For some reason, perhaps connected with my sad lack of a decent social life, I've been thinking a lot lately about ideas.

I come not from PR but from a journalism then an advertising background. Advertising is a business that's all about ideas (although in the ad biz ideas are called concepts because that sounds way more impressive and you can charge a lot more for them).

When ideas are needed in advertising, account management brief a creative team (a copywriter and an art director who always work together). The creative team then go away, look terribly important and busy and artistic for a few days, and come back with a bunch of ideas (sorry, concepts) of which the best three are then presented to the client.

It's a hugely inefficient process. It's a bit different here at Octopus. We have brainstorming sessions and they're all well and good. But for slightly smaller projects, people use the company-wide email address to send out a shout for contributions.

So as an Octopede you'll be sitting at your desk doing your normal job and suddenly a company-wide e-mail will arrive asking for ideas about a name for this or an approach for that or a clever way of doing something else.

And it works like a charm!

In minutes, ideas come bouncing out of the oddest places. People who work on a tech account, send off really good ideas for an environmental client. And vice versa. People whose job has nothing to do with copy come up with better lines than the so-called professional writers (i.e. -- me).

And it all happens in about twenty minutes.

It's far more efficient than the ad biz creative team model and even more effective than our normal brainstorms.

So I got to thinking about why.

And I've come to the conclusion that our e-mail brainstorms allow everyone to contribute at whatever level they're comfortable with.

You can ignore it. You can get involved. You can build on and enhance someone else's idea. Or you can shift the entire discussion in a brand-new direction. You can do whatever you like.

These online brainstorms are fast-paced so there's an incentive to think on your feet and get involved. And, most importantly, they're fun.

So next time you need a good idea, think about firing off a company-wide e-mail and see what comes back as 'reply all.'

The response may surprise you.

Mark