That creativity requires novelty is common knowledge, but neuroscientists are beginning to understand why:

Perception and imagination are linked because the brain uses the same neural circuits for both functions. Imagination is like running perception in reverse. The reason it’s so difficult to imagine truly novel ideas has to do with how the brain interprets signals from your eyes. The images that strike your retina do not, by themselves, tell you with certainty what you are seeing. Visual perception is largely a result of statistical expectations, the brain’s way of explaining ambiguous visual signals in the most likely way. And the likelihood of these explanations is a direct result of past experience.

Entire books have been written about learning, but the important elements for creative thinkers can be boiled down to this: Experience modifies the connections between neurons so that they become more efficient at processing information. Neuroscientists have observed that while an entire network of neurons might process a stimulus initially, by about the sixth presentation, the heavy lifting is performed by only a subset of neurons. Because fewer neurons are being used, the network becomes more efficient in carrying out its function.

…

Fortunately, the networks that govern both perception and imagination can be reprogrammed. By deploying your attention differently, the frontal cortex, which contains rules for decision making, can reconfigure neural networks so that you can see things that you didn’t see before. You need a novel stimulus — either a new piece of information or an unfamiliar environment — to jolt attentional systems awake. The more radical the change, the greater the likelihood of fresh insights.

The Fast Company article has more–and explains why corporate retreat/brainstorming sessions don’t work.

A few weeks ago, I guess it was, we twittered about Peter Kim’s list of companies that represent some of the best practices in utilizing social networking. Well, he’s now pulled all of that information into a wiki, making it easy to see who’s doing what, how they’re doing it, and what it’s doing for them.

David Armano of Logic + Emotion lays out a conceptual framework for online community building in an article in AdAge.  Everyone wants engagement with their brand.  The problem is that most companies believe that viral strategies are the only (or at least the best) way to do this.  Armano makes the case that community building offers a more achievable goal:

[U]nlike viral, community requires a different set of objectives, strategy and tactics around measurement. Yet, intuitively, brands realize there is value to them. That’s because if we take our bright and shiny marketing hats off for a moment, we realize that it’s likely we are part of them. … People who use social networks also feel like they’re part of a larger community of people they relate to.

Regardless of whether you’re considering starting an online community, Armano provides a concise framework for any online presence—and for any brand initiative for that matter:

Content
When considering community initiatives, there are three questions to ask: Where will the content come from? Does it provide indisputable value? Can a regular flow of quality content be maintained?

Context
Context means understanding how to meet people where they are and serving them the right experience at the right time. Well-designed applications and functionality have great opportunities to deliver on context.

Connectivity
… It’s not about mass communications but more about the micro-interactions …. Designing experiences that support thousands of micro-interactions means you are making a commitment vs. trying to produce a one-hit wonder. …

Continuity
Communities … need to be flexible to evolve while still providing a valuable and consistent user experience which can be sustained.

Read the full article here.

I stumbled across this paper by Iqbal Mohammed that raises some interesting questions about how we understand branding in the digital age. Mohammed applies Chris Anderson’s Long Tail idea to brand building and argues that when it comes to branding, most organizations are still operating on the same old “a few big hits” model that media producers and manufacturers have traditionally relied on. Branding has (typically) been focussed on finding one big idea that will resonate with the broadest audience and then orienting everything around that idea. But, Mohammed argues, this approach is obsolete: digital media and the ability to segment messages to more and more niche audiences cheaply and easily means we can build a brand around any number of ideas. One or two of these ideas will appeal to a broad audience, but the rest should be allowed to find their own audiences. Even if they appeal to only a few individuals, as the Long Tail idea shows us, those small groups add up to sizable potential markets.

I don’t agree with Mohammed’s criticisms of building a brand on a single core idea, but his argument and his paper are provocative and definitely worth reading for anyone thinking about how to take branding into new media.

On a similar note, check out this discussion of branding versus “edgework” (which seems to be getting at something akin to what Mohammed is talking about).

Ypulse just wrapped up another Youth Marketing Mashup, and here are some of the highlights:

Youth consume local news online, too.

…They want news that impacts them, which is why I think more young people tune in or search for local stories. Sites other than MySpace and Facebook mentioned by our panel as favorites were: Colbert Nation, College Board, New York Times, CNN, MSN, Veoh, Hulu, Twitter, Wired, Reddit, Digg, Delicious, Lifehacker and Gizmodo. The college students were much more like “early adopters” in their tastes than the high school students (some big socio-economic differences as well).

There are still “Tech Nots”
With all of our talk about Totally Wired youth, we forget that there are some teens who choose to not participate or unplug. We had one of these high school students on our panel. She barely used the internet for anything outside of school work. She also was one of the teens who spent the most time reading books for pleasure. She’s not on MySpace or Facebook and did not text. We also had another high school student who did not own a cell phone. I wasn’t sure if that was her preference or for financial reasons. My guess was the latter.

Communication Tools Are About Efficiency
Youth are in developmental phase in their lives where socializing with peers is what’s most important. They are also incredibly busy. When I asked the young people on our panel how they stay in touch with each other, what I heard were the usual response (IM, textbook, Facebook and some email, mostly to communicate with adults), but I also heard the repeated need to blast or communicate with “all my friends at once.” Phones are still being primarily used for voice and text, though some of these teens text more than talk (200+ text messages a day). That said, two of our college students had iPhones with data plans and one student had a music phone. As PDAs become more widespread among youth and if the price of data plans drops, I think we’ll see more young people surfing, gaming and even watching video via phone.

[...]

HBO a hit…with youth?
When I asked how they watch TV – some still watched the old fashioned way, but I also heard HBO on demand, YouTube, Colbert Nation, SNL videos (online), and “Lost” on ABC.com.

[...]

Still downloading…
Most of our panel downloads free music or movies from sites like Bit Torrent and Limewire, except for one of the college students who was busted by the RIAA (ouch). The other college students download from home (not school) for that very reason.

Ypulse is a great resource for teen and tween culture. For more highlights on their mashup, click here.

Contributed by: Karlyn Morrissette
E-Marketing Strategist, Web Producer, Dartmouth College

In our culture, outsourcing is often considered a four-letter word, conjuring up images of American jobs being shipped overseas to India or China, where they do the same work for pennies on the dollar. But outsourcing isn’t always a bad thing. It can allow an institution to focus on what it does best (presumably providing an education to students) rather than expend human resources and dollars on technology infrastructure.

Mass email sending for your email marketing program is one of those pieces of infrastructure that is better left to the professionals. I can honestly say I’ve never heard a college make a case for why they need to send all of their email in-house. IT people are usually very uppity on this point — why give up “free” email to pay a vendor for something that can’t do as much as the in-house system?

The problem with this is two-fold:

1. There are hundreds of Email Service Providers (ESP) out there. If you can’t find one with the features you want, you just aren’t looking.
2. Nothing is free. The internal staff costs to maintain an in-house system far exceed what you would pay for an external one.

Your average ESP will charge around one cent per message sent. If you send 500,000 emails a year, that’s $5,000. If you send 1.5 million emails a year, that’s $15,000. And so on and so forth. If you want database integration, that’s going to cost you a bit more — say a buy-in of $40K for the first year. Included in those prices is typically everything from support to maintaining deliverability standards to regular updates with new features. Any of these numbers could put your budget manager into shock (”FOR EMAIL???”), but consider the following: To do an in-house “free” system, you’re going to have to assign at least one full-time employee to it to do it right. Can you show me an IT person whose salary (plus benefits) is going to be less than $5,000? Or $15,000? Or $40,000? If you can, I doubt that person is qualified to know what to do should they come in one day and find the institution blacklisted from major email providers like Yahoo and thus defeating the point of having an in-house “free” solution in the first place.

In this case, outsourcing is clearly the best solution. Simply put, you get more functionality and better support for a fraction of the cost that it would take you to implement and maintain an internal system. There are a lot of things that IT departments can do great in-house. This is not one of them. Save yourself a headache and let the vendors handle it.

__
Karlyn Morissette is an e-marketing strategist and web developer, specializing in higher education. Currently the Web Producer in the Development Office at Dartmouth, she is responsible for advising the office on e-marketing strategy and maintaining multiple web properties that bring millions of dollars worth of online donations each year. Karlyn is one of the most prolific bloggers in the higher education community. In addition to www.karlynmorissette.com, she is a regular author on www.doteduguru.com.