I often write about the inspiration I take from Chip and Dan Heath’s business book Made to Stick. The book presents very compelling reasons why some ideas thrive while others die. According to the authors, there are six principles of sticky ideas – ideas that are easily remembered and passed along virally.

The book and its valuable lessons have been top of mind for me lately as I raced to prepare my company and its products for relaunch. Most importantly, the principle of unexpectedness or unexpectedness in the service of core principles. Here’s an excerpt from the book:

PRINCIPLE 2: UNEXPECTEDNESS
How do we get our audience to pay attention to our ideas, and how do we maintain their interest when we need time to get the ideas across? We need to violate people’s expectations. We need to be counterintuitive. We can use surprise — an emotion whose function is to increase alertness and cause focus — to grab people’s attention. We can engage people’s curiosity over a long period of time by systematically “opening gaps” in their knowledge — and then filling those gaps.

I’ll be tackling the pain of knowledge gaps in a future post on SEO and link baiting. But today, I wanted to share a great tool for seeking inspiration by hunting for cool (it just sounds so uncool saying that): TrendHunter unlocking cool is the world’s largest community dedicated to trend spotting and cool hunting. It is chock full of surprising, unexpected and “cool” ideas and products that you’ve probably never heard about. It strikes me that this must be the source of many of the “breaking news” posts on popular blogs today. Might even provide a good blog post or two for you.

Got any other great ideas for seeking ways to surprise your customers?