In the race for influence and audience attention sometimes we forget to take time for disconnected tranquility. Such was the case with a recent visit to a local Barnes and Noble, an ideal location for inspiration, critical thinking, and self exploration. After all, it's good to know thyself!

A recent article from strategy + business caught my attention and is based on the idea of How to Make a Region Innovative. With today's talk of innovation, creativity, cause, impact, and progress across industry, the time to talk about real fundamental building blocks of creating real genius and thriving environments is now.

The following are a collection of tidbits from the outstanding article that are sure to prove vital for those interested in building a thriving community and one in which ideation breeds innovation, technology fuels growth, collaboration adds to creativity, and regions are changed.

Clusters can be vitally important to a country’s innovation and prosperity, but when they are misunderstood, they do not realize their potential.

To generate one groundbreaking technological development after another, innovation must be embedded within long-lived social institutions and networks.

Four different sectors must be linked together: government, business, civil society (not-for-profit organizations), and academia.

This is called the quad.

In most communities, this quad alignment can be deliberately developed if leaders put three measures into effect. First, they should construct cross-sector networks that are richer, more diverse, and more deliberately structured than those of the past.

Think synergy.

We now know how to accelerate the process by drawing on the collective efforts of leaders in all four sectors of the quad.

Second, these leaders should continually reform the way their organizations are managed — creating a climate that fosters innovation, and adjusting the incentives and organizational structures to reward creativity and collaboration.

Reinforcement breeds solutions.

Third, leaders should invest in talented, innovative individuals, attracting, retaining, and empowering the right mix of people who can foster serial innovation.

Always hire people better then yourself.

To build a thriving community requires the collaborative efforts of several entities. Here's where it gets really interesting and should capture the attention of most visitors to this blog. Business.

Businesses provide the cluster with its economic engine. Because they will close down if they fail to innovate successfully, they take the many risks that innovation entails. The private sector furnishes a large part of the capital needed to fund strategic innovation. 

What does this mean for business? Does this confirm the work and efforts of your organization? Where can we add value to this equation of building an innovative region? 

The answers are inspiring and thought provoking helping to shed some light on the power of people, press, process, and product the four fundamentals of creativity.

Winning friends and influencing people is the heart and soul of social media. Individuals and brands are on a mission to capture audience attention, build trust, and turn fans into advocates. In "How to Win Friends and Influence People", American writer and lecturer Dale Carnegie offers readers several tips, tools, and strategies for making new friends comprising a relevant study for today's students of new media.

Six Ways to Make People Like You

1. Become genuinely interested in other people.
2. Smile.
3. Remember that a person's name is, to him or her, the sweetest and most important sound in any language.
4. Be a good listener. Encourage others to talk about themselves.
5. Talk in the terms of the other person's interest.
6. Make the other person feel important and do it sincerely.

Clearly, success is built on the art of personalization.

Some business owners make the mistake of trying to appeal to the widest audience possible. That's a great way to lose everyone at once. When someone reads your headline, they need to feel an instant sense of recognition that you are speaking directly to them. Personalization of the message and a consumer's response to that message are all-important.

(Source: Web Marketing for Small Businesses)

Define your niche and then focus on being the best at what you do. Excellent insights for those wanting to start something great.

Participating in social media takes a tremendous amount of investment. Inputs can range in time and scope making it necessary to measure the amount of return that one hopes to gain from tweets, blog posts, and other various forms of content. True success in the digital landscape requires substantial investment of an individual's time and effort.

Benchmarks

Before investing in social media, marketers and storytellers alike must identify concise objectives. These goals will help keep all efforts focused on the tasks at hand and open up opportunities for improvements. Benchmarks allow an individual to identify their target results.

However, before we focus too much time on retweets, likes, comments, subscribers, friends, followers, listeners, and so forth...let's stop for a moment to recognize the value of residual returns on our social media investment.

Here are a few questions to ask as you begin on placing a value on your social media marketing efforts:

• Is your content so good that people actually gained value from reading or sharing?
• Do you place enough of an importance on the value of reciprocity?
• Is social capital a vital component of your strategic efforts?
• Is your network (comprised of friends, followers, etc.) coming back for more?
• Does your audience care about you enough to actually share your content even when there's nothing new to share?

Residual returns on social capital can provide a unique benchmark for measuring the success of your continued investment in social media.

However, some still forget about the ultimate shortcut to engagement and relevance.

Content.

Quality content can be the key that unlocks new doors of opportunity and influence.

Content matters.

Social media has become the focus of many individuals, organizations, and brands looking to connect with today’s online audiences. Success stories motivate key decision makers to participate and explore their own social media plan of attack.

However, questions are bound to arise as to how to approach this new medium and arena of social interaction and engagement.

Brian Solis offers some good perspective on the key responsibilities associated with managing social media:

“Once we let go of the rope in this veritable tug of war of who owns social media and realize that no one necessarily owns this diverse medium, we can then concentrate our efforts on shaping the perception of our brand and contribute to its sense of value and purpose within the influential communities that define our markets.

Social Media, at the very least, galvanizes the socialization of businesses, down to departmental and individual roles. Service, marketing, PR, HR, sales, finance, product, will maintain a social presence as dictated and demanded by their communities, thus evoking the movement from social CRM (sCRM) to SRM.“

Social relationship management is a responsibility of every extension of your organization.