We’ve all have been there, a bathroom in a business that was not a memorable experience, unless it was so disgusting it left a dreadful, bad impression.

Roadside gas stations are notorious for this. But, I’ve also been in some pretty high-brow retail stores where the loo was a lot less than lovely. In fact, it was missed many opportunities to connect their brand with customers, clients and employees, often and intimately.

If you think about, when someone visits your room of resting it’s a pretty uninterrupted experience, where small details surface and a lot of messaging is communicated.

Take a look at these 3 environments and see how they could be translated into a brand impression.

Unfortunately I see this one a lot.
1) A nasty, un kept facility with no obvious thought about design or decor, multi-used as an unorganized, cluttered stockroom and no basic supplies in sight.

Hmmm is this how do they run their business too?

2) An immaculate space, friendly signage about plumbing sensitivity, interesting art, painted walls and lighting that make your look great, not sick and subtle branding details that further the story about the brand.

This feels good. What a nice experience, I believe this company is thoughtful and these small details tell me more about who they are.

3) I’m blown away. This 2-minute bathroom excursion is so unique. Every detail is memorable from the lighting, to eco-friendly fixtures to the branded soap products.

I can’t wait to tell my friends about this. This company is so creative, innovative and distinct. This makes me feel special.

So which one is your company? And what do you need to do to bring the toilet up to total brand standards?

Here are some ideas to pump up your bathroom branding.
1)Change something out regularly. So people want to visit. Make it a seasonally experience.
2)Consider leveraging more than one sense. What can you do to the scent, the sounds, touch and textures or visuals to make it more memorable?
3)Inject some humor in to the room. Provide custom reading material with a brand twist.
4)Think about how can you imprint your brand graphics into the experience? On the soap, tissues, floor, ceiling or wall tiles.

Here are a couple of my favorite restrooms experiences.

Oddpodz is fortunate to be housed in the Walker Brands Building in Tampa. Walker Brands specializes in experiential, destination branding and their building is the first “Gold” LEED certified property in the city. Which means they were recognized by the U.S. Green Building Council’s leading-edge system for designing and constructing a sustainable, energy-efficient and high-performance building meeting key eco-supporting standards.
The entire space is awesome and a creative haven, but the bathrooms are a great example of a thoughtful on-brand experience. The 8,400-square-foot building has four uniquely wonderful lavatories, all delivering a cool and memorable experience. All designed with a consistent style, each sport a wall-to-wall photo graphic depicting a story and travel experience. One is Fenway Park, one is an aquarium with whale sharks, one is Times Square in New York City and one is a Roman scene. In addition to energy-saving and beautifully-design fixtures, they all have life like sound effects from the featured destination.

My other example is not quite as full drama, but equally as on-brand. The company is a consulting practice and investment banking firm called Santa Fe Capital. It’s owned by emerging business guru and author David Silver. David is very creative, not your typical finance guy and loves art and collects it. His office is packed with an eclectic mix of paintings, sculptures and photographs. And so is his restroom, wall to ceiling, you feel like you are at the MOMA and not in a small business bathroom. It’s impressive and memorable.

If you want to see some other noted restroom environments for more inspiration check out this link highlighting 10 of the most unique restrooms in the world.

Your company toilet, bathroom, power room or what ever you choose to call it is an important branding touch point, don’t to waste the opportunity. Have you seen a cool and on brand bathroom? If so, share it with us.

The past few days I’ve suffered from a less than productive head. I absolutely could not get anything finished or even put a dent in a project. The more I tried, the less I achieved. It was like my brain was at a stop sign and then I ran out of gas. I could not think, create or solve any problems. After a couple hours of useless work, I started feeling very stressed and then I couldn’t even focus on what I was doing. Why does this happen? What can you do, when your brain feel less than productive?

This theory is not scientific. But for me, I think your brain gets clogged up and too many “ta does” and stress can actually immobilize your brain’s function. I noticed that when I stare at my computer screen for long periods of time, this brain freeze happens the most.

Get way from your computer and move around.

My good pal Doug Stevenson explains in his CD series on “How to Deliver a Dynamite Speech” that too much typing on your computer will keep your brain and your thoughts in the left sided, logical mode and will make solving problems and being creative a very difficult task. He suggests creative thinking should happen away from the computer. He also recommends moving around and that sitting still does not empower creative thinking. I agree with that idea. After I go for a run or play tennis my brain is on fire with fresh ideas. And I’m in great mood.

Manage disruptions and doing things tomorrow.
Another friend of Oddpodz is Mark McGuinness. Mark lives across the pond, is a poet and leads Wishfulthinking a consultancy for creative professionals, agencies and studios. Mark suggests managing disruptions like email and responding to clients, along with doing more things tomorrow and not today. Mark’s work and blog has been hugely helpful in moving me out of the brain freeze zone. Two of his brilliant pieces of work are featured in Oddpodz FREE Biz Findz. Both are FREE ebooks. One is called Time Management for Creative People and the other is called How to Motivate Creative People. I recommend both reading both of this and visiting his blog.

I’m out of the brain freeze now. Thank goodness. I know it will be back. I continue to battle this state of mind when my plate is very full. But, I am making progress. When I feel it happening, I change my environment, schedule uninterrupted time and get away from my computer.

Tampa TweetUp.

Saturday night I was drinking red wine, munching on pretzels and tweeting with some 60 new tweeple at Walker Brands. Why spend three hours with a bunch of strangers and their keypads seeing random text notes under 160 characters of what they are doing, thinking and why anyone should care on a big screen?

Copyright 2009 Michael Alex Wasylik

I was curious.
This was the fifth gathering sponsored by The Tampa TweetUp. It was organized by Tampa Bloggers’ Founder Josh Carrico and Brand Tampa Creator Julia Gorzka, both self-proclaimed social media junkies. The first official Tampa TweetUp was held in March.

I’ve been tweeting for a couple months, follow me @Brandingdiva. I see how it can be a good communication tool and a way to bring awareness to your business. Has any of this tweeting translated into cha ching, can’t report that yet.

Was it fun and worth my tweet time?
Yes. I met a bunch of cool people (bloggers, marketers, and business owners) that I would likely have passed by in my regular life walk. Many of these tweeters have checked out Oddpodz and signed up. That’s a good thing. I also connected with a couple reporters who could become meaningful contacts and I witnessed how an online phenomenon like twitter expands its purpose and passion offline. And as a bonus the TweetUp hosts facilitated 30-minute think tanks where guests could collaborate on some creative issues and learn about more about tweeting.

If your community offers TweetUps, I’d say check them out and support the effort. If your community is not hosting TweetUps yet, jump in and be a tweet leader. It’s a powerful new way to further bridge technology and business relationships.

For more on the Tampa Tweet, visit Tampa TweetUp, Tampa Bloggers’ and Brand Tampa. And note the Twitter Hash Tag is #tbtweet. Tag your posts with this code and all the Tampa TweetUper will get the tweet.

Oddpodz is not a Facebook and not a Linkedin and does not want to be.

While we appreciate both of their roles in business, they are enormous tracks of land, full of weeds, bugs, ugly and beautiful flowers. They are general spaces and if you are not careful, you can easily get lost.

The mega sites growth has been remarkable, the combined two sites of Facebook and Linkedin is over 250 million people strong. Social networks have truly changed the way people communicate, get info and even how brands market. It is a whole new ballgame.

In 2006, we started the Oddpodz community with the goal of building a place for creative-minded people to unite, share ideas and gain stuff that makes a difference. Like a lot of young companies, we have good days and days we ask ourselves, why us, why this? Yep, that can be frustrating at times, but we continue to move forward and grow. Our community has gone from two people with a passion and an idea to a wonderful network of talent, creativity and growing businesses. We touch over 10,000 creative people every week.

Jocelyn and I have been working hard at making the Oddpodz site more useful, easier to get around and richer with ideas and content that helps you prosper.

The Oddpodz team is a very small group of dedicated creative souls.

In addition to the founders, we are like to recognize other important people that are adding to the growth and value of our community. Some have been with us since the beginning, others have recently joined the team. They include: Jack Omlor, Kristen Friend, Michelle Carrigan, Ann Marie Gardner, Son Nguyen, Kyle Williams, Shaina Bindeman, Heidi and Victor Morrill and the Wyndstorm development team. In addition to working with Oddpodz, they all have their own gigs too. You can learn more about their talents through the Oddpodz network search tool.

We are now ready to take Oddpodz to the next level

But we can’t do it without you. The real power of community comes from active connections and collaboration. Our focus these past few years has been to build the Oddpodz framework. While it’s not perfect, we have a lot of engine power ready to help you. To activate more of the energy in our community this week we will be adding several new things and we invite you to check them out, give us your feedback and participate in.

•We will be launching a Creative Inspiration Contest to help all businesses get past these touch times.

•We’ve added new forum discussions and will be actively posting to them. They include: Book reviews, lessons learned and a Web site critique.

•And we are most excited about our new dedicated section of FREE Biz Findz. We have over 75 awesome, totally free tools and resources to help you success. This list grows every week.

•We’ve enhanced our bi-weekly Idea Engine Newsletter with forum and blog posts too.

Thanks for all your support! We look forward to big year!