normal tendency to hang out with the usual suspects. Most of the conferences and meetings we go to are teeming with usual suspects who love to get together to admire the problem. We sure do love to admire problems. Solution discussions are narrow and tend to shop around old solutions that have been discussed forever. If you want new ideas, approaches, and solutions go to gatherings that you have absolutely no reason to attend other than you might learn something new or meet somebody with a different perspective and experience. Make it a personal goal to attend gatherings where you don’t know the people or subject matter. Or better yet go to gatherings that are designed to bring unusual suspects together and to enable random collisions.
We are only two weeks away from our annual Collaborative Innovation Summit, BIF-6 on September 15-16. The energy at BIF in the weeks leading up to the summit is at dangerous levels. I am like a kid in a candy store and grateful that the summit is sold out again this year. Like-minded innovation junkies immerse themselves among unusual suspects. We design to optimize the interstitial space in between an incredible line-up of innovation storytellers. The event is not about the stories that will be shared from the stage although they will be great. (Stories will be live streamed during the event and videos posted a few weeks later on our site for those interested). The real magic happens in between stories at extended breaks where all participants and those following the conversation in the social media world collide. It isn’t about the storytellers, it is about random collisions in the interstitial spaces that happen every year among the participants and those connected to the conversation. I can’t wait.
The goal is to get better faster. If you want to get better faster hang out in interstitial spaces. Don’t just dip your toes into interstitial spaces but jump in with all the passion you can ignite. Magic happens in the interstitial space between us.
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The Recovering Politician Bookstore
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A Kansas City, Missouri based startup, DivvyHQ, realized that content marketing is the present and the future of marketing. Their founders, both from the digital agency world, developed an ideation, planning and production workflow specialty tool to help businesses and online publishers embrace content marketing and collaboration, but in a manner that allows the user or users to do so in a more efficient way without all the headaches. Simply put, DivvyHQ aims to take content marketers out of spreadsheet, email, storage and organizational hell and alleviate the challenging manual and laborious process. Corporations such as Intel, Toyota, Bed Bath & Beyond, Walmart, Sprint, H & R Block, Travelocity and Adobe have all worked with DivvyHQ. PR and media giants Ogilvy, Edelman and the National Geographic Channel have also used the product to streamline their content needs.
