Creativity

Creativity is at the heart of every successful product or service. It is what makes these products or services unique and demanded by customers. Take Google for example, it thrives off the creativity of the people that it hires. They understand that the key to their success lies in the hands of their employees and they value the ideas that they have to offer. Google individually-taylor's its compensation packages and provides its employees with state of the art facilities with gourmet chefs, on-site doctor, shuttle service, roller hockey, outdoor volleyball court, pools, and even gym, dry cleaning, car wash, and hair stylist services.
New Media has fostered creativity in that it has given corporations new mediums to market and extract customer preferences. Companies have integrating social media marketing techniques by marketing through social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter. They also use Social Networking sites to gain ideas for new products or product upgrades from the customers themselves. This low cost medium of gaining valuable information such as product preferences directly from the customers allows a company to save on R&D costs and because the ideas come directly from the customer, there is a good chance that the product or service will meet the needs of the customer.
Lets look at the article, "Twitter Serves Up Ideas From Its Followers" by Clarie Cain Miller. In the article she notes how companies monitored Twitter to find out what their customers like and what they wanted changed and how Twitter followed suit. In the article she notes how Twitter added features such as Lists and Retweets which were features generated by Twitter users. Another user generated feature of Twitter was its hash tags which are hyperlinks and allow users to click and see all posts on that topic. Not limited to Twitter, Ford Motors also noted that customers were modifying the Sync on their cars and has invited university students to design new features for its Sync system.
In conclusion, creativity is not something that only a select few individuals possess, but it is something that we are all born with. With all the new media tools that we have to choose from, it is easier for us to put our thoughts out for everyone to see. They allow us to express ourselves either as ourselves or as an anonymous commenter but it encourages us to throw our thoughts and ideas out in the open where someone can take it and turn it into something better.