My partner Ming came down to Penang on Monday for a business trip mainly to meet up with the team at Netccentric and plan our overall marketing strategy (since our website is due for launching soon).
The little office I work in has gotten a little crowded since with me working at my usual desk but Ming taking up a position right beside me.
So once in a while out of anger and annoyance… I would shoot an angry look at him to remind him that he’s taking my space!!!
And he would then shoot back a rather confused look wondering what the heck I was staring at him for…. since obviously.. IT WAS HIS OFFICE TOO!!!
So before tensions got too high, we decided to call a marketing meeting to involve the technical team of the company to brainstorm for ideas on how to market our product.
Now Ming and I have always wanted Netccentric to be a “forward-looking” company.
So rather than having the typical brainstorming session that has people shout out ideas, Ming suggested we try something new.
Ming was the Chairperson of the meeting so he directed everyone on what to do.
First, everyone was to take a piece of paper and fold it to divide the paper into 9 parts.
Then in each part, everyone was to come up with 9 ideas of his/her own and write it in his/her own piece of paper without talking to anyone else about it.
After that, we took the piece of paper, tore it up to 9 pieces (one idea on each piece) and then spread it out on the floor in front of us.
Then of the 9 pieces in front of us, we each took out 3 ideas that we thought were crap
and chucked it into a basket.
Then of the remaining 6 pieces for each person, we separated it into two groups.
3 pieces from each person to go into a pile that was what the person thought was the BEST of his ideas and the remaining 3 pieces per person was to go into a pile for “Second Best” ideas.
So there you have it in this picture.
The CRAP ideas were in the basket.
The Best Ideas on the left.
And the Second Best on the right.
Then we wrote all the “BEST” ideas (15 of them) on the white board and discussed them altogether. 
We expanded on each of those 15 BEST ideas and when we were done with those we moved on to the 15 SECOND BEST ideas and then on to the 15 CRAP ideas.
Mind you… the crap ideas are often good.
Just that it’s sometimes so silly that people are too embarrassed to call it a great idea themselves 😛
By the end of the meeting, we all came up with some very good marketing ideas and one revolutionary one (which I can’t discuss here at the moment).
We prepared meeting minutes which stated exactly which person had to follow-up on each idea (Ming and I got the bulk of the work since the technical team was already buried in work).
So our brainstorming session turned out to be quite a success.
But of the sea of ideas we had, some turned out to be quite funny.
In my “CRAP” pile, one of the ideas I wrote was “Company Musical/Soundtrack”.
WHAT WAS I HIGH ON?!?!
Either ways… we had some great ideas there… something that many of you will see in time to come.
So when our company has launched and you’ve seen its creative marketing campaign somewhere, remember that the idea probably came about in this boardroom meeting of a small dotcom company.
Timothy Tiah – Co-Founder of Colony, Kuala Lumpur Co-Working Space