Forget outside-the-box – Just how good are you?

Communicating with online audiences. More and more brands are convinced of its growing importance, and huge potential.  It’s a fast changing environment, where new networks are adopted; sky rock, are disregarded, forgotten and sold to pop stars in the blink of an eye.

In all kind of windowless meeting rooms, marketers and communicators look at expensive slides. Buzzwords like engagement, Klout, digital, blogs, and Google+ are ping – ponged around the table.  Everyone agrees change is needed: Stepping up, killing your darlings, bleeding edge, innovation by design, burn the status-quo.  There is lots of nodding. And then, somebody  brings to the table that outside the box thinking is needed.

And that is when my light goes out. Albert Einstein framed it elegantly: “The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at, when we created them”.  I could not agree more. Just adding a Twitter account, some Facebook hocus pocus and being one of the first brands thinking about the new Google does not make a company ready for this digital age. The biggest problem of thinking outside of the box, is that the box is kept.

Can we find the guts and glory to forget all about the old box? Trying to find a new business model that fits consumer needs that are rapidly changing? Can we get away of our history, ourselves, and shape up for the future?  A car is way more than a horseless carriage; an iPhone is a complete rethinking of what good old Alexander Graham Bell had in mind when he invented the telephone.

Successful chance in this content driven, engaging digital age requires more than the occasional out of the box thinker. It requires purposeful dreamers, with an iron will to make it happen. Reshaping is a creative strategy, not a recurrent one.

To get out of the mud, rethink your wheels 😉