It’s not secret I’m a photography guy.  I love photos.  I love cameras.  I love film (digital or real).  I love the magic you can capture and make with camera gear.  If you were sign up for a photography class you’d learn a great number of things.  You’ll cover the basics like f-stops, shutter speeds, and lens selections.  You’ll also cover many of the “rules” of photography like, Sunny 16, never putting a horizon line in the middle of a photo and of course the rule of 3rds.

These are great rules, principles and philosophies that have a place and serve a purpose.  You need to understand these rules and “best practices” so that you can eventually break them.  The masters of photography, the ones who’ve created work that stands out have learned that you can’t simply rely on best practices.

If you took 100 photographers to a location and asked them to shoot a subject, leveraging only “best practices” you’d end up with 100 nearly identical photos.  The best practices would in effect stunt the creativity of the photographers.  This is the classic case of asking everyone to follow the paint by numbers chart explicitly.

Greatness does not come from conformity.  Greatness does not come from doing what everyone else does.  Greatness does not come from following the crowd.  Greatness does not come from applying the same model, that everyone else learned during their MBA program, to the problem.

No, greatness comes from understanding the best practices and then figuring out how to extend and break them.  Greatness comes from blending history with vision.  You can’t forget the past.  You can’t ignore what has happened before.  You can’t discount the value of best practices and those that have leveraged them for success.  But, if you simply copy another company’s model and leverage the same boring best practices that the “industry” has adopted you’ll never differentiate, stand out or be memorable.  You’ll simply float into the seam of sameness that has plagued far too many companies.

In the movie, Almost Famous, Frances McDormand’s character says in a conversation with Billy Crudup’s character, “be bold, and mighty forces will come to your aid.” She indicates she’s quoting Goethe. There are many ways to interpret the quote. Certainly, as a marketer, one way to interpret it is, if you are bold in your thinking, your marketing and your product innovation, consumers will come to your “aid” and become loyal. Just ask the Dyson guy, being bold seems to have generated that type of fait, goodwill and sales from a very supportive consumer base.

As consumers, we want bold. We want different. We want things that standout. We want to defy convention. Marketers, are you listening?

The word innovation has always perplexed me.  It’s a vague term really.  What might seem innovative to one person can be banal to another.  You can’t really measure innovation because we can’t really agree on what defines it.  Yet, despite how ambiguous the word innovation is, it’s something every organization craves.

My current title is Director, Interactive Marketing Innovation.  My job is to be ahead of the curve and not be recommending things published in the trade pubs like AdAge and AdWeek.  Not because they aren’t great publications, but because often they’re 6 months behind the curve.  My expectations for myself are high.  I pride myself on being always in the know and more importantly always thinking about the interactive space in new, different, and sometimes unexplored ways.

Many times, I fail.  Failing is part of the job.  There’s not better example of innovation coming through failure than the Post It Note.  Half the fun in trying to be innovative is failing.  You learn from failure if you don’t let failure beat you down.

The toughest aspect of innovation is remaining hungry and committed to innovating.  Sounds crazy right?  Seriously though, think about it.  There’s plenty of examples of companies that were once innovative, who failed to continue innovating, and ended up a dinosaur.  Case in point, Polaroid.  These guys were the original creators of the instant photo…or what has now become the digital photo.  They opted not to invest in digital photography and where are they today?  Bankrupt.

See here’s the thing with innovation.  There’s always someone else out there who’s hungrier than you.  There’s some 16 year old wonder child right now in his garage concepting the next evolution of Facebook.  That’s the thought that keeps me on my toes.

I’ve been thinking about innovation a great deal lately; specifically innovation as it relates to twitter.  Twitter is being hailed as an innovative tool.  I sorta disagree.  My contention is that when twitter first launched it was innovative. But, where’s the innovation been since they launched?  There most innovative enhancement was adding a search feature.  Except they didn’t create the twitter search engine.  Instead they opted to “innovate” by acquiring Summize.  Is that really innovative?  Go ahead look back at the evolution of twitter, you’ll be hard pressed to find any new and innovative features beyond adding search.

Most of the twitter innovation is taking place AROUND twitter.  Twitter’s very open API makes innovating around twitter easy and fast.  Making their API so accessible has helped make possible tools like Tweetdeck, Tweetie, Twitter Grader, Skimmer, and Twitter Analyzer.  These tools offers features and options that twitter has elected to neglect.  For example with Tweetdeck I can segment the people I follow into different groups.  Tweetie lets me manage multiple accounts, which is quite useful when you are representing yourself and a company/brand.  Twitter Analyzer lets me pinpoint where in the world (using Google Maps) my followers are from.  Those are some pretty damn cool and useful features, if you ask me.

The only problem with all of this innovation taking place around twitter is that there’s little to no brand or experience consistency.  Tweetie, Tweetdeck, and Twitter.com all offer completely different and unique experiences with twitter.  Would this ever fly with Ritz Carlton, BMW, Tiffany & Co., Pepsi, or McDonalds?  We’ve had this concept of consistency in the brand experience beaten into our heads since the beginning of time.  How can this be a good thing for twitter?  I suppose you could argue that by having so many different ways to interface with twitter, users are in control, and will be more apt to stay loyal.  Me, I don’t buy it.

You’d think with all the great features being offered elsewhere, twitter would pick the best of the best features and start integrating them into Twitter.com.  If all these other individuals and companies can innovate, why can’t twitter?  Have the folks at twitter gotten lazy?  Are they content to just be the API and let others innovate around them?

Maybe twitter’s innovation angle is the API or maybe innovation is so nebulous I can’t see the innovation taking place.  What do you think?