From FutureLab’s Alain Thys of the marketing profs, 8 truths of real innovators. A short list below with some adaptions for college media, but read the full explanations at the Marketing Profs Daily Fix blog.
Truth #1: Stop equating innovation to R&D.
The process of innovation involves thinking about every aspect of your organization and how it might be done differently in a new media world. How is your newsroom workflow organized? How can new processes or tools help make the process more efficient or easier? How can your web presence engage users more? How can your ad department use new tools to better sell ads? How can new tools help an adviser communicate with student staff?
Truth #2: Pay people to fail.
To innovate your college media product, you’re going to have to find ways to try new things, even if they fail. As an adviser, that means you’ll need to find ways to reward people for stepping outside the ordinary and doing things like trying podcasts, video, community involvement, etc. The easiest thing in the world for a student editor to do is reward a staffer for turning in a story on time and complete. How do you reward a student who wants to do something different? Remember that “pay” doesn’t have to be money.
Truth #3: Treat everyone as an innovator.
You shouldn’t rely on your online editor to be the source of new ideas for your news operation. Treat every staff member as an integral part of your new media efforts. Create a culture that emphasizes the importance of new media to the future of news (you do believe this, right?). Find a way to get input from writers, graphic artists, and ad people - even freshmen(!) about how to do this “new media” thing differently.
Truth #4: Kill bad ideas quickly.
If something doesn’t work, don’t keep doing it just because you might hurt someone’s feelings. Kill the project and move on. The next idea might be the best. Example: I know a college media operation that started a podcast, and they expected maybe 60 subscribers. They have over 600. Others might have a different experience. If your podcast effort doesn’t generate sufficient interest, move on to something else.
Truth #5: Launch first, worry about the shortcomings later.
I learned this early while trying my hand at blogging. It’s often better to launch an effort and work out the kinks while it’s in the wild than to “polish” it under wraps. You can change the design, the frequency of publication, comment policies, etc. as you go along. If you’re working on a mapping project, put it out online and upgrade it as you see new things that need to be added.
Truth #6: Don’t believe what your customers tell you, dig deeper.
The marketing profs note that customers will often tell researchers one thing and then do something totally different. In college media, there are different things to consider. Who is your audience online? Are they radically different from the readers of your printed product? How can you serve these two audiences effectively? As well, what about the people who don’t read your product, either online or in print. How can you serve them? Think about your potential audience as well as the audience you already have. They may have completely different needs that you can meet.
Truth #7: Don’t try radical innovation, buy it.
Fortunately, college media doesn’t have to invent a lot of things. There are open-source projects for weblogs, mapping applications, social networking, audio and video editing, etc. The innovative part comes when you try to integrate these applications into your existing operation.
Truth #8: Mix elements that shouldn’t be mixed.
Let college students post weblogs on your site? That’s a radical idea. Host user-submitted photos alongside staff-generated photos? Allow editors to converse with readers through a web site forum? These are oil-and-water mixtures. What other such mixtures might work on your campus? Think about this: “What things would we never think of combining? Why? Why not?” And then see if there’s a way to implement something radical.
And, as always, if you have anything to add, or examples of transformations you’ve made in your organization, leave a comment below.
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