Information can stimulate the imagination, suggest fresh strategies, or help you recognize great business opportunities. Always keep one ear open for interesting, surprising, or inspiring facts. Subscribe to a diverse range of publications, read interesting blogs, and make a point of talking to people of all sorts, both in your industry and beyond it, to keep you in the flow of new ideas and facts. Also, ask other people for their ideas.

Take advantage of the growing world of on-line social networking to talk to people about your product and how they view it. If you’re on MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, any of the many blog Web sites, or any other online social network, chat up your friends and virtual friends for opinions, suggestions, and ideas. Much of what you get back will be chaff, but you may find the grain of a great new marketing idea in there, too.

When asking for input and information on Web sites and in virtual Web communities, be honest about who you are and why you’re asking for advice. If you tell people you’re in charge of marketing your product and want to know what they think of your new ad, many people will offer their views freely. If, however, you pretend to be someone outside the company who’s just trying to insert business questions into an innocent chat, people will sniff you out and be angry with you for subverting their social network for business purposes.

Honesty and transparency are the keys to successful research in online communities.

Don’t fall into the trap of spending all your time online, though. Make a point of talking to people face to face, too. Carry an idea notebook in your pocket or purse and try to collect a few contributions from people every day. This habit gets you asking salespeople, employees, customers, and strangers on the street for their ideas and suggestions. You never know when a suggestion may prove valuable. Lee Iacocca kept an idea notebook in his early days as a marketing guy in the auto industry — and out of those jottings came the idea for the Ford Mustang, one of the biggest brand successes in history.