You might also adapt this list to marketing - everything a business does is marketing at the end of the day.

The forms you ask your customers to fill out, the minutes they wait in line, the dizzying phone recoding systems are all part of your company's brand. Few organizations are starting to pay attention to those experiences and coming up with new solutions.In mind of the innovator: taming the traps of traditional thinking, Matt May writes about the seven sins of solutions.

Traditional ways of thinking prevent us from divining the most accurate—and elegant—of solutions to any problem solving situation, he writes. How would those ideas play in customer service?

(1.) Shortcutting - making a beeline for the solution without first analyzing the root cause of the problem could lead you to drawing the wrong conclusions. Our brain is trained to jump to conclusions, to take shortcuts, and experience compounds that trait. However, it is also experience that teaches us that root cause analysis is helpful to know which questions you're answering. Incidentally, when you start thinking about problems differently, you also come up with entirely new ways of doing things, which may lead to ... read more >>

This is from Ric Roberts of Swirrl, a company that offers a hosted online workspace for sharing knowledge. The Swirrl Blog is a good source of information on business collaboration and knowledge management. - Stewart

Email works great for short messages intended for one person, where you just want to alert the recipient to something, and no further discussion is required. But when you start to include more people, and they all start chipping in with their responses, email starts to break down as an efficient medium.

Say there are five other people in your team, and you want to get their feedback on a report that you intend to send to a client. If you send out an email to all of them, asking for their advice, you might get 3 or 4 responses back: some with revised versions of the report, some with notes at the end and some with comments interspersed within your original text. A couple of people might have ‘CC’d everyone else in your team when they replied, where others might have just replied directly to you.

I’m sure you can see where this is leading. Your team ends up with multiple conflicting versions of the report, some of which aren’t available to everyone involved. Holding ... read more >>

Social media is not about Facebook, Twitter, blogs, yada yada - and if you really want to understand it you have to look behind the scenes and see what is going on.  Here's the story, its about the separation of content from its means of distribution.  Sounds rather bland until you actually grasp what this means.

From the year dot until Gutenberg’s invention of moveable type and the printing press, information had no means of mass distribution, except through storytelling.

Gutenberg’s invention made the widespread distribution of information possible and it also cemented a marriage between information and its means of distribution that lasted for 600 years. Within this marriage, distribution became the dominant partner because it almost always cost more money to distribute stuff than it did to create it in the first place. This relationship between information and distribution - which could be termed the Gutenberg principle - meant that the flow of information within our society became institutionalised to generate the revenues necessary to pay for the high costs involved (printing presses, TV and radio networks etc).

The institutions that evolved around the...