How To Create A Social Media Marketing Plan

What is a social media marketing plan?

A social media marketing plan is the summary of everything you plan to do and hope to achieve for your business using social networks. This plan should comprise an audit of where your accounts are today, goals for where you want them to be in the near future, and all the tools you want to use to get there.

In general, the more specific you can get with your plan, the more effective you’ll be in its implementation. Try to keep it concise. Don’t make your social media marketing strategy so lofty and broad that it’s unattainable. The plan will guide your actions, but it will also be a measure by which you determine whether you’re succeeding or failing. You don’t want to set yourself up for failure from the outset.

Step 1: Create social media objectives and goals

The first step to any social media marketing strategy is to establish the objectives and goals that you hope to achieve. Having these objectives also allows you to quickly react when social media campaigns are not meeting your expectations. Without goals, you have no means of gauging success or proving your social media return on investment (ROI).

These goals should be aligned with your broader marketing strategy, so that your social media efforts drive toward your business objectives. If your social media marketing strategy is shown to support business goals, you’re more likely to get executive buy-in and investment.

Go beyond vanity metrics such as Retweets and Likes. Focus on advanced metrics such as leads generated, web referrals, and conversion rate.

You should also use the SMART framework when setting your goals. This means that each objective should be specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound.

SMART goal example:

“For Instagram we will share photos that communicate our company culture. We will do this by posting three photos a week. The target for each is at least 30 likes and 5 comments.”

A simple way to start your social media marketing plan is by writing down at least three social media goals. Make sure to ask yourself what the goal will look like when completed, and use that to determine how you will track it.

Step 2: Conduct a social media audit

Prior to creating your social media marketing plan, you need to assess your current social media use and how it’s working. This means figuring out who is currently connecting with you via social, which social media sites your target market uses, and how your social media presence compares to your competitors’.

We’ve created a social media audit template that you can follow for each step of the process:

Once you’ve conducted your audit you should have a clear picture of every social account representing your business, who runs or controls them, and what purpose they serve. This inventory should be maintained regularly, especially as you scale your business.

It should also be evident which accounts need to be updated and which need to be deleted altogether. If your audit uncovers fraudulent accounts—a fake branded Twitter profile, for example—report them. Reporting fraudulent accounts will help ensure that people searching for you online only connect with the accounts you manage.

As part of your social media audit you’ll also want to create mission statements for each network. These one-sentence declarations will help you focus on a very specific goal for Instagram, Facebook, or any other social network. They will guide your actions and help steer you back on track if your efforts begin to lag.

Take the time you need to determine the purpose of every social profile you have. If you can’t figure out its purpose, you should probably delete that profile.

Mission statement example:

“We will use Snapchat to share the lighter side of our company and connect with younger prospect customers.”

Before you can determine which social media networks are right for your business, you first need to know who your audience is and what they want. We’ve created a guide to help you learn which social networks your audience lives on, which tools to use to gather demographic and behavioural data, and how to target the customers you want.

Step 3: Create or improve your social accounts 

Once you’ve finished with your social media audit, it’s time to hone your online presence. Choose which networks best meet your social media goals. If you don’t already have social media profiles on each network you focus on, build them from the ground up with your broader goals and audience in mind. If you do have existing accounts, it’s time to update and refine them to get the best possible results.

We’ve created a guide on How to Set-up Facebook, Twitter, and Every Other Major Social Network to walk you through that process. Each social network has a unique audience and should be treated differently.

Optimizing profiles for SEO can help generate more web traffic to your online properties. Cross-promoting social accounts can extend the reach of content. In general, social media profiles should be filled out completely, and images and text should be optimized for the social network in question.

Step 4: Get social media inspiration from industry leaders, competitors, clients

Not sure what kinds of content and information will get you the most engagement? For inspiration, look to what others in your industry are sharing and use social media listening to see how you can distinguish yourself from competitors and appeal to prospects they might be missing.

Consumers can also offer social media inspiration, not only through the content that they share but in the way that they phrase their messages. See how your target audience writes Tweets, and strive to mimic that style. Also learn their habits—when they share and why—and use that as a basis for your social media marketing plan.

A final source of social media inspiration is industry leaders. There are giants who do an incredible job of social media marketing, from Red Bull and Taco Bell to KLM Airlines and Tangerine Bank. Companies in every industry imaginable have managed to distinguish themselves through advanced social media strategies. Follow them and learn everything you can. See if they’ve shared any social media advice or insight elsewhere on the web.

Here are a few suggested sources of inspiration in different areas of social media marketing:

• Content marketing: Unbounce, Virgin
• Social media customer service: Tangerine, Warby Parker
• Social media advertising: AirBnB, the American Red Cross
• Facebook strategy: Coca-Cola, Walmart
• Google+ strategy: Cadbury, National Geographic
• Twitter strategy: Charmin, Oreo
• Instagram strategy: Herschel Supply Co., General Electric

http://www.slideshare.net/hootsuite/smss-lookbook

Step 5: Create a content plan and editorial calendar

Having great content to share will be essential to succeeding at social media. Your social media marketing plan should include a content marketing plan, comprised of strategies for content creation and content curation, as well as an editorial calendar.

Your content marketing plan should answer the following questions:

• What types of content you intend to post and promote on social media
• How often you will post content
• Target audience for each type of content
• Who will create the content
• How you will promote the content

Your editorial calendar lists the dates and times you intend to publish blogs, Instagram and Facebook posts, Tweets, and other content you plan to use during your social media campaigns.

Create the calendar and then schedule your messaging in advance rather than updating constantly throughout the day. This gives you the opportunity to work hard on the language and format of these messages rather than writing them on the fly whenever you have time. Be spontaneous with your engagement and customer service rather than your content.

An example editorial calendar

Make sure your calendar reflects the mission statement you’ve assigned to each social profile. If the purpose of your LinkedIn account is to generate leads, make sure you are sharing enough lead generation content. You can establish a content matrix that defines what share of your profile is allocated to different types of posts. For example:

• 50 percent of content will drive back to your blog
• 25 percent of content will be curated from other sources
• 20 percent of content will support enterprise goals (selling, lead generation, etc.)
• five percent of content will be about HR and culture

If you’re unsure of how to allocate your resources, a safe bet is to follow the Social Media Rule of Thirds:

• One-third of your social content promotes your business, converts readers, and generates profit
• One-third of your social content should share ideas and stories from thought leaders in your industry or like-minded businesses
• One-third of your social content should be personal interactions with your audience

Step 6: Test, evaluate and adjust your social media marketing plan 

To find out what adjustments need to be made to your social media marketing strategy, you should constantly be testing. Build testing capabilities into every action you take on social networks. For example, you could:

• Track the number of clicks your links get on a particular platform using URL shorteners and UTM codes
• Use Hootsuite’s social media analytics to track the success and reach of social campaigns
• Track page visits driven by social media with Google Analytics

Record and analyze your successes and failures, and then adjust your social media marketing plan in response.

Surveys are also a great way to gauge success—online and offline. Ask your social media followers, email list, and website visitors how you’re doing on social media. This direct approach is often very effective. Then ask your offline customers if social media had a role in their purchasing. This insight might prove invaluable when you look for areas to improve. Learn more about how to measure social media ROI for your business.

The most important thing to understand about your social media marketing plan is that it should be constantly changing. As new networks emerge, you may want to add them to your plan. As you attain goals, you will need to set new targets. Unexpected challenges will arise that you need to address. As you scale your business, you might need to add new roles or grow your social presence for different branches or regions.

Rewrite your social media strategy to reflect your latest insights, and make sure your team is aware of what has been updated.

#1: Identify Business Goals

Every piece of your social media strategy serves the goals you set. You simply can’t move forward without knowing what you’re working toward.

Look closely at your company’s overall needs and decide how you want to use social media to contribute to reaching them.

You’ll undoubtedly come up with several personalized goals, but there are a few that all companies should include in their strategy—increasing brand awareness, retaining customers and reducing marketing costs are relevant to everyone.

I suggest you choose two primary goals and two secondary goals to focus on. Having too many goals distracts you and you’ll end up achieving none.

#2: Set Marketing Objectives

Goals aren’t terribly useful if you don’t have specific parameters that define when each is achieved. For example, if one of your primary goals is generating leads and sales, how many leads and sales do you have to generate before you consider that goal a success?

Marketing objectives define how you get from Point A (an unfulfilled goal) to Point B (a successfully fulfilled goal). You can determine your objectives with the S-M-A-R-T approach: Make your objectives specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-bound.

Using our previous example, if your goal is to generate leads and sales, a specific marketing objective may be to increase leads by 50%. In order to measure your progress, choose which analytics and tracking tools you need to have in place.

Setting yourself up for failure is never a good idea. If you set an objective of increasing sales by 1,000%, it’s doubtful you’ll meet it. Choose objectives you can achieve, given the resources you have.

You’ve taken the time to refine your goals so they’re relevant to your company, so extend that same consideration to your objectives. If you want to get support from your C-level executives, ensure your objectives are relevant to the company’s overall vision.

Attaching a time frame to your efforts is imperative. When do you intend to achieve your goal(s)? Next month? By the end of this year?

Your objective of increasing leads by 50% may be specific, measurable, achievable and relevant, but if you don’t set a deadline for achieving the goal, your efforts, resources and attention may be pulled in other directions.

#3: Identify Ideal Customers

If a business is suffering from low engagement on their social profiles, it’s usually because they don’t have an accurate ideal customer profile.

Buyer personas help you define and target the right people, in the right places, at the right times with the right messages.

When you know your target audience’s age, occupation, income, interests, pains, problems, obstacles, habits, likes, dislikes, motivations and objections, then it’s easier and cheaper to target them on social or any other media.

The more specific you are, the more conversions you’re going to get out of every channel you use to promote your business.

#4: Research Competition

When it comes to social media marketing, researching your competition not only keeps you apprised of their activity, it gives you an idea of what’s working so you can integrate those successful tactics into your own efforts.

Start by compiling a list of at least 3-5 main competitors. Search which social networks they’re using and analyze their content strategy. Look at their number of fans or followers, posting frequency and time of day.

Also pay attention to the type of content they’re posting and its context (humorous, promotional, etc.) and how they’re responding to their fans.

The most important activity to look at is engagement. Even though page admins are the only ones who can calculate engagement rate on a particular update, you can get a good idea of what they’re seeing.

For example, let’s say you’re looking at a competitor’s last 20-30 Facebook updates. Take the total number of engagement activities for those posts and divide it by the page’s total number of fans. (Engagement activity includes likes, comments, shares, etc.)

You can use that formula on all of your competitors’ social profiles (e.g., on Twitter you can calculate retweets and favourites).

Keep in mind that the calculation is meant to give you a general picture of how the competition is doing so you can compare how you stack up against each other.

#5: Choose Channels and Tactics

Many businesses create accounts on every popular social network without researching which platform will bring the most return. You can avoid wasting your time in the wrong place by using the information from your buyer personas to determine which platform is best for you.

If your prospects or customers tell you they spend 40% of their online time on Facebook and 20% on Twitter, you know which primary and secondary social networks you should focus on.

When your customers are using a specific network, that’s where you need to be—not everywhere else.

Your tactics for each social channel rely on your goals and objectives, as well as the best practices of each platform.

For example, if your goal is increasing leads and your primary social network is Facebook, some effective tactics are investing in Facebook advertising or promotion campaigns to draw more attention to your lead magnets.

#6: Create a Content Strategy

Content and social media have a symbiotic relationship: Without great content social media is meaningless and without social media nobody will know about your content. Use them together to reach and convert your prospects.

There are three main components to any successful social media content strategy: type of content, time of posting and frequency of posting.

The type of content you should post on each social network relies on form and context. Form is how you present that information—text only, images, links, video, etc.

Context fits with your company voice and platform trends. Should your content be funny, serious, highly detailed and educational or something else?

There are many studies that give you a specific time when you should post on social media. However, I suggest using those studies as guidelines rather than hard rules. Remember, your audience is unique, so you need to test and figure out the best time for yourself.

Posting frequency is as important as the content you share. You don’t want to annoy your fans or followers, do you?

Finding the perfect frequency is crucial because it could mean more engagement for your content or more unlikes and unfollows. Use Facebook Insights to see when your fans are online and engaging with your content.

#7: Allocate Budget and Resources

To budget for social media marketing, look at the tactics you’ve chosen to achieve your business goals and objectives.

Make a comprehensive list of the tools you need (e.g., social media monitoring, email marketing and CRM), services you’ll outsource (e.g., graphic design or video production) and any advertising you’ll purchase. Next to each, include the annual projected cost so you can have a high-level view of what you’re investing in and how it affects your marketing budget.

Many businesses establish their budget first, and then select which tactics fit that budget. I take the opposite approach. I establish a strategy first, and then determine the budget that fits that strategy.

If your strategy execution fees exceed your budget estimate, prioritize your tactics according to their ROI timeframe. The tactics with the fastest ROI (e.g., advertising and social referral) take priority because they generate instant profit you can later invest into long-term tactics (fan acquisition, quality content creation or long-term engagement).

#8: Assign Roles

Knowing who’s responsible for what increases productivity and avoids confusion and overlapping efforts. Things may be a bit messy in the beginning, but with time team members will know their roles and what daily tasks they’re responsible for.

When everyone knows his or her role, it’s time to start planning the execution process. You can either plan daily or weekly. I don’t advise putting a monthly plan together because lots of things will come up and you may end up wasting time adapting to the new changes.

You can use tools like Basecamp or ActiveCollab to manage your team and assign tasks to each member. These tools save you tons of time and help you stay organized.

As social media continues to grow as a proven marketing strategy, the marketing industry has seen an increase in clever and effective social media campaigns.

Many publishers and organizations have been compiling and publicly recognizing their favorites, and the top picks vary greatly in size, method and style. However, when you break down the details of various top-rated social media campaigns, you see that they often share some common elements.

Our most recent social media campaign, #JustSaidYes, taught us a number of important lessons about building a great social media campaign. Instead of running a broad campaign for all potential WeddingWire (my employer) users, we were able to identify a subset of our target audience and create a campaign that capitalized on existing social behavior on their favorite network: Instagram.

But for many businesses, a successful social media campaign may not be as easy to identify, plan or execute.

If your business is considering a social media campaign, incorporate these four main components to achieve your desired results and boost the impact to your bottom line.

1. A Carefully Developed Plan

The best social media campaigns start with a carefully developed plan. This plan should be specific to your campaign, but it should also fit into your overall social media strategy — meaning that your goals should not conflict, and the campaign should be a good continuation of your brand’s existing social voice and style.

To develop your plan, begin with research. Do a thorough analysis of your existing social followers across your networks and identify areas for improvement versus your competition.

Remember that different social networks exist for different purposes, so choose which social networks best fit your needs. For example, Instagram and Facebook are good networks to target Millennials — but you won’t find many Gen Xers or Baby Boomers on Instagram.

Understand where your target audience spends time, and research recent campaigns in your industry to see which existing trends you can leverage.

Once you decide what kind of campaign you plan to run on the social networks you choose, it’s important to allocate your budget and resources. Include in your budget whether your campaign requires any paid social efforts or if you plan to rely on organic tactics and owned media.

With 49 percent of global business leaders planning to increase their social media budgets this year, allocating budget for a social media campaign should be easier than in years past. However, if you need additional resources like a social media platform, CRM or automation platform to implement your ideal vision, remember to include that in your desired scope.

After you’ve researched your idea, decided on an appropriate budget and outlined a plan for your social media campaign, identify your dream team. Assigning clear-cut roles ahead of time helps to avoid confusion and overlapping responsibilities.

At a minimum, you’ll want to assign roles for messaging, design and promotion. If your social media campaign will be promoted across channels, make sure you’ve selected the right team members in ancillary departments to be responsible for your campaign.

The last part of your social media campaign plan should be to identify the metrics you’ll use to measure the success and ROI of your campaign. In order to do that, you’ll need to define your campaign’s goals — which is the next component of a great campaign.

2. Clearly Defined Goals

Before starting any marketing campaign, you need to clearly define your goals. Deciding on what you want to achieve at the beginning of a campaign makes it easier to measure and analyze your results.

Your social media campaign can have multiple goals, where each piece of your strategy serves a different objective. Each goal you select should be personalized for your business’ needs, but here are a few common ones most campaigns address:

• Increase Brand Awareness. If your business is relatively new (or new to social media), or if you need to distinguish your business from others in the same space, some part of your campaign should aim to increase brand awareness. If prospects and customers are unable to recognize your brand, your campaign will have little effect.

Incorporating a sharing aspect to your campaign is a great way to increase your brand awareness and online influence. To measure your brand’s social influence, benchmark key metrics, such as total number of likes or followers, total brand mentions/retweets, influencer brand mentions and site entrances or app downloads driven by social media.

• Drive More Website Traffic. I know what you’re thinking: Who doesn’t want more visits to their website or blog? It’s a natural goal for most marketing campaigns, but it also plays into your social presence. The more visitors your website receives, the more opportunities they have to share your site or content on social media and follow your accounts on their favorite networks.

To drive more traffic, direct users to a landing page on your site where they can take the next action. Use Google Analytics or your Web analytics platform of choice to benchmark key metrics like total Web visits, visits driven by social media, time on site and overall engagement of social users.

• Drive Visitor Loyalty. Do you want to increase your website visitor loyalty? Driving more website traffic is a short-term goal, but you can aim to increase the amount of time spent on your website and the frequency of return visits for the long term.

If visitor loyalty is one of your goals, consider a social media campaign that requires users to visit your website several times to enter or find information. To measure visitor loyalty, benchmark metrics like pages per session, average session duration and the percent of new sessions to your site.

• Improve Conversion Rates. If your business is well-known and already receives a lot of Web visitors, your campaign should focus on improving your website/app conversion rates. Whether your business considers a conversion a product purchase or an account sign-up or anything in between, you can align an aspect of your social media campaign with website conversions.

Consider campaigns that require users to fill out a form or sign up to get the benefit or value being offered — but remember to keep an eye on these conversions to see if you’re driving meaningful, long-term customers through your campaign. To measure your social media campaign’s impact on conversions, track metrics like total site entries, total conversions and assisted social conversions.

3. Cross-Channel Promotion

Unless you’re a major brand with millions of loyal followers, your social media campaign likely needs help from other marketing channels to achieve your desired results. The best social media campaigns are part of an integrated marketing campaign where your efforts on social media are supported on a number of other channels.

The benefits of promoting your social media campaign across additional channels are twofold: Those you reach via social media are reminded through other communications, and those who aren’t as active on social media are informed.

Your followers are already familiar with your brand, so they’re the most likely to see your campaign on social media; therefore, they will be more likely to engage or participate after being reminded through a different channel.

You can catch those who don’t follow you on social media or are less active via email, search or on-site content and ad units.

Reaching different people at varying times across many marketing channels increases the likelihood that your campaign will be successful. Just be careful with your segmentation and timing. You don’t want to overwhelm existing customers or bother potential ones with too much at the same time.

Gentle reminders and mentions across a number of touch points to different cohorts of your target audience will deliver better results than a social media campaign that’s only promoted on your social network of choice.

4. Thorough Analysis

So how’d your campaign perform? Was your social media program successful in reaching the goals you set out to achieve?

When it comes to analyzing the success of your campaign, you’ll be thankful you identified the key metrics associated with your goals ahead of time. It’s easy to benchmark your progress against your initial starting point.

Going beyond achieving your goals, are there any “downstream” metrics you’ve seen improve? In your given time period, evaluate whether or not you saw a difference in account logins, customer lifetime value or other engagement metrics specific to your business.

Perhaps the revenue from those customers acquired through your social media campaign is higher than revenue from those acquired through your search acquisition campaigns. (That has tended to be the case for our business.) Or maybe those customers log in more often or adopt tools more readily. There are a number of ways to think about the ROI of your campaign that aren’t tied directly to revenue.

Great social media campaigns should affect more than your follower count. Using these four components as the tenets of your next social media campaign will help your business extend your social reach, gain a better understanding of your target audience and achieve your long-term business goals.

SMART goals

SMART is a mnemonic acronym, giving criteria to guide in the setting of objectives, for example in project management, employee-performance management and personal development. 

• Specific – target a specific area for improvement.
• Measurable – quantify or at least suggest an indicator of progress.
• Assignable – specify who will do it.
• Realistic – state what results can realistically be achieved, given available resources.
• Time-related – specify when the result(s) can be achieved.

Specific: 

A specific goal has a much greater chance of being accomplished than a general goal. To set a specific goal you must answer the six “W” questions:

*Who: Who is involved?

*What: What do I want to accomplish?

*Where: Identify a location.

*When: Establish a time frame.

*Which: Identify requirements and constraints.

*Why: Specific reasons, purpose or benefits of accomplishing the goal.

EXAMPLE: A general goal would be, “Get in shape.” But a specific goal would say, “Join a health club and workout 3 days a week.”

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Measurable - Establish concrete criteria for measuring progress toward the attainment of each goal you set.

When you measure your progress, you stay on track, reach your target dates, and experience the exhilaration of achievement that spurs you on to continued effort required to reach your goal.

To determine if your goal is measurable, ask questions such as……

How much? How many?

How will I know when it is accomplished?

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Attainable – When you identify goals that are most important to you, you begin to figure out ways you can make them come true. You develop the attitudes, abilities, skills, and financial capacity to reach them. You begin seeing previously overlooked opportunities to bring yourself closer to the achievement of your goals.

You can attain most any goal you set when you plan your steps wisely and establish a time frame that allows you to carry out those steps. Goals that may have seemed far away and out of reach eventually move closer and become attainable, not because your goals shrink, but because you grow and expand to match them. When you list your goals you build your self-image. You see yourself as worthy of these goals, and develop the traits and personality that allow you to possess them.

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Realistic- To be realistic, a goal must represent an objective toward which you are both willing and able to work. A goal can be both high and realistic; you are the only one who can decide just how high your goal should be. But be sure that every goal represents substantial progress.

A high goal is frequently easier to reach than a low one because a low goal exerts low motivational force. Some of the hardest jobs you ever accomplished actually seem easy simply because they were a labour of love.

Timely – A goal should be grounded within a time frame. With no time frame tied to it there’s no sense of urgency. If you want to lose 10 lbs, when do you want to lose it by? “Someday” won’t work. But if you anchor it within a time-frame, “by May 1st”, then you’ve set your unconscious mind into motion to begin working on the goal.

Your goal is probably realistic if you truly believe that it can be accomplished. Additional ways to know if your goal is realistic is to determine if you have accomplished anything similar in the past or ask yourself what conditions would have to exist to accomplish this goal.

T can also stand for Tangible – A goal is tangible when you can experience it with one of the senses, that is, taste, touch, smell, sight or hearing.

When your goal is tangible you have a better chance of making it specific and measurable and thus attainable.

SMART goals

You could say that the whole human endeavour is geared towards setting and achieving goals. Goals are part of every aspect of life: how you conduct your relationships, what you want to achieve at work, the way you use your spare time... Everything comes down to priorities, and what you would like to accomplish in every aspect – whether you make a conscious choice or go with subconscious preferences.

Without setting goals or objectives, life becomes a series of chaotic happenings you don't control. You become the plaything of coincidence. Accomplishments like sending someone to the moon, inventing the iPod etc are the result of a goal that was set at some point. A vision that was charted and realised.

What is SMART goal setting?

SMART goal setting brings structure and track-ability into your goals and objectives. In stead of vague resolutions, SMART goal setting creates verifiable trajectories towards a certain objective, with clear milestones and an estimation of the goal's attainability. Every goal or objective, from intermediary step to overarching objective, can be made S.M.A.R.T. and as such, brought closer to reality.

In corporate life, SMART goal setting is one of the most effective and yet least used tools for achieving goals. Once you've charted to outlines of your project, it's time to set specific intermediary goals. With the SMART checklist, you can evaluate your objectives. SMART goal setting also creates transparency throughout the company. It clarifies the way goals came into existence, and the criteria their realisation will conform to.

What does S.M.A.R.T. goal setting stand for?

Why not think of a small goal you want to set right now, personal or professional. To make your goal S.M.A.R.T., it needs to conform to the following criteria: Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant and Timely.

S.M.A.R.T. goal setting: Specific

What exactly do you want to achieve? The more specific your description, the bigger the chance you'll get exactly that. S.M.A.R.T. goal setting clarifies the difference between 'I want to be a millionaire' and 'I want to make €50.000 a month for the next ten years by creating a new software product'.

Questions you may ask yourself when setting your goals and objectives are:

• What exactly do I want to achieve?
• Where?
• How?
• When?
• With whom?
• What are the conditions and limitations?
• Why exactly do I want to reach this goal? What are possible alternative ways of achieving the same?

S.M.A.R.T. goal setting: Measurable

Measurable goals means that you identify exactly what it is you will see, hear and feel when you reach your goal. It means breaking your goal down into measurable elements. You'll need concrete evidence. Being happier is not evidence; not smoking anymore because you adhere to a healthy lifestyle where you eat vegetables twice a day and fat only once a week, is.

Measurable goals can go a long way in refining what exactly it is that you want, too. Defining the physical manifestations of your goal or objective makes it clearer, and easier to reach.

S.M.A.R.T. goal setting: Attainable

Is your goal attainable? That means investigating whether the goal really is acceptable to you. You weigh the effort, time and other costs your goal will take against the profits and the other obligations and priorities you have in life.

If you don't have the time, money or talent to reach a certain goal you'll certainly fail and be miserable. That doesn't mean that you can't take something that seems impossible and make it happen by planning smartly and going for it!

There's nothing wrong with shooting for the stars; if you aim to make your department twice as efficient this year as it was last year with no extra labour involved, how bad is it when you only reach 1,8 times? Not too bad...

S.M.A.R.T. goal setting: Relevant

Is reaching your goal relevant to you? Do you actually want to run a multinational, be famous, have three children and a busy job? You decide for yourself whether you have the personality for it, or your team has the bandwidth.

If you're lacking certain skills, you can plan training's. If you lack certain resources, you can look for ways of getting them.

The main questions, why do you want to reach this goal? What is the objective behind the goal, and will this goal really achieve that?

You could think that having a bigger team will make it perform better, but will it really?

S.M.A.R.T. goal setting: Timely

Time is money! Make a tentative plan of everything you do. Everybody knows that deadlines are what makes most people switch to action. So install deadlines, for yourself and your team, and go after them. Keep the timeline realistic and flexible, that way you can keep morale high. Being too stringent on the timely aspect of your goal setting can have the perverse effect of making the learning path of achieving your goals and objectives into a hellish race against time – which is most likely not how you want to achieve anything.

The History and Social Impact of Creativity and its Influence on Design

		Review and compare different definitions of creativity and explain how these relate in an historical context Creativity is a phenomenon whereby something new and somehow valuable is formed. The created item may be intangible (such as an idea, a scientific theory, a musical composition, or a joke) or a physical object (such as an invention, a literary work, or a painting). Scholarly interest in creativity involves many definitions and concepts pertaining to a number of disciplines: psychology, cognitive science, education, philosophy(particularly philosophy of science), technology, theology, sociology, linguistics, business studies, songwriting, and economics, covering the relations between creativity and general intelligence, mental and neurological processes, personality type and creative ability, creativity and mental health; the potential for fostering creativity through education and training, especially as augmented by technology; the maximisation of creativity for national economic benefit, and the application of creative resources to improve the effectiveness of teaching and learning.
		Describe the ways in which creativity has occurred in different fields of human endeavour Psychology Freud was an Austrian neurologist and the founder of psychoanalysis, who created an entirely new approach to the understanding of the human personality. He is regarded as one of the most influential - and controversial - minds of the 20th century.

Cognitive science

Cognitive science is the scientific study of the human mind. The field is highly interdisciplinary, combining ideas and methods from psychology, computer science, linguistics, philosophy, and neuroscience.

Education

Philosophy

Confucius

Confucius was an influential Chinese philosopher, teacher and political figure known for his popular aphorisms and for his models of social interaction.

http://www.biography.com/people/confucius-9254926/videos/confucius-wandering-china-29219395938

Technology

Hedy Lamarr (1913-2000)

Hedy Lamarr might be recalled as a sexy movie star of the 1930s and 1940s, however, few know that she invented a remote-controlled communications system for the U.S military during World War II.  Lamarr’s frequency hopping theory now serves as a basis for modern communication technology, such as Bluetooth and Wi-Fi network connections.

Steve Jobs

Apple Inc.

iPod made Steve Jobs realize that Apple could become the greatest consumer electronics company on the planet. Around 2003, he started a secret project to develop a tablet. But in 2004-2005, he realized that the technology that this group had developed, including a revolutionary touch-screen technology, could be used in a phone rather than a tablet. After two more years of development, including a harsh internal competition to prove that it was possible to make Mac OS X run on the phone, iPhone was introduced at Macworld on January 9, 2007. This keynote is often considered the best and most memorable of all of Steve Jobs's career.


iPhone was not only a breakthrough digital convergence device ("an iPod, a phone, and an Internet communicator" all in one), it was also a force of disruption of the traditional phone business. Just like for the iTunes Store, Steve Jobs had negotiated landmark deals with wireless carrier AT&T before he introduced iPhone — without ever showing it to them! In exchange for exclusivity, the carrier would pay Apple a share of all their iPhone subscription revenues. And of course, AT&T could not put any software on the iPhone, and no logo either. This was an inversion of the traditional master-slave relationship that carriers entertained with phone manufacturers. In the long run, it really put the phone industry upside down.

Theology

Sociology

Linguistics

Business studies

Songwriting

Economics

Extract key information and ideas from the history of creativity for possible relevance to your own work and the work of others

Creativity is a process involving the generation of new ideas or concepts, or new associations between existing ideas or concepts, and their substantiation into a product that has novelty and originality. From a scientific point of view, the products of creative thought (sometimes referred to as divergent thought) are usually considered to have both "originality" and "appropriateness." An alternative, more everyday conception of creativity is that it is simply the act of making something new.

Although intuitively a simple phenomenon, creativity is in fact quite complex. It has been studied from numerous perspectives, including psychology, social psychology, psychometrics, artificial intelligence, philosophy, history, economics, and business. Unlike many phenomena in science, there is no single, authoritative perspective, or definition of creativity; nor is there a standardized measurement technique. Creativity has been attributed variously to divine intervention or spiritual inspiration, cognitive processes, the social environment, personality traits, and chance ("accident" or "serendipity"). It has been associated with genius, mental illness and humor. Some say it is a trait we are born with; others say it can be taught with the application of simple techniques. Although popularly associated with art and literature, it is also an essential part of innovation and invention, important in professions such as business, economics, architecture, industrial design, science, and engineering. Despite, or perhaps because of, the ambiguity and multi-dimensional nature of creativity, entire industries have been spawned from the pursuit of creative ideas and the development of creativity techniques.

This mysterious phenomenon, though undeniably important and constantly visible, seems to lie tantalizingly beyond the grasp of scientific investigation. Yet in religious or spiritual terms it is the very essence of human nature. Creativity, understood as the ability to utilize everything at hand in nature to transform our living environment and beautify our lives, is what distinguishes human beings from all other creatures. This is one way that human beings are said to be in the image of God: they are second creators, acting in a manner analogous to God, the original Creator.

Moreover, all people, regardless of their intellectual level, are co-creators of perhaps the most important thing—their own self. While God provides each person with a certain endowment and circumstance, it is up to each individual to make what he will of his life by how he or she choses to live it.

Definitions of Creativity


"Creativity, it has been said, consists largely of re-arranging what we know in order to find out what we do not know." George Keller





Leonardo Da Vinci is well known for his creative works


"The problem of creativity is beset with mysticism, confused definitions, value judgments, psychoanalytic admonitions, and the crushing weight of philosophical speculation dating from ancient times." Albert Rothenberg


More than 60 different definitions of creativity can be found in the psychological literature.The etymological root of the word in English and most other European languages comes from the Latin creatus, literally "to have grown."


Perhaps the most widespread conception of creativity in the scholarly literature is that creativity is manifested in the production of a creative work (for example, a new work of art or a scientific hypothesis) that is both "novel" and "useful." Colloquial definitions of creativity are typically descriptive of activity that results in producing or bringing about something partly or wholly new; in investing an existing object with new properties or characteristics; in imagining new possibilities that were not conceived of before; and in seeing or performing something in a manner different from what was thought possible or normal previously.


A useful distinction has been made by Rhodes between the creative person, the creative product, the creative process, and the creative "press" or environment. Each of these factors are usually present in creative activity. This has been elaborated by Johnson, who suggested that creative activity may exhibit several dimensions including sensitivity to problems on the part of the creative agent, originality, ingenuity, unusualness, usefulness, and appropriateness in relation to the creative product, and intellectual leadership on the part of the creative agent.


Boden noted that it is important to distinguish between ideas which are psychologically creative (which are novel to the individual mind which had the idea), and those which are historically creative (which are novel with respect to the whole of human history). Drawing on ideas from artificial intelligence, she defines psychologically creative ideas as those which cannot be produced by the same set of generative rules as other, familiar ideas.


Often implied in the notion of creativity is a concomitant presence of inspiration, cognitive leaps, or intuitive insight as a part of creative thought and action. Pop psychology sometimes associates creativity with right or forehead brain activity or even specifically with lateral thinking.


Some students of creativity have emphasized an element of chance in the creative process. Linus Pauling, asked at a public lecture how one creates scientific theories, replied that one must endeavor to come up with many ideas, then discard the useless ones.
History of the term and the concept


The way in which different societies have formulated the concept of creativity has changed throughout history, as has the term "creativity" itself.


The ancient Greeks, who believed that the muses were the source of all inspiration, actually had no terms corresponding to "to create" or "creator." The expression "poiein" ("to make") sufficed. They believed that the inspiration for originality came from the gods and even invented heavenly creatures - the Muses - as supervisors of human creativity.


According to Plato, Socrates taught that inspired thoughts originate with the gods; ideas spring forth not when a person is rational, but when someone is "beside himself," when "bereft of his senses." Since the gods took away reason before bestowing the gift of inspiration, "thinking" might actually prevent the reception of divinely inspired revelations. The word "inspiration" is based on a Greek word meaning "the God within." The poet was seen as making new things—bringing to life a new world—while the artist merely imitated.


In the visual arts, freedom was limited by the proportions that Polyclitus had established for the human frame, and which he called "the canon" (meaning, "measure"). Plato argued in Timaeus that, to execute a good work, one must contemplate an eternal model. Later the Roman, Cicero, would write that art embraces those things "of which we have knowledge" (quae sciuntur).


In Rome, these Greek concepts were partly shaken. Horace wrote that not only poets but painters as well were entitled to the privilege of daring whatever they wished to (quod libet audendi). In the declining period of antiquity, Philostratus wrote that "one can discover a similarity between poetry and art and find that they have imagination in common." Callistratos averred that "Not only is the art of the poets and prosaists inspired, but likewise the hands of sculptors are gifted with the blessing of divine inspiration." This was something new: classical Greeks had not applied the concepts of imagination and inspiration to the visual arts but had restricted them to poetry. Latin was richer than Greek: it had a term for "creating" (creatio) and for creator, and had two expressions—facere and creare—where Greek had but one, poiein. Still, the two Latin terms meant much the same thing.


Although neither the Greeks nor the Romans had any words that directly corresponded to the word creativity, their art, architecture, music, inventions, and discoveries provide numerous examples of what we would today describe as creative works. At the time, the concept of genius probably came closest to describing the creative talents bringing forth these works.


A fundamental change came in the Christian period: creatio came to designate God's act of "creation from nothing." Creatio thus took on a different meaning than facere ("to make"), and ceased to apply to human functions.


The influential Christian writer Saint Augustine felt that Christianity "played a leading role in the discovery of our power to create" (Albert & Runco, 1999). However, alongside this new, religious interpretation of the expression, there persisted the ancient view that art is not a domain of creativity.This is also seen in the work of Pseudo-Dionysius. Later medieval men such as Hraban the Moor, and Robert Grosseteste in the thirteenth century, thought much the same way. The Middle Ages here went even further than antiquity; they made no exception of poetry: it too had its rules, was an art, and was therefore craft, and not creativity.


Another shift occurred in more modern times. Renaissance men had a sense of their own independence, freedom and creativity, and sought to give voice to this sense of independence and creativity. Baltasar Gracián (1601-1658) wrote: "Art is the completion of nature, as it were 'a second Creator'"; … Raphael, that he shapes a painting according to his idea; Leonardo da Vinci, that he employs "shapes that do not exist in nature"; Michelangelo, that the artist realizes his vision rather than imitating nature. Still more emphatic were those who wrote about poetry: G.P. Capriano held (1555) that the poet's invention springs "from nothing." Francesco Patrizi (1586) saw poetry as "fiction," "shaping," "transformation,"


Finally, at long last, someone ventured to use the word, "creation." He was the seventh-century Polish poet and theoretician of poetry, Maciej Kazimierz Sarbiewski (1595-1640), known as "the last Latin poet." In his treatise, De perfecta poesi, he not only wrote that a poet "invents," "after a fashion builds," but also that the poet "creates anew" (de novo creat). Sarbiewski even added: "in the manner of God" (instar Dei).


By the eighteenth century and the Age of Enlightenment, the concept of creativity was appearing more often in art theory, and was linked with the concept of imagination. There was still resistance to the idea of human creativity which had a triple source. The expression, "creation," was then reserved for creation ex nihilo (Latin: "from nothing"), which was inaccessible to man. Second, creation is a mysterious act, and Enlightenment psychology did not admit of mysteries. Third, artists of the age were attached to their rules, and creativity seemed irreconcilable with rules. The latter objection was the weakest, as it was already beginning to be realized (e.g., by Houdar de la Motte, 1715) that rules ultimately are a human invention.


The Western view of creativity can be contrasted with the Eastern view. For the Hindus, Confucius, Daoists and Buddhists, creation was at most a kind of discovery or mimicry, and the idea of creation from "nothing" had no place in these philosophies and religions.


In the nineteenth century, not only was art regarded as creativity, but "it alone" was so regarded. When later, at the turn of the twentieth century, there began to be discussion of creativity in the sciences (e.g., Jan Łukasiewicz, 1878-1956) and in nature (such as Henri Bergson), this was generally taken as the transference to the sciences of concepts proper to art.


The formal starting point of the scientific study of creativity is sometimes considered to be J. P. Guilford's address to the American Psychological Association in 1950, which helped to popularize the topic. Since then (and indeed, before then), researchers from a variety of fields have studied the nature of creativity from a scientific point of view. Others have taken a more pragmatic approach, teaching practical creativity techniques. Three of the best-known are Alex Osborn's brainstorming techniques, Genrikh Altshuller's Theory of Inventive Problem Solving (TRIZ); and Edward de Bono's lateral thinking.
Creativity in psychology & cognitive science


An early, psychodynamic approach to understanding creativity was proposed by Sigmund Freud, who suggested that creativity arises as a result of frustrated desires for fame, fortune, and love, with the energy that was previously tied up in frustration and emotional tension in the neurosis being sublimated into creative activity. Freud later retracted this view.


Graham Wallas, in his work Art of Thought, published in 1926, presented one of the first models of the creative process. Wallas considered creativity to be a legacy of the evolutionary process, which allowed humans to quickly adapt to rapidly changing environments.


In the Wallas stage model, creative insights and illuminations may be explained by a process consisting of 5 stages:
preparation (preparatory work on a problem that focuses the individual's mind on the problem and explores the problem's dimensions),
incubation (where the problem is internalized into the subconscious mind and nothing appears externally to be happening),
intimation (the creative person gets a "feeling" that a solution is on its way),
illumination or insight (where the creative idea bursts forth from its subconscious processing into conscious awareness); and
verification (where the idea is consciously verified, elaborated, and then applied).


Wallas' model has subsequently been treated as four stages, with "intimation" seen as a sub-stage. There has been some empirical research looking at whether, as the concept of "incubation" in Wallas' model implies, a period of interruption or rest from a problem may aid creative problem-solving. Ward lists various hypotheses that have been advanced to explain why incubation may aid creative problem-solving, and notes how some empirical evidence is consistent with the hypothesis that incubation aids creative problem-solving in that it enables "forgetting" of misleading clues. Absence of incubation may lead the problem solver to become fixated on inappropriate strategies of solving the problem. This work disputed the earlier hypothesis that creative solutions to problems arise mysteriously from the unconscious mind while the conscious mind is occupied on other tasks.


Guilford performed important work in the field of creativity, drawing a distinction between convergent and divergent production (commonly renamed convergent and divergent thinking). Convergent thinking involves aiming for a single, correct solution to a problem, whereas divergent thinking involves creative generation of multiple answers to a set problem. Divergent thinking is sometimes used as a synonym for creativity in psychology literature. Other researchers have occasionally used the terms "flexible" thinking or "fluid intelligence," which are similar to (but not synonymous with) creativity.


In The Act of Creation, Arthur Koestler listed three types of creative individuals: the "Artist," the "Sage," and the "Jester." Believers in this trinity hold all three elements necessary in business and can identify them all in "truly creative" companies as well. Koestler introduced the concept of "bisociation"—that creativity arises as a result of the intersection of two quite different frames of reference.


In 1992, Finke proposed the "Geneplore" model, in which creativity takes place in two phases: a generative phase, where an individual constructs mental representations called preinventive structures, and an exploratory phase where those structures are used to come up with creative ideas. Weisberg argued, by contrast, that creativity only involves ordinary cognitive processes yielding extraordinary results.
Creativity and intelligence


There has been debate in the psychological literature about whether intelligence and creativity are part of the same process (the conjoint hypothesis) or represent distinct mental processes (the disjoint hypothesis). Evidence from attempts to look at correlations between intelligence and creativity from the 1950s onwards regularly suggested that correlations between these concepts were low enough to justify treating them as distinct concepts.


It has been proposed that creativity is the outcome of the same cognitive processes as intelligence, and is only judged as creativity in terms of its consequences. In other words, the process is only judged creative when the outcome of cognitive processes happen to produce something novel, a view which Perkins has termed the "nothing special" hypothesis. However, a very popular model is what has come to be known as "the threshold hypothesis," stating that intelligence and creativity are more likely to be correlated in general samples, but that this correlation is not found in people with IQs over 120. An alternative perspective, Renculli's three-rings hypothesis, sees giftedness as based on both intelligence and creativity.







The frontal lobe (shown in blue) is thought to play an important role in creativity
Neurology of creativity


Neurological research has found that creative innovation requires "coactivation and communication between regions of the brain that ordinarily are not strongly connected." Highly creative people who excel at creative innovation tend to differ from others in three ways: they have a high level of specialized knowledge, they are capable of divergent thinking mediated by the frontal lobe, and they are able to modulate neurotransmitters such as norepinephrine in their frontal lobe. Thus, the frontal lobe appears to be the part of the cortex that is most important for creativity.
Creativity and madness







Henry Moore's Reclining Figure
Creativity in art & literature


Most people associate creativity with the fields of art and literature. In these fields, "originality" is considered to be a sufficient condition for creativity, unlike other fields where both "originality" and "appropriateness" are necessary.


Within the different modes of artistic expression, one can postulate a continuum extending from "interpretation" to "innovation." Established artistic movements and genres pull practitioners to the "interpretation" end of the scale, whereas original thinkers strive towards the "innovation" pole. Note that we conventionally expect some "creative" people (dancers, actors, orchestral members, etc.) to perform (interpret) while allowing others (writers, painters, composers, etc.) more freedom to express the new and the different.


The word "creativity" conveys an implication of constructing novelty without relying on any existing constituent components (ex nihilo - compare creationism). Contrast alternative theories, for example:
artistic inspiration, which provides the transmission of visions from divine sources such as the Muses; a taste of the Divine.
artistic evolution, which stresses obeying established ("classical") rules and imitating or appropriating to produce subtly different but unshockingly understandable work.


In the art, practice, and theory of Davor Dzalto, human creativity is taken as a basic feature of both the personal existence of human beings and art production.
Creativity in science, engineering and design







Isaac Newton's law of gravity is popularly attributed to a creative leap he experienced when observing a falling apple.


Creativity is also seen as being increasingly important in a variety of other professions. Architecture and industrial design are the fields most often associated with creativity, and more generally the fields of design and design research. These fields explicitly value creativity, and journals such as Design Studies have published many studies on creativity and creative problem solving.


Fields such as science and engineering have, by contrast, experienced a less explicit (but arguably no less important) relation to creativity. Simonton shows how some of the major scientific advances of the twentieth century can be attributed to the creativity of individuals. This ability will also be seen as increasingly important for engineers in years to come.
Creativity in business


Creativity, broadly conceived, is essential to all successful business ventures. Entrepreneurs use creativity to define a market, promote a product or service, and make unconventional deals with providers, partners and lenders. Narrowly speaking, there is a growing sector of "creative industries" — capitalistically generating (generally non-tangible) wealth through the creation and exploitation of intellectual property or through the provision of creative services.

In many cases in the context of examining creativity in organizations, it is useful to explicitly distinguish between "creativity" and "innovation."

In such cases, the term "innovation" is often used to refer to the entire process by which an organization generates creative new ideas and converts them into novel, useful and viable commercial products, services, and business practices, while the term "creativity" is reserved to apply specifically to the generation of novel ideas by individuals, as a necessary step within the innovation process.


Some researchers have taken a social-personality approach to the measurement of creativity. In these studies, personality traits such as independence of judgement, self-confidence, attraction to complexity, aesthetic orientation, and risk-taking are used as measures of the creativity of individuals. Other researchers have related creativity to the trait, "openness to experience."

Daniel Pink, repeating arguments posed throughout the twentieth century, has argued that we are entering a new age where creativity is becoming increasingly important. In this "conceptual age," we need to foster and encourage "right-directed thinking" (representing creativity and emotion) over "left-directed thinking" (representing logical, analytical thought).


The following is summary of techniques to foster creativity, including approaches developed by both academia and industry:

Establishing purpose and intention

Building basic skills
Encouraging acquisitions of domain-specific knowledge
Stimulating and rewarding curiosity and exploration
Building motivation, especially internal motivation
Encouraging confidence and a willingness to take risks
Focusing on mastery and self-competition
Promoting supportable beliefs about creativity
Providing opportunities for choice and discovery
Developing self-management (metacognitive skills)
Teaching techniques and strategies for facilitating creative performance
Providing balance