Last Friday, BP’s CEO Tony Hayward had the quote of the day: “The Gulf of Mexico is a very big ocean. The amount of volume of oil and dispersant we are putting into it is tiny in relation to the total water volume.” TINY? This “tiny” problem is a big problem for BP’s brand image. They keep getting deeper into a PR mess. First, they said the spill was not their fault, but did say it was their responsibility to clean it up. Then they said they will pay for all “legitimate” claims. They need to begin to listen to their PR firm, and not solely to their lawyers. I hope they’ve learned from the backlash of their “tiny” comments and will begin a public relations strategy that is straight-forward, transparent and honest. The brand will be judged by their response. I am waiting to see if BP can restore their image in the upcoming months, but I am only one tiny person in relation to the total volume of consumers in this world.

Read more on the impact of the spill.

If you had a hard time with the exercise above it is because your left and right-brain are in conflict. Your left insists on saying the word, while your right struggles to say the color. In the United States, we have been raised to live in our left-brains. With school curriculums focusing highly on logical thinking, analysis, and accuracy and less on arts, imagination, and synthesis, how can we bounce over to the right? Recently, I’ve been hearing a lot about this and I’ve learned some tricks, the following have worked for me, and they’re fun!

1. Drive, clean, work out. I’m not trying to sound like a life coach, but it turns out driving, showering, washing dishes, mopping, exercising, knitting, all those tasks we do on autopilot, put us in our right-brains. Keeping our left-brains occupied, allows our right-brains to roam free. It is because of this that sometimes we find ourselves at our destination, hardly remembering the commute, or why the most brilliant song lyrics come out of shower time… well at least for me. This is my favorite technique because you are being productive while working on being creative. No sitting and staring, waiting for inspiration to spring out of thin air! Plus, if it doesn’t work, at least the dishes are done.

2. Turn off the music. It may seem counterintuitive being that music is artistic, creative and moving but listening to music actually brings us out of our right-brains. Because it spawns sense memories, putting us into a mood, effectively limiting the clean creative air. However, if your creativity is calls on you being in a “mood” and you are not, a good sad or happy song might put you there.

3. Call out colors. A fun game you can play if you can’t get out of the office or don’t feel like going for a drive or cleaning. Look around the room and try to name every color you see as fast as you can.

4. Draw something without looking at the paper. Focusing only on the object try and draw the entire thing without looking. This is a neat game and can be very frustrating, with your left-brain constantly nagging you to look at the paper. This article has a clear way of explaining this exercise in detail. Another way to do this is to turn an image or photo upside down and draw it, without flipping it over.

5. Office basketball. Now we all love this one, and I’m sure we’ve all done it. Toss out your trash, really, toss it. Thinking spatially forces us to use our right-brains. Figuring out the distance from here to the wastebasket instantly does the trick. To explain this, think about when you are backing your car out of a parking spot, if you’re talking to someone in the car you usually stop mid-sentence, focusing on the task at hand. Talking, is a left-brain function, you have to stop because you need to work in your right-brain. So whenever you are feeling uninspired, summon Kobe and shoot some trash hoops!

With all of these, remember to have a pen and paper near by so none of those great ideas go to waste. No side of your brain is worse then the other. We need the left as much as the right, but in our society our right needs some exercise. If you ever need a little boost to get you in the RIGHT mindset for creativity, try some of these tricks! And the next time you notice yourself having some truly wonderful ideas, take note of what you are doing and what you were doing just before, keep that in your creative toolbox.

To find out what side of your brain you use more go here or try this test!

There’s been a Facebook backlash of sorts recently, with privacy concerns taking center stage for many users. The most recent changes, which automatically allow third-party websites to customize your experience (unless you opt out) has led to a number of the early adopter, techie types to cancel their accounts entirely (http://bit.ly/a8Ekje).

Is this the beginning of a new trend, or just the latest growing pains for the current giant of the social web? It is true that privacy issues seem to be more of a generational thing. Gen-Y typically doesn’t have the same concerns about online privacy, which is one of the factors that allowed the site membership to grow in the first place. But what ultimately made Facebook become as ubiquitous as it is now was when the Gen-Xers and Baby Boomers began crashing the party and creating profiles of their own.

Unfortunately for Facebook, expanding their membership base is a double-edged sword. Older generations are far more concerned with protecting their personal information than are their younger counterparts. And as the novelty of reconnecting with high school friends wears off and people tire of reading about farms and mafia wars (while at the same time it becomes increasingly more complicated to keep your privacy settings in place with every “redesign”), more and more people are starting to just say no.

No one should shed any tears for Facebook yet, however. We’re too far down the rabbit hole of the social web to ever go back. People like being able to easily connect with friends, businesses, media outlets and causes that are important to them. And the simple fact of the matter is that, as the world’s largest social network, pretty much everyone you know is there already. It’s not a whole lot of fun to go off to play at another social network all by yourself.

Nevertheless, this is a critical time for them and we should watch carefully how they respond. Because as MySpace can certainly tell them, nothing stays hot forever.