What do you do with leftovers?
I’m looking for advice. One of my strengths is being full-to-bursting with ideas; it’s also a weakness, though, since there are way too many ideas to ever implement. We’ve touched on this before.
This came to mind again yesterday after reading this post from Jim Storer:
Jim was looking for ideas for social-media-driven marketing promotions in line with “Join the Fiesta Movement,” which Ford is using to drum up interest in its Fiesta model. In the comments, I wrote this:
What if a bunch of local restaurants put together a sort of group scavenger hunt that led teams of people from one place to the next, sampling some specially-prepared micro-meal? Like a cross between a tasting menu and a pub crawl, with the unusual twist that it would be coordinated between restaurants that might be seen as competing with one another? What if the whole thing were coordinated by tweets?
Now, who knows whether this would work or not? Surely it would work better in a food-crazed town like Austin or San Francisco or New York than it would in Podunk, and surely it would need better organization than it could ever get from me. (I’m long on ideas, short on implementation of fine details.)
But how could this idea be implemented? Who would do it? And more important, how to get the word out — not just about this idea but any idea?
There’s this blog, which has a modest (but growing!) readership. There’s Twitter. There are other social-media outlets. But these venues rely a lot on serendipity, and if the right people from the restaurant business don’t happen across them . . . then what?
Now that I think of it, maybe part of my inspiration comes from the 999 business ideas recently posted on the SAMBA blog. That post had the advantage of a very big megaphone — Seth Godin’s blog — talking about it.
But that’s only one post, like this is only one post. What about all the other little potentially useful ideas that you and I and your neighbor and that smart woman in Purchasing may have? Do they just die on the vine?
So . . . what would YOU do to promote an idea like this?
~
Photos: fridge by Kathleen Franklin, megaphone by Michael Douglas Bramwell, both used under Creative Commons license.
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4 Comments so far
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Hi Tim – Thanks for riffing on my post. The obvious answer (IMHO) to your specific idea about a restaurant scavenger hunt seems to be Yelp. They have relationships with restaurants (however informal they may be), a built-in audience in their members (Elite and otherwise) and an interest in exposing people to a bunch of restaurants in a certain locale. If this works, they’d have a model that could work in any of the cities they cover, although I agree the big cities might be easier to organize.
To your larger question of what happens to ideas that come up in posts, I think they’re just ideas until they’re attached to someone with a passion for them AND an ability to execute. That last one is the issue for a lot of folks these days… they may have a lot of good ideas, but are already doing 120% of a job.
It’s interesting that blogs, Twitter, etc. are breaking down the walls between people at companies and they are starting to cooperate to solve problems (and develop new ideas) outside of the traditional corporate structure. We’re still in the very early stages, but as people start to recognize the relative strength of their personal brand, I think we’ll see more and more grassroots development of the ideas that often times languish inside organizations.
I noticed an example of this happening with a group called DIYbio (http://diybio.org/). They presented last night at Ignite-Boston.
I got going on a bit of a rant there. Thanks for listening. ;-)
Jim | @jstorerj
Thanks for the riff/rant, Jim.
I agree that an idea is nothing without execution. I wonder how much the current economic downturn will (a) cause people to abandon Big Ideas that they fear are impractical or not immediately profitable, or else (b) chuck the mundane stuff *in favor of* Big Ideas.
Oh, and DIYbio looks neat!
Nowadays, you must be super creative to have a good business idea that works..-;
it is easy to get Business ideas, just look for a product or service that has demand and fill it”,~