Gotcha! 3 ways to keep great ideas from evaporating

Corporations are increasingly learning how to use social media to add value and build layers of new, shared knowledge. But the key to social media success is being able to capture fragmented knowledge and learn from it.

A recently published e-book from Dow Jones, The Conversational Corporation, studies how some companies have created cultures of collective knowledge — and built infrastructures to support them.

“A company using not just blogs and wikis, but also virtual words, text messaging, Twitter and face-to-face events would be stronger and convert more content more quickly in ways that would return greater results to the company and its ecosystem,” the report says. “The more knowledge that comes in from multiple points to the main body, the healthier the entity becomes and the faster it grows.”

The concept of driving discussions and stirring up new ideas is an attractive one — but the real challenge, the report’s authors propose, is the ability to actually capture these thousands of thought bubbles and turn them into something that can be reused.

Anyone who has ever tried to be the gatekeeper for ideas — the person responsible for a company’s info@ mailbox, for example — knows the impossibility of identifying gems and then actually figuring out how to do something with them. Companies who are starting to capture knowledge successfully are instead doing it by propagating a true shift in the way people communicate and mine information:

Integration of social media efforts
Publicly available Web 2.0 tools are all offered on separate platforms, which can cause a company’s social media efforts to be scattered, disconnected and difficult to wrangle. The report touts Sun Microsystems’ SunSpace as one way a company can prosper from collective knowledge. “Our main objective was to consolidate technical Web venues and knowledge repositories into a single, integrated Web 2.0 experience,” says Sun CEO Peter Reiser.

The key to success was a standardized, corporate-wide taxonomy system that tags all content appearing on any of Sun’s Web 2.0 platforms, allowing the company to harness and learn from content on specific topics long after a comment, post, or link has blipped onto the radar.

Communal conversation, rather than one-to-one dialog
In other words: email bad, wikis and collaborative workspaces good. The report cautions against working in silos, trading documents back and forth by email when working with colleagues on a project.

“If I send one email to four colleagues, I’ve just created four unique instances of information exchange that are beyond the reach of the enterprise at large,” the authors say. “Worse, any files attached to my email may be subject to as many as four different versions. The alternative is a collaborative workspace in which multiple participants can work together on one document that’s preserved as one standard.” The final outcome is also easier to publish and share with others who can learn from it if created in a public space.

A culture of living out loud
Give people a way to discuss ideas, offer feedback, and share experiences, and there’s no limit on the rich knowledge that can be nurtured, the report suggests. Comments areas on blogs, discussion forums, and ways for people to share links and blogrolls not only promote shared knowledge but fuel a culture where employees and customers feel like they are encouraged to make a genuine contribution to the overall direction of the company.

The creative brief: when it’s good, it’s good

Did you hear the one about the ad agency that wrote a 27-page creative brief for the rebranding of a major beverage brand that was so pretentious, self-indulgent, and ludicrously aspirational it had everyone in the ad business rolling in the aisles?

The story has been hard to miss since someone leaked the “Breathtaking Design Strategy” document drafted by the Arnell Group, the branding agency charged with rethinking the Pepsi logo last year, onto the Internet in March. The creative brief waxed poetic about Vitruvian principles, the Golden Ratio, and magnetic dynamics, resulting in a dense tome that reads more like the notebook scrawls of a mad professor than a project roadmap for a rebrand.

Since getting their mitts on the brief, industry-watchers have been hooting and cawing non-stop about the silliness, especially in light of the several hundred million dollars Pepsi ultimately spent with Arnell to develop what many critics say is, at best, a pretty generic new logo, and at worst, a rip-off of the Obama campaign. Gawker for one can’t let it go: “Breathtaking bullshit,” they called the exercise.

The saddest fallout of the leak and the ensuing brouhaha, in my mind, is that it has made a mockery out of the creative brief as an essential part of communications projects. Steve Hall wrote on AdRants: “We’re not defending the document’s overblown inanity but pick up any creative brief or major rebranding document you’ve ever written and read it. Then multiply the idiocy you just read by about 100 and it makes perfect sense, given the size of the Pepsi account, the Arnell/Pepsi document is as hilariously verbose and mind-boggling as it is.”

Maybe for some agencies the creative brief is yet another vehicle to prove to the client how smart they are. But it doesn’t have to be that way. The creative brief is the guiding light of a communications project: a brief (there is a reason for the document’s name), flexible framework for the creative to be developed. It’s also a way for everyone involved to agree on objectives and direction, keeping clients and creatives alike on the right path and in check if anyone begins to lose sight of the overall vision of the project.

To me, a creative brief is successful when it:

• Provides clear direction – without trying to solve the creative problem. I like starting with a brief because it’s a chance for everyone to agree on what we’re setting out to achieve. Which is important. Often you can talk and talk about a problem and the solution, but when the work is finished it’s clear that there was a lack of mutual understanding about what was really needed. The brief is a chance to clearly define parameters and direction; the actual creative concepts are the next step in the process.
• Is specific. Too many times I’ve seen creative briefs that seem to generically outline a project approach. These are typically fill-in-the-blank kinds of forms that aim to answer the same questions for any kind of project. But every client, industry, project and audience is different. I like to write each creative brief from scratch, thinking about what exactly we need to answer as we define the project.
• Is succinct and targeted. There is real beauty in the ability to boil down into just the right amount of perfectly chosen words a project’s objectives and key messages. Really, there’s only so much you can communicate even in the most complex campaign. If you can get to the heart of what you are trying to say in the brief, it will be easy to deliver creative concepts that hit the target.
• Makes the client say, “That’s it!” After the initial intake meetings and discussions, the sending of PowerPoint decks and past collateral and forwarded emails, there is often so much information floating around it’s hard to know where to start — and most likely the client is feeling frazzled and confused. A creative brief takes all background information into consideration but provides real clarity of purpose, cutting through the clutter to play back to the client what the project is truly all about. I’m always excited to start a project when a client receives the creative brief and replies, “That’s exactly what I want to communicate!” Even more exciting is when the client interacts with the document, adding or revising key points — because the more engaged stakeholders in charting the course for the project, the more successful the project will be.

So if someone delivers you a creative brief as you begin your next communications project, resist the urge to roll your eyes or be skeptical. A well-done creative brief can make the difference in the successful and satisfying outcome of your brand communications.

What makes creative win awards?

With the announcement of the OBIE Awards, the annual awards from the Outdoor Advertising Association of America, came a brief interview in Adweek with this year’s chief judge, Mark Tutssel at Leo Burnett. Tutssel summed up quite succinctly for readers the three criteria that deemed an advertising campaign an award-winning work of art:

1. “The work has to surprise and delight.”
2. “It has to bear repeated viewing.”
3. “It has to be rewarding each time you look at it.”

I liked this 1-2-3 of successful creative, because I think it sums up the formula of all successful communications. A B2B product brochure may not “surprise and delight” the same way that McDonald’s “Fresh Eggs” billboards (the winner of this year’s OBIEs) do — making people laugh or intriguing them to watch the mechanical egg “crack” each day at dawn.

Yet each communication, whether it’s a Web site, a brochure or an email campaign, has the potential to engage audiences in the same way: with a new way to talk about an old problem, a fresh approach that makes people sit up and engage, and rich content that draws in audiences and keeps them coming back for more.

The Adweek article is a reminder that we should never fall into a rut. No matter what you’re working on, always aim for top honors.

When content strays far from the nest

A few weeks ago my favorite usability guru issued an Alertbox reminding communicators of the importance of always maintaining context when writing Web content:

Writing for the Web differs because various users might approach a given piece of content in different ways … In some of these scenarios, users see only a small portion of the content displayed out of context. They might, for example, see only a headline, or perhaps a headline, summary, and a thumbnail photo.

This concept recently demonstrated itself in my own life when I signed up for InstaPaper. I have probably 200 different publications and blogs that I really like to read regularly, but unfortunately my days are so crammed with client deadlines that taking the time to peruse a long and thoughtful article or blog entry about a topic I’m interested in is a pure luxury. I’ve used Bloglines for years to manage RSS feeds for all the blogs, but unfortunately I’m guilty of letting my Bloglines feeds fill up and remain unread (it’s not unusual for some of the more prolific ones, like Boing Boing and TechCrunch, to hit the max of 200 feeds and stay there for weeks).

My husband recently introduced me to InstaPaper. It’s similar to delicious in the way that you can capture articles to read later, which was always my second step after finding an article I wanted to read in more depth in my RSS feeds. With InstaPaper, though, once you grab the article, you can instantly load it into an iPhone app, where the entire article appears and can be read offline at anytime.

So just to review:

An article about, say, electronic medical records that I want to read on The New York Times‘ Web site, would be carefully presented when it appears on its primary site. A catchy blurb and thumbnail on the site’s home page would draw in readers. An intelligently written headline and subhead, along with callouts, might entice readers to read further. Design-wise, photographs are strategically placed, along with captions, to help guide the eye. The entire article appears in the selected NYT online typeface. Ads appear as they are intended, to draw readers interested in similar topics but to avoid being so intrusive as to annoy readers. Related articles of interest are listed to the side so readers can easily jump to other places they’d like to explore. The experience is carefully controlled.

Then: I pull the article into Bloglines. The original headline and a blurb from the article (sometimes just the first few lines or paragraph) are the only things working to encourage me to read further. Photos may appear, but it’s often hard to predict where they’ll show up, and captions don’t always come with them.

I click the headline to be taken to the NYT site, where I can definitely dive in to the article in its original intended form — except I don’t have time to read it right now. Later. Mañana. I click my “Read Later” InstaPaper bookmark button on my browser toolbar and InstaPaper captures the article. Later, while waiting in line at the bank, I fire up my iPhone, refresh my InstaPaper app, and I see this:

The mobile version of InstaPaper articles take you back to the Web circa 1995 — all text, blue links, the most basic of HTML. You don’t see images, you see image ALT tags (so don’t forget how important those ALT tags can be!). Banner ads that flow with the text on the original site show up as ALT tag text in the middle of an article, sometimes disruptively. And only some of the supporting text shows up; captions, related articles, subheads, callouts and other elements often get lost in translation.

It makes me think about how we can often be dismissive of the need to “design for mobile,” especially these days when devices such as the iPhone have Web browsers that typically present sites the way they were originally intended. But the more important thing is that it’s important to always keep in mind that readers may be seeing your content in many different ways — and that it may change hands, and formats, many times between its original posting and a reader’s experience with it.

Is social media the platform for solving healthcare’s problems?

The past several days I’ve seen a few interesting developments and discussions on the potential of social media for a more enlightened, and even productive, healthcare provider community.

One is The Bedside Trust, a sort of thinktank of healthcare executives and providers that has set up shop as a social network on the SocialCast platform. The idea behind it is to build a community of healthcare leaders who can work together collaboratively to create change in healthcare, participating in discussions and sharing ideas to “solve the healthcare crisis” as colleagues. The site is brand new and so far pretty sparsely populated — it’s also unrestricted and free for anyone to join, and it will be curious to see if that continues to be true — but so far the topics being floated by community members range from how healthcare organizations can better engage their physicians to how physicians and nurses can overcome historical tensions and work together more collaboratively.

While the idea of online communities for clinical leaders and healthcare executives is certainly not new, this seems to be a different approach: a true social networking platform where members establish profiles (rather than posting anonymously or hidden behind a handle), connect with others in the same geographic region or with the same professional title, and begin conversations within their established networks. It’s going to be interesting to watch how this community grows, and what kinds of offlines implications and influence it will start to have as it does.

In the meantime, Phil Bauman, an RN and author of a blog about “health 2.0,” writes about the 140 Health Care Uses for Twitter. His premise is that “micro-sharing” is the ideal platform for healthcare — presumably because it’s a brief, fast, easy-to-use way to communicate directly to a targeted group of people when moments count. His list of potential uses includes everything from emergency response team management and tissue donation recruitment to glucose tracking for diabetes patients and live-tweeting surgeries for educational purposes (something that’s already being done today).

Bauman raises the natural objections and obstacles to social media as a platform for the medical world: namely, the concerns about privacy and HIPAA compliance, violations of professional oaths and possible litigation. For these very reasons, the “letting it all hang out” nature of social media will cause the industry to move with extreme caution before adopting such channels as a standard way to communicate. Bauman acknowledges that while the concerns are very real, solving healthcare’s overwhelming problems may involve thinking creatively, and finding a way to steer around the roadblocks:

I want to focus on the possibilities because once we see the potential, we may have stonger motivations to deal intelligently with the constraints. So when reading this list, don’t get hung up on the details, the fears, the anxieties that may be provoked by the realities of health care as it is practiced today. It’s the 21st Century: let’s be imaginative, determined and innovative. Let’s be remarkable.

You’ll never know unless you try

The visionary Guy Kawasaki guest-blogged on innovation over at Sun Microsystems’ site last year. In his final post on the site, he offered a piece of advice that has continued to resonate with me, and in a way has become the little mantra that I whisper to myself as I work each day. His simplistic recommendation? Try stuff.

This was one of five lessons Guy says he’s learned as an entrepreneur, and all the lessons were good. But I particularly like this one, especially when it comes to the way we communicate.

Often, companies suffer from one of two problems in their brand communications:

• They lose sight of what they’re trying to achieve, and fall into comfortable patterns — or even bad habits. They forget what the audience cares about. They forget that their customers are people. And they forget what their company stands for, the overall journey of which they are part and their role in moving the company ahead in that journey. Or:
• They get so caught up in strategy that they become paralyzed. It’s impossible for them to move forward, and when they do, their communications become the equivalent of the legislative bills that grow more bloated and corrupted as they move through the legislative process, losing the purity of their intentions as more people tack on their own special interests. To paraphrase my former boss: when a committee of marketing people came together to design the horse, they instead ended up with the camel.

Whatever the situation, it’s easy to get stuck, and to stay within the boundaries of the familiar and proven because it’s easier, safer or because it’s working. But to Guy’s point: change happens when people take risks and try new stuff. “Luck favors the people who try stuff, not simply think and analyze,” he writes.

How do you know if what is working today always will — or that something won’t work better? Keep throwing “stuff” into the water to see what floats. Whether your stuff be new or borrowed or reinvented, it serves one important purpose in that it keeps you on your toes: it opens your eyes to new possibilities, keeps you attune to what’s going on around you, and helps you clarify your purpose as you think about it again and again from different perspectives. And however you look at it, that’s good stuff.

9 for ’09: brand communications hypotheses for the new year

Every marketing expert with a blog and a pulse has already released a “predictions” list for 2009 — they’ve become as ubiquitous as the end-of-year best-of albums and Oscar favorites. Neither a soothsayer nor a guru, I won’t endeavor to predict the future. But I can make some educated guesses, based on a lot of reading, trendwatching, and some old-fashioned history-repeats-itself wisdom. Here is my contribution to the blogosphere’s 2009 list-fest: nine hunches about where brand communications are heading in the next 12 months.

1.  Brands will go back to basics.
In these tenuous times, we’ll see brands seeking solace in the stuff that has always worked for them. They’ll put more emphasis on their cornerstone products and simplify their messaging to promote the core values that made them successful in the first place. An Interbrand study published during the last economic downturn in 2001 promoted companies’ need to separate the wheat from the chaff: carefully evaluating and eliminating all unnecessary product brands, subbrands or program brands, so companies can instead focus money and energy on building out the brands with the strongest customer loyalty and capitalizing on their potential.

2.  Communicators will seek non-traditional channels that work harder for them.
With business on the edge of its seat wondering when the next economic hit is going to come, marketers are quickly finding themselves with more constrained budgets. Print advertising is out; for some companies, print anything is out for the time being. Discovering marketing and communications efforts that work harder and go farther for less money is key. One example is the diamond company Hearts on Fire, which launched a viral Internet campaign à la last season’s dancing elves, distancing itself from the conservative advertising and promotional campaigns traditionally favored by the jewelry industry.

3. Hope will prevail.
Americans responded overwhelmingly to a strong, clear message of hope, change and unity in the November presidential election, and I can’t remember the last time spirits were so high after that message – and its evangelist, Barack Obama – won out over negativity and complacency. The collective mood quickly plummeted in the following weeks with all the disheartening news about unemployment, dismal retail sales, and war in the Middle East. But I suspect that as the Obama administration takes office and change starts becoming a reality, communicators will piggyback on that mood and message of optimism and hope. Pepsi, for one, is counting on it in its 2009 “Optimism Project.”

4. Audiences will start to tune out.
We have reached a fever pitch in the amount of information and stimuli any one individual can process in a given moment. Especially given that so much of the content coming our way right now leans toward the negative and unproductive, I believe people will begin to be more selective in the amount of information they choose to encounter and engage with. More productivity and business thought leaders – including the king of simplicity, Jakob Nielsen – are advocating the shunning of habitual email, IM, RSS readers, Twitter and other compulsions that fragment attention and interrupt our flow. If the backlash happens, communicators will be under more pressure to truly break through the clutter by providing information that customers consider vital to their business success (in the case of B2B) or lives (B2C).

5. The social media shakeout will begin.
In the mid to late 1990s, everybody talked about how Web sites, to be relevant, had to have a online community – which at the time meant a bulletin board and a chatroom with hosted live chats. Yet few companies could actually figure out how to build an online community where people would actually congregate. It was the “If you build it will they come?” question. Over the years those tools have naturally found their niches – for example, bulletin boards are perfect tools for software companies whose community of users can provide free tech support to one another, or provide organic feedback that helps the company evolve the product.

Now, everybody says we all need to be on Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, etc. Yesterday, I attend a lunch meeting of the Independent Communicators Roundtable, a group of highly accomplished, educated and creative writers, brand and PR consultants and other entrepreneurs. Everybody at the table of about 12 people shared the same frustration: we’re not quite sure what to do with Twitter. We know we’re supposed to be “joining the conversation,” but what exactly does that mean? I personally have followed countless writers, communicators, business consultants and big thinkers, and mostly I have been bombarded by Tweets about bad colds and snowstorms. Rarely do I see a Tweet from a stranger that makes me want to jump in and start talking.

Point being: much of this social media hype is putting the solution before the problem, or the platform before the business need. If a company still doesn’t know whether it should be blogging after several years of talking about it, the answer is probably “no.” We will begin to watch social media tools shake out and serve legitimate business purposes to support true brand communications objectives. But I suspect we’ll see a lot less advice about how your company simply must join the fray.

6. On the other hand … social media will continue to influence brands.
And now I am going to contradict everything I just said in #5 – sort of – with the assertion that “the conversation” taking place on social media platforms will begin to have more influence on companies and their brands in 2009. The Motrin vs. Twitter Moms debacle in November was one of the first examples of how a powerful community of consumers using Twitter could blacken the eye of a stalwart brand in a matter of hours. Motrin manufacturer McNeil Consumer Healthcare recovered impressively, picking up on the wildfire quickly and falling over itself to claim mea culpa and make up for its mistakes.

My first question after it all happened: will this make McNeil, and other corporations, more aware of the need to build a real relationship with their consumers, rather than assuming they know who their customers are and what they need? When companies discover that they indeed need a little bonding time with their consumers, using social media to grow that relationship organically (instead of forcing it through false camaraderie) is indeed the legitimate business need that I talk about in the previous point.

7. Customers will begin to drive the message.
In the healthcare space where I do a lot of my work, we talk a lot about the emergence of consumer-directed healthcare. So much information (much of it credible) is now immediately available and so many communities of people are able to share experiences and recommendations that the patient is – possibly for the first time ever – in control. And that is becoming true for all industries and groups of customers. The means are in place for customers to ask directly for what they want from a company and a product. If the company doesn’t, or can’t, comply, customers can and will go elsewhere. Finding a way to “hear” customers and being agile enough to respond to what they’re saying is going to become an essential part of doing business.

8. Companies will continue to talk more narrowly to target audiences.
From a business perspective, being everything to everybody can be (depending on your business) a good position. From a brand perspective, it doesn’t really work. Audiences have a hard time taking a sweeping message about comprehensiveness and boiling it down to answer the biggest pressing question they have: “What can this company do for me and me alone?” More companies are beginning to target their brand positioning to more narrowly defined groups of customers. Read this case study about SeaPak, a frozen shrimp company that identified two very different consumer profiles – the “live-to-cook” shoppers and the “cook-to-live” shoppers – and positioned its brand differently for each group.

9. Language will continue to disintegrate in the name of pop culture.

The image speaks for itself. (Thanks to Melissa Klug for the secret shopper photo!) Whether the infiltration of SMS abbreviations and colloquialisms in our written language is a good thing or a bad thing I leave up for debate – but let’s just say I bet a certain journalism school professor of mine is feeling pretty crabby about this continuing trend.

What’s the big idea? 6 strategies for high-concept marketing writing

One of my recent projects was a 12-page technology white paper. There were several challenges with this project. The white paper was about a product that is truly unique in its space, so getting potential customers to wrap their minds around how it works and why it’s valuable wasn’t easy to begin with. In the course of trying to figure out how to explain, position and market the product, the client had researched countless possible angles.

So after my initial input session, my client sent a ton of materials to help initiate me. And I mean a ton. In three days after the project kicked off, I received 51 different emails with articles, decks, quotes, notes, clippings, ideas, graphs and other food for thought, providing me exhaustive opportunities to help shape the story of this product in my white paper.

I read all of it. Then I had to write the bloody thing.

Needless to say, I was paralyzed. With so much information to sift through, and so many different ideas that I needed to be able to incorporate in my writing, where in the world would I even start?

I believe that businesspeople hate writing for this very reason. We always begin knowing what we need to achieve when communicating a complex concept, but as soon as we start trying to write we get bogged down. It’s too easy to burrow too deeply down the wrong hole, to get caught up in niggling details, to veer off track and forget the point of what we were trying to explain in the first place.

Especially when we’re under pressure to communicate something that’s high-concept, it’s easy to lose hold of the big idea. So that when we’ve finished the first draft, our concept is no longer cohesive — or even coherent.

When wrangling with a complex writing project, follow these suggestions for getting to the heart of your big idea, and keeping it alive throughout your writing:

1. Do all your research first. I like to spend a lot of upfront time gathering as much information as I can about my topic. Then I sit down and read it all. I usually make notes and even draft a rough outline as main concepts emerge from my reading, but mostly I’m just absorbing.
2. Now, close your books. Writing is a lot like public speaking. You’re best at it when you really know your topic, deep in your heart. At this point you’ve done enough reading to know your subject matter at least basically. Open a blank page, and start writing what you already know. Don’t look at your notes, and don’t worry how the language reads. Write as if you’re explaining the subject at hand to someone at a cocktail party. Chances are, if you have been paying attention as you’ve read, the core premise of your communication — the overall message that you’re going to weave throughout your written piece — is going to emerge clearly from this exercise.
3. Post your premise. Now refine your “big idea” into a sentence or two that sums up exactly what you’re trying to say. Your high school English teacher called this your “thesis statement.” If you’re writing marketing copy, it’s the idea that you’re trying to persuade your readers to believe and act upon. Either highlight these sentences in your copy, or write them down and tape them on your computer monitor as you type. As you begin working on a new section or begin describing details about a technological feature or business concept, constantly ask yourself: Does what I’m writing right now support the premise, and push readers one step closer to believing in this idea?
4. Never fail to bring it back around. We’ve always been told that repetition is a bad thing. I beg to differ. In persuasive writing (which is what all marketing content is, one way or the other), you have to keep returning to home base, or readers will drift off in one direction as you drift off in another. Think of your premise as the refrain to a song. It keeps your readers anchored. Each time you describe a concept, conclude the section with a statement about why the concept reinforces the premise – and, oh, by the way, why the reader should buy in to that premise. You can find many different ways to say it, but don’t forget to keep saying what you mean.
5. Anchor your concept with recognizable words and phrases. Again, in the spirit of effective repetition, in a complex marketing piece it’s OK to repeat words and phrases from time to time – even advisable. While there are endless different ways to describe a concept, your busy reader will begin associating signature words or phrases that you pepper throughout a piece with the original concepts derived by your company. So while the thesaurus may suggest two dozen different ways to say “transformative” or “interconnectivity,” you might choose to bypass synonyms and use your word of choice to hammer home your concept throughout your written piece.
6. Deliver what you promise. At the beginning of a marketing piece, it’s easy to set up the expectation (for yourself and your readers) that you’re going to show them how your concept, and ultimately your product, will change their lives. By the end of the piece, you’ve gotten so wrapped up in listing features and talking about state-of-the-art technology that you’ve forgotten the change-their-lives part. Be sure to connect what you’re discussing to the big picture, which is always and without fail, what all of this means to your audience.

Defiling my Moleskine

Anyone who works in a creative field – designer, illustrator, writer – is most likely familiar with the complicated relationship one can have with a Moleskine notebook. The leather-bound little books, featuring blank or grid paper inside, are typically available in the kinds of retail stores offering handmade paper too lovely to touch (and most definitely off-limits for those of us with 2-year-olds).

It’s hard to resist them, even at about $15 a pop. Devastatingly simple — bold black cover contrasted by pristine off-white pages — the Moleskine provides the coolest blank canvas ever for all those stunning ideas and revelations that are going to pop up when we’re away from our computers. I bought mine when I was first starting to freelance full-time, and as I handed over my Visa card I imagined the brilliant ideas for articles and books I would get while talking to friends or walking in the park, the visual inspiration that would strike me for print and Web designs, the song lyric or overheard snippet of conversation that could spark an idea for an entire novel.

Of course, the reality, at least for me, is that I often forget to take the Moleskine with me. I have a larger notebook I use for business meetings and conversations, and the Moleskine typically stays behind. Or I can’t find it. Or it’s at the bottom of the other bag. When I do remember it, the Moleskine has come in handy for two things: grocery lists and an emergency coloring book for my daughter. If you look at my Moleskine today, you’ll find notes about neighborhoods we looked at in Portland during our visit in July, a few names of Italian trattorias (probably from our trip to Florence, but I can’t remember), a couple of notes about writer’s lists that someone told me about, and lots and lots of Crayola drawings of puppy dogs, trees, cats and free-form scribbles by my child.

When I was in Chicago in August at the Creative Freelancer Conference, my friend Alisa and I made a couple of new friends, two fun, sweet and amazingly creative women, a designer and a copywriter. We headed out to a cool wine and cheese bar for dinner, and when the bill came we (the creative kids who hated math) had a difficult time splitting up the bill — some of us had had wine and some not, one had ordered a la carte cheese, another just a salad. Even with our four iPhone calculators we were having trouble. So, knowing that an old-fashioned pen and paper can work wonders, I whipped out my Moleskine.

Our new friends were horrified. “Oh my god, we couldn’t possibly use your Moleskine for that,” they said.

I grinned and proudly opened the notebook to show them the contents. Every precious page defiled by ugly, waxy crayon scribbles and badly drawn animal pictures, all attempts to keep Maddie entertained during some dining experience. My new friends were shocked. I shrugged, and Alisa agreed that as parents, you do what you have to do.

But later, I thought how this experience had changed me. All my life, as an aspiring writer, I’ve been buying beautiful, cloth-bound blank books as an attempt to really dig in and write. But I never did write in those books. They were always too beautiful, clean, perfect. My writing would never be good enough to grace those pages. What if I messed up? What if my writing was stinky? I’ve always had a shelf full of these blank books, most of which have two or three pages of a story at the beginning of them and nothing more.

I’ve always approached creative writing projects the same way — stopping before things get too messy.

The past two years, though, things have changed. Life has gotten messy. I have a child now. Things are never perfect. They’re fun, happy, silly, crazy, rewarding, touching, but never perfect. Always messy. I’ve come to terms with that.

And now that I’m back to being a full-time writer, I’m having to get messy every day. There’s no way to churn out the amount of work I’m up against for so many different clients without getting messy. I’m learning the fine art of just sitting down getting the paint on the page, in a wild, wet, smeary mess. The beauty of writing is that I can go back and fix it all later. There’s not as much pressure that way.

Defiling my Moleskine was a good experience for me. I still don’t have brilliant inspiration written in my Moleskine, though a couple of pages have been used legitimately for what I intended — ideas that might morph into something big someday. Now I write on top of the brown Crayola dog and the purple squiggle, instead of hunting for the perfect blank page. Ideas are crazy, unstructured and out of control by their very nature. Learning to let go and follow their lead, without pressure to make them structured and clean, is the only way to eventually understand and corral them.

Power to the people (plural)

I am secretly a wannabe information architect. I’m fascinated with the science behind user experience and design and love the thinking that goes into IA, even if my mind isn’t quite cut out for the rigorous organizational aspect to the job. But I still really enjoy reading IA blogs and articles, because I feel that the learnings of IAs can easily translate to all communications, especially interactive media but print as well.

So I always enjoy listening to the podcasts from IDEA, the big annual information architecture conference. Some of it is a little over my head, but I always feel like I learn a lot from them.

At IDEA 08 in Chicago last week, Aradhana Goel from the famous design firm IDEO spoke about an interesting shift in how her company has to think about design problems today. After more than a decade of touting user-centric design, based on the concept of empathy with users and their needs, Goel says, it’s now necessary to think about not only individual users but also consider the collective — to think about what these individuals are doing together with thousands of other people, and the technological and social trends that enable design innovation.

Trendwatching isn’t anything new, but Goel says this is a shift in how user-centric design is considered. Anyone who’s ever gone through a Web design or redesign project knows the importance of user testing. And that user testing typically focuses on individuals: we set up profiles of typical (often fictional) users to get inside their heads, study their demographics and psychographics, and learn what drives them. Then we test those assumptions with a handful of individual users, interviewing them about their reactions and responses.

When we talk about the “users” of our Web sites (or the “audience” for our communications in general), what we really mean are the individual people we serve. When I write for an audience, I try to get inside of the head of one physician, or home buyer, or patient, or designer. What are their pain points? What is their environment? What emotions factor in to their decision-making?

But Goel suggests that these days it’s necessary to go above and beyond the individual to address and find solutions for design problems. In this era where social networks, community and collaboration are spreading fast and furiously, connecting and reconnecting people in so many different new ways and people are more and more open to it. At the same time, technology trends are changing so quickly that it’s impossible to solve a design problem without looking at how technology can and should “enable” the solution.

Today, Goel says, her company encounters more open-ended and “intangible” challenges than ever. “In our past work, whether it was a health device or a library design, there was a problem at hand,” she told the audience at IDEA. “People weren’t coming to the library. Our challenge was how do you improve the experience. And we knew the constraints.

“Now the problems are more open-ended. Clients ask, ‘We’re second. How do we become first?’ When we have no design constraints, where do we look?”

Goel says it’s important to consider individual needs in context with how people are moving collectively, and how larger trends are impacting them, in order to find a starting place for tackling these open-ended challenges. As an example of what she means by that, she provided a number of examples of societal, technology and business trends that have influence over a user’s experience. A few of these include:

• The “culture of networks” – the ability to leverage your personal or professional network for support, to contribute to a community dedicated to social change, or to collaborate on innovation through open source communities
• Nomadism — being able to communicate and work from anywhere in the world
• Sustainable living — the combination of changing behaviors while making personal statements
• A “platform approach” to technology, offering flexibility and choice, a la the iPhone
• Loyalty-building services, a la Amazon.com or Netflix
• Anytime, anywhere conversations using endless numbers of channels

The “user” is still at the center, but the world spinning around him or her has to factor in considerably for the ultimate experience to be relevant and to truly solve the challenge.

Download Goel’s podcast and her PDF presentation, or visit the IDEA 08 site.