If you agree with someone, you might say, “I agree.” But if your agreement elicits an emotional response you might say, “That really resonates with me.” It’s an interesting word, resonates, isnt’ it? This morning I was listening to Ben Folds’ podcast “Lightning Bugs,” which I love and highly recommend, and he was interviewing a poet, Alice Major. She used the word “resonate” in a very interesting way that got me thinking. She was speaking about the role of poetry in our everyday lives and she said, “That resonated me.”

I’d never heard the word used as a verb in that way. She could have said, “That resonated with me,” but she didn’t. She said, “That resonates me.” And off my mind went with just how fantastic a description it was for the power of ideas.

First, here’s the podcast I was listening to. You can hear Alice say that line at about 5:15 in.

Ideas resonate us.

I often admit that when I experience a great idea I get the chills. As in, real goosebumpy chills sometimes from head to toe. A great idea affects me physically and viscerally as if the idea originator literally strikes a chord and that chord strikes me. Not unlike this tuning fork experiment where one tuning for is struck and then the other one vibrates without being struck:

It’s a little thing called…you guessed it…resonance. But it is a useful metaphor for creativity where ideas “vibrate” at certain frequencies and don’t just communicate information, but “resonate” people.

For me “getting resonated” with a great idea elicits the chills. For you it may be something else. But the point is that our goal in the advertising world should be to not just communicate with people, but resonate them.

Now imagine four tuning forks “resonating” each other.

The other reason resonation (is that a word?) resonated with me is that it, for the first time, poetically described the real magic of the Ideasicle X model. Each idea project is conducted with a team of four brilliant minds all working together, all posting ideas virtually for the other three to see, all building upon each other’s ideas, and all riffing new ones.

It’s a resonation factory. It’s four tuning forks all getting struck at different times, resonating with the other tuning forks. It’s energy, it’s inspiration, it’s darn near spiritual. The ideas are the hammer, the freelancers on the job are the forks.

I always talk about how Ideasicle X accelerates idea generation, but now I have a better way to explain why.

Resonation.

Will Burns is the Founder & CEO of the revolutionary virtual-idea-generating company, Ideasicle X. He’s an advertising veteran from such agencies as Wieden & Kennedy, Goodby Silverstein, Arnold Worldwide, and Mullen. He was a Forbes Contributor for nine years writing about creativity in modern branding. Sign up for the Ideasicle Newsletter and never miss a post.