In Case You Missed It: November Meeting Recap

On November 7, The Rogers Group hosted a creativity workshop, Tap Into Your Creative Side. The speakers, Brenda Lynch, SVP, The Rogers Group, and Rose Maciejewski, SVP and leader of the technology practice, Ruder Finn West, offered tips on how to bring out personal creativity and how to create out-of-the-box PR campaigns. Below are a few words of wisdom they shared with the group of over 20 young professionals.

Brenda Lynch discussed the root of being a creative PR professional – tapping into your personal creativity. She offered the following tips:

· Be a kid again - discover things and places in a new and interactive way. Be insatiably curious. It helps to actually play with kids regularly.
· Seek inspiration at all times - examples include looking at billboards and bumper stickers, reading, experiencing nature and interacting with others. It's important to be a pop culture junkie too. Have your finger on the pulse of today's trends.
· Recharge your batteries - research shows that exercise and being stress-free help your creativity
· Hold a brainstorm with colleagues - PR professionals rely on brainstorms when beginning or re-evaluating a campaign, or sometimes to get short-term ideas. A few types of brainstorms are:

Switch or Dueling Brainstorms - two separate brainstorms occurring at the same time in different places
Spider - a variation of Switch - Groups of 8 switch one member out every 8 minutes
"Taking" From Others - focus on what is going on in the news/culture, then hone it to the best ideas for the client
Field Trip - get into character by visiting a place where the target audience frequents
Informal or Stealth brainstorms - take colleagues to lunch to discusss your current challenge, send out an email for ideas or post papers in the office kitchen for colleagues to write down ideas when walking by

Rose Maciejewski discussed implementing creative ideas into PR campaigns by highlighting several of her agency's recent campaigns including:

· The Launch of Myride.com - to fit Myride's consumer-driven style, one of her team's creative pitches used for driving traffic to Myride was naming the best and worst car names and including an opportunity for visitors to vote on the worst car names.
· Support.com's YouTube Video - a funny video was created by Rose's team to promote Support.com's services using the classic attention grabber - sex. The video has had more than 4,000 views to-date.
· Hook up with TiVo - Ruder Finn's client, TiVo, partnered with The Bachelor host Chris Harrison to offer one lucky contest winner the chance to be the "perfect match" for a new TiVo HD DVR (in other words, to win the product).