Innovation is Not Creativity

Usually, managers equate innovation with creativity. But innovation is not creativity. Creativity is about coming up with the big idea. Innovation is about executing the idea — converting the idea into a successful business.
We like to think of an organization's capacity for innovation as creativity multiplied by execution. We use "multiplication" rather than "sum" because, if either creativity or execution has a score of zero, then the capacity for innovation is zero.
Companies tend to focus far more attention on improving the front end of the innovation process, the creativity. But the real leverage is in the back end.

Ideas will only get you so far. Consider companies that struggled even after a competitor entered the market and made the great idea transparent to all.

Did Xerox stumble because nobody there noticed that Canon had introduced personal copiers?
Did Kodak fall behind because they were blind to the rise of digital photography?
 Did Sears suffer a decline because they had no awareness of Wal-Mart's new every-day-low-price discount retailing format?

 In every case, the ideas were there. It was the follow-through that was lacking. In fact, we have found that innovation initiatives face their stiffest resistance after they show hints of success, begin to consume significant resources, and clash with the existing organization at multiple levels — that is, long after the idea generation stage.

Managers seem to be enamored with the Big Idea Hunt for three reasons.
 First, coming up with an idea does not create tension with the core business.
Second, ideation is sexy, while execution is long, drawn out, and boring.
 Third, companies think they are good at execution. But generally they're good at execution in their core businesses; the capabilities making that possible are poisonous for innovation.

Thomas Edison, the greatest innovator of all time, put it well: "Innovation is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration." Reflect on how much time your organization spends on inspiration versus perspiration. What are the barriers to execution? How are you attempting to overcome them?

INNOVATION IS NOT CREATIVITY

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SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION

An important aspect of Search Engine Optimization is making your website easy for both users and search engine robots to understand. Although search engines have become increasingly sophisticated, in many ways they still can't see and understand a web page the same way a human does. SEO helps the engines figure out what each page is about, and how it may be useful for users.

A Common Argument Against SEO

We frequently hear statements like this:

“No smart engineer would ever build a search engine that requires websites to follow certain rules or principles in order to be ranked or indexed. Anyone with half a brain would want a system that can crawl through any architecture, parse any amount of complex or imperfect code and still find a way to return the best and most relevant results, not the ones that have been "optimized" by unlicensed search marketing experts.”

But Wait...

Imagine you posted online a picture of your family dog. A human might describe it as "a black, medium-sized dog - looks like a Lab, playing fetch in the park." On the other hand, the best search engine in the world would struggle to understand the photo at anywhere near that level of sophistication. How do you make a search engine understand a photograph? Fortunately, SEO allows webmasters to provide "clues" that the engines can use to understand content. In fact, adding proper structure to your content is essential to SEO.

Understanding both the abilities and limitations of search engines allows you to properly build, format and annotate your web content in a way that search spiders can digest. Without SEO, many websites remain invisible to search engines.

Social Media Measurement

Social media measurement or ‘social media monitoring’ is an active monitoring of social media channels for information about a company or organization , usually tracking of various social media content such as blogs, wikis, news sites, micro-blogs such as Twitter, social networking sites, video/photo sharing websites, forums, message boards, blogs and user-generated content in general as a way to determine the volume and sentiment of online conversation about a brand or topic.
Social media monitoring allow users to find insights into a brands' overall visibility on social media, measure the impact of campaigns, identify opportunities for engagement, assess competitor activity and share of voice, and be alerted to impending crises. It can also provide valuable information about emerging trends and what consumers and clients think about specific topics, brands or products. This is the work of cross section of people including market researchers have created tools to facilitate the monitoring of a variety of social media channels from blogging to internet video to internet forums. This allows companies to track what consumers are saying about their brands and actions. Companies can then react to these conversations and interact with consumers through social media platforms.

The social media monitoring sector

There are a wide range of monitoring platforms available, from entry-level free tools to much more powerful enterprise tools, each of which provides different functionality and methods to find, manipulate and work with the relevant data. Some tools are geared more towards engagement, offering solutions to track and respond to mentions of a brand, whilst others are more data-focused, though most tools offer, to varying degrees, a combination of both.
Due to the industry being relatively young, new tools and offerings are still emerging and evolving
Quantifying social media
It is very difficult, if not impossible, to measure all social media conversation. Due to privacy settings and other issues, not all social media conversation can be found and reported by monitoring tools. However, whilst social media monitoring cannot give absolute figures, it can be extremely useful for identifying trends and for benchmarking, in addition to the uses mentioned above. These findings can, in turn, influence and shape future business decisions.