Here's how to generate heaps of ideas

Hi team

My timetable for writing this newsletter is: first draft Thursday, edit Friday, publish Monday. I've managed this so far this August. Sometimes though, like today, I get to Monday afternoon and my idea cupboard is bare. This should not happen.

So I thought I'd give myself a quick brush up in the art of ideation, and bring you along for the ride.

ideation [ ahy-dee-ey-shuhn ]: the process of forming ideas

Ideas are the feedstock of your content engine (tm). If you are going to tell compelling stories about what your organisation/brand/self stands for you need to have a full hopper.

Ideas are cheap. Content is expensive. So get lots of ideas together so that you can chuck most of them out. The art of curating ideas into commissions will be the subject of a future post.

I am building here on the smart work of my colleague Roberts Rabcevskis who wrote this blog on 5 ways to generate lots of great content ideas.

1. Dedicate focused time and resources to ideation

I roam the internet all week long. This is how it affects my brain:

So to curate things down a bit I have my favourite places for idea stimulation. Each week I read:

• Matt Navarra links to all the things happening in the world of social media;
• Benedict Evans, who summarises all the things happening in the world of tech;
• Sara Fischer's Axios Media Trends;
• Charlie Wurzel otherwise known as Galaxy Brain;
• my old mate and boss Adrian Monck 孟安典's newsletter 7 Things;
• Jack Appleby is great on LinkedIn and Twitter, and writes a newsletter called Future Social for Morning Brew.

I have an RSS feed of the headlines from all the journals that I find helpful: the media sections from the major newspapers in each market, specialist publications like The Verge, TechCrunch, MIT Technology Review, NiemanLab and the like.

I use Tweetdeck to make Twitter lists that surface relevant posts from the influencers I follow - the search function is super powerful, so you can set up ongoing searches for tweets that, for example, have more than 1,000 retweets and mention "Mark Zuckerberg".

Suffice it to say that once I have been through all of that, as well as just general web roaming, I usually have a list of many things that I could be writing about. Today was an exception.

2. Make ideation a team sport

Each week on a Tuesday The Content Engine team has a group brainstorm, coming up with a clutch of ideas for a particular customer. The call goes out on a Monday so people can do their research and build their list of ideas. Then on Tuesday we go through all the ideas that have been submitted through The Content Engine platform and sift for the best ones.

If you are on a video call, it is also great to give people a topic to work on live, and then see who can come up with the most story ideas in the next five or 10 minutes. Even better if you can get together around a conference table or with a whiteboard.

3. Don't be afraid to fail

"There's no such thing as a bad content idea."

Actually, there is. Nonetheless, everyone needs to be comfortable submitting ideas, even if they might be bad. When working consistently with teams on ideation, the biggest challenge is creating a culture of safety, alternatively a culture of robust acceptance that some pitches will flop.

4. Have a clear process to collect and track ideas

We've all had ideas in the middle of the night, in the shower, or in the grocery store. No sooner do they come than they go.

At The Content Engine we make it super easy to submit ideas into the system through any and all communication channels. If it is just a matter of sending a quick email or a WhatsApp message, the chances of losing those ideas become much smaller. If it is easy for team members and colleagues to submit ideas to the digital communications team, and they know how, they can feel confident that their input will be considered and may well become actual content for the organisation's digital channels. This is how we collect ideas in the Engine:

5. Reuse, recycle, repurpose

See what I've done here with Rob's blog post? Not every idea needs to be original. As you monitor the news cycle, what do you have in the archives that chimes with today's agenda? Could you freshen it up with a new headline or lede paragraph? What did well this time last year? Content is fast-moving and there is lots of it.

You can safely assume your audience is not up to speed with everything you have ever published, and even if they are, communication is about well-considered repetition.

Ideas are everywhere. You just have to focus. I'm working on it.

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A couple of updates from last week's piece on AI art:

As often happens, when I write about something, the New York Times picks it up. Or is it the other way around? In any case, here's a lovely piece from Kevin Roose replicating the super fun experiment I did last week, generating AI art.

Here's a weird one: a marketplace for AI "prompts". A prompt is the words you give an AI to get it to generate an image or a piece of writing. Apparently (who knew?) some prompts work better than other, so much so that they have value that can be traded on a marketplace. On Promptbase, a prompt to generate any animal wearing a suit costs $0.99.

Thanks team for reading this far. Let me know what you think of all these ideas in the comments. Also, share with your chums cause they might like them too.

Ciao for now

Mike