tips in 10: idea generation
TRANSCRIPT
Heart Internet’s Tips in Ten
Idea GenerationYou’re just ten slides away from brainstorming
better ideas quickly and easily.
Timing is everything
• Time management doesn’t improve efficiency; focus management does.
• If you’re not interested, you won’t succeed.
• Forcing ideas doesn’t work: you need a starting point to avoid wasting time.
• Give yourself enough time for what you want to do, or it will show.
Online sources of ideas
• Has to be something you’re genuinely interested in to produce a good result.
• Incorporate with social media (searches, trending topics, popularity) so ideas are brought to you.
• Play with existing content in experimental ways, e.g. reduce a blog post to a single tweet, turn a video into an infographic, and so on to get a feel of how ideas can branch out or be simplified.
Offline sources of ideas
• Get off the web – books, films, magazines.
• Get out of a rut – take some photos, go to an art gallery, visit somewhere new.
• Get out of your comfort zone – find out more about a topic you’re not familiar with (e.g. typography, hardware).
• Get into other industries, particularly creative ones.
Brainstorming ideas
• Have clear aims and objectives.
• Start with the intended audience rather than the topic (psychographic profiling).
• Create a list of broad topics, segments and hooks to break down further.
• Keep a list of great headlines/post titles for inspiration & reworking.
Brainstorming through visuals• Pick an image representing a strong
emotion/theme.
• Use mind drifts, associations, or pair up with a practical concept/specific audience.
• Note ideas/pairings that you don’t use this time.
• Can be adapted for pop culture.
Ideas through problem-solving• Find a good, representative source of your target
audience.
• Identify their problems and use them to spark ideas.
• Perfect for helping your visitors identify with you and creating search engine friendly content based around questions/topics they’re interested in.
Child ideas
• Once you have one good idea, adapt it:
Make a series/follow-up
Change the segment
Change the hook
Change the experience level
Change the platform
Change the medium
Analysing good existing ideas• What makes it good?
• Who is it aimed at?
• How is it beneficial to the brand?
• How could it be beneficial for your company?
Using existing ideas
• No idea is original.
• How could the existing version be better?
• How would you have done it differently?
• How could the idea be adapted (different audience, season, medium, etc.)?
• How could your company do it?
Organising ideas
• Keep organised notes of articles, campaigns etc. and highlight what’s interesting/why you picked it out.
• Organise by type where you can – e.g. ‘social media contest inspiration’
• Private Pinterest boards with comments are perfect for visual media. Project management tools such as Trello are better for text.