Transit Ad - what an ugly model.

Routines.

As a social media consultant, it’s extremely easy to get sucked into routines. It’s something I’m overly conscious about as I work hard to approach each new project with fresh perspective – a brand new creative whiteboard. Creativity can be quite difficult based on the risk tolerance of your client, budget and a slew of other factors. But on another level, I feel that it’s always my job to open clients’ eyes to new possibilities, alternative strategies and unique tactics.

With any social campaign, user experience and design are critically important. Whether on your site, interacting on a Facebook page or digesting a video, your content relevance and ease of understanding for users ultimately drives engagement. As social media folks, it’s easy to get overly focused on process and overall execution but critical that we also keep design and UI top of mind, envisioning how our target audience will interact with our approach.

Inspiration.

I try to gather design inspiration on a daily basis from a variety of sources. It may be a blog post, a photo on Flickr, an infographic, a random idea sketch or quick exchange with a design friend, a poster for an upcoming concert in my neighborhood. Design is all around us but often overlooked as great design appears perfectly logical from the start.

With that being said, hop over and subscribe to Frog Design’s Design Mind blog. Posts are short and sweet but aggregate the thinking of some of the sharpest creative minds around. It’s a great way to jump start some inspiration and unique thinking.

For example, watch this video:

I love it. It seems so simple, right? All good design does. But think about the potential impact of this one idea…

Now think about some way that you typically engage your brand or client’s target audience. Pick a past engagement strategy that was meh, good, but not GREAT. What’s that small tweak early on that could have improved engagement with your audience and impacted the final project outcome?