I spent the entire 2010 summer passing out resumes, interviewing with companies large and small, and working my butt of to try to find just an internship. I can’t even begin to imagine what it must be like for people with entire careers under their belts trying to find new jobs.

A while back I came across this video by Max Radi at Ignite Portland 8.

The sticking point for this video is at the 4:25 mark. Max explains that our generation is in a bind because we’re looking for Jobs to give us experience, but we are often denied jobs because of a lack of experience. We’re caught in a place where expectations by companies are set in a way that college students seeking internships sometimes what we want to do isn’t necessarily our field of study.

I love social media, I’d love to work in marketing. My problem, I’m an International Business Major…It’s possible I might come out with a minor in marketing, but most people looking for social media people are looking for communications, or PR…That’s not me. But as Max mentions, why not hire someone and mold them, train them to be the person that you need them to be and from then on you have someone exactly qualified and right where you want them.

In today’s economy chances can’t be taken in hiring the wrong person, and that’s understandable. What we study in college doesn’t guarantee we’ll know what you want us to know when you hire us. The training you give us has little bearing on our past experience, or what you expect us to know.

Remember, we need the experience too. If you’re hiring someone for an internship, why not hire the person with the least experience, and give the person with more experience the opportunity for an entry-level position. This will let you mold the intern to the way you want them.

What do you think? How is your company hiring interns?

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1. Network Your A** Off
2. Define Your Culture
3. Meeting the People That Help You Get There

When was the last time, during a work day, that you took an honest-to-goodness nap. Whether you went home and took one or sat in the break room for 20-30 minutes and just napped.

While this might go contrary to about 100% of businesses in the U.S., as a college student, like many, I am a firm believer in quality nap time. This 30-minute part of my day is one that increases productivity, mental awareness, and physical stamina. During my time in Spain this was only reinforced by the type of workday they had. Like the American schedule they would begin their workday at 9am and work until 2 or 3pm (most commonly 2). They would then take a two hour break, and come back to work at 4-5pm and work until 6-8pm. That two hour break is the reason that 5 Hour Energy only exists in the U.S.

In that two hour break time workers have time to go home, see their family, eat lunch, take a nap, and come back to work. They are still getting a full day’s work and in fact are more productive because of it. Now I’m not saying sit around your workplace and nap at your desk so you can increase productivity later, but go home, relax, take a load off your shoulders then worry about it when you get back to the office. You’ll have a clearer mind, a more focused mind, and you will be a hell of a lot better for it just because of a 30 minute nap.

Think about it, if you work from home give it a shot.

What do you think? Leave a comment and thanks for reading my 200th blog post!

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1. Productivity: Is There Really Such a Thing?

Know What’s Ahead

According to the IBM 2010 Global CEO Study,

Eight in ten CEOs expect their environment to grow significantly more complex but only 49 percent believe their organizations are equipped to deal with it successfully – the largest leadership challenge identified in eight years of research.

While being one of the most difficult things to predict in today’s business world, the expectation of growth and the understand of the direction in which it’s heading matters just as much as understanding the culture of a business in itself. More importantly is embracing the changes that occur every day. Listening to employees, accepting feedback and changing the aspects of your culture will lead to better employees and better clients.

Understanding your employees is a factor that is as strong as the culture, and in fact is your culture. Every person inside your company is an integral part, know who you’re working with, hire people that might not necessarily be the top pick as far as their individual job, but help to define the future of your company and where you will go as part of that culture.

Value Time

Time whether in the long run or the short run should always be beneficial to you, your employees, or your employer. Knowing that everything has its commitments really focus on what needs to be done. As an employer though, much more productivity (and creativity) has been shown to occur when the people are given the opportunity to take matters into their own hands. Give employees the chance to do something they love, do something they want to do for themselves, and see where it takes the company.

Valuing time isn’t just a part of the company, but it’s a part of the lives of the people who work for that company. If things are going well, hell, give people some time to go home early to their kids and spouse. Time value shouldn’t just be taken for the money that could have been made, letting employees know that you care about them and their families. That’s Culture.

Defining your culture is a part of many, many aspects, it’s the way you treat people, the way you grow and the way you engage your customers.

What defines your culture?

Related posts:

1. Culture Not Clique – Relationship Series pt. 1
2. 3 Ways to Truly Build Communities
3. Consumers Think ROI Too

The general statement is that,

Gen-Y isn’t leaving social media.

And while that might be true, the focus around that statement isn’t as is should be. The assumption that we’re addicts and the fact that simply because we have grown up with all these Web 2.0 tools means we will forever be online is a general assumption that could be a terrible demise.

The statistic that has gained the most flame and fanfare is that, 67% of experts agree that,

By 2020, Members of Generation Y (today’s “digital natives”) will continue to be ambient broadcasters who disclose a great deal of personal information in order to stay connected and take advantage of social, economic, and political opportunities.

The problem I have with this isn’t the “experts” that aren’t even Gen-Y’ers, or the fact they’re basing off of statistics that aren’t data backed, but are opinions. Opinions cannot be measured. There may be people who agree with opinions, but there is no data to back an opinion.

The assumption that the Gen-Y’s willingness to share, express ourselves online, and as a whole be more “social” online cannot be true for just Gen-Y. There are plenty, if not, a vast majority of people who are outside of the millennial age-range who share as much, if not more than us.

The growth of the demographic range that isn’t millennial, is equally important for marketing purposes as the focus of the Pew Internet Poll. We, as millennials, are not the only people willing to share our data, nor are we the people who will become the most sharers in the future. As it stands I know more people outside of my generation who are more likely to share about their lives and become some of the most “stalk able” people online.

Two friends of mine have their baby children on Twitter with their own accounts and updates. Over at Pingdom they have graphs of Ages of Social Network Users.

Of the top user groups, ages 24-44 dominate for the majority the social networks sphere. So how does it compare to say that Gen-Y will become the major factor in the future of the sharing network? Yes, Gen-Y has the potential to become a massive force in the sharing world in 2020. At the same time however, we are more conscientious of the fact of how are data is used. We have grown up with Spam emails, Facebook Privacy issues, and an overall knowledge of our privacy. We are cautious in what we do and how we do it.

What do you think of the way Gen-Y uses social media? Will we be as the Pew internet poll says? Leave a comment!

Download the Pew Internet Study.

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1. It’s Not About Us
2. 3 Ways to Truly Build Communities
3. Long or Short Social Strategy: Part 1 – Long Term

If you’re not having fun with what you’re doing, why are you doing it? Do you have time to do something you enjoy after work? The problem is not enough people have the guts to say, “To hell with it, I’m going to go do what I Love.” That’s about as large of a problem as sitting around and working just to make money. Now, I understand that there are people who live paycheck to paycheck, I’m one of them. But every day that I write something, or that I dedicate my time to doing so, the project I work on is a project that I will enjoy.

I have been doing some unpaid internship work for eWayDirect and have been contributing to their blog. Why? Because I enjoy writing, I enjoy social media, and to be a part of a team where I can enjoy what I do and help others, to me, is a quality that can never be over looked.

So I ask you, what are you doing to have fun? Are you enjoying your work? Tell me about your fun, leave a comment!

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Go Offline

Building communities online is great. The best way, though, to build a community is to take your online presence and go offline.  A worked with Carrboro Creative Coworking for a summer and one of the ways I used to build our community was to create a TweetUp. This allowed people to come into the business, explore, tinker, and become a part of the place even if it was for just a couple of hours. By getting people together so they can know each other on a personal offline level the interactions and the lasting effect of being around and shaking hands is infinitely stronger than just chatting it up on Twitter.

Be Human

Being human goes to even Social CRM. The key aspects of being human isn’t to sit around, automate everything you do on an online profile and just let things whip by. I’m not saying you need to be online every hour of the day, or respond to every single email that comes your way, but the simple fact that people recognize that someone is out there filtering information and only passing on what matters becomes a strong point in the eyes of the people that you’re engaged with. Being human isn’t about the vicious cycle of commenting, retweeting, or liking, but rather an obvious and empathetic point of view online towards others.

Email Works

Email marketing is by far the most optimal and effective means of Social Media Marketing. Personalization, transparency and basically not screwing it up, you’re better off with email as a more direct and thorough way to really reach out and build a community around your brand. Check out Blue Sky Factory or hit up DJ Waldow (@DJWaldow) for some info on their email marketing, and how you can build a strategy through BSF.

When it comes down to the end, what really matters is how are you giving back to the people? Are you giving them what they want, what they need?

Start building and stop being a robot! What do you think? Leave a comment!

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1. Going Beyond The Sale
2. Community Marketing – Relationship Series pt. 3
3. Student Branding vs Professional Branding

We began realizing that our business world and even our non-business (medical, law, philosophy, history, any subject really) has been following both a telescoping and an exponential growth rate.

Telescoping Exponential

In the history of sciences and new knowledge, we can take some of the greatest minds in history: Galileo, Pythagoras, Newton, any great mind from the renaissance or before the 20th Century. All of these men were experts in not just one field, but many. Galileo is remembered as a premier astronomer, but was also a physicist and mathematician, amongst others. Pythagoras was a philosopher and a mathematician. These men were the best in more than just one thing leading to the basis of so much science in today’s ever-evolving world. This is the telescoping point of view, few people with a vast amount of knowledge on many different concepts.

Today though, this is being reversed. We have many people with very intricate and specific niche topics. You can go out today and look for a marketing agency and find a marketing agency dealing with just publicity or just advertising, they are a specific set of people with a small focus and they’re damn good at it. Same goes for science, you will find a neurologist, radiologist, podiatrist, the list is almost infinite, hell there’s probably even a doctor for just your femur (yes I am exaggerating). You see where I’m going with this.

Graphically it would look like this:

This general overview of specific concepts that used to be held by so few people who knew many things, is now backwards. More people know fewer things, but they’re better at them! That is the defining factor.

In the end what this ends up happening, is that the individual knowledge becomes so high, that the level of growth become a sky rocket. If you take a look at any economical graph or a world economics graph over the past centuries, the growth is exponential.

Image source: dinocrat.com

What does it all mean?

The more we grow, the more specific we get. The more specific we get the more we can dedicate research to individual topics and get to new heights in research, levels of income, and best of all for your business, more revenue!

Take this YouTube video for example, part of the inspiration for this post:

Stick around next week for the followup on this post: Collective Thinking – Cloud Minds

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1. People don’t really “Like” International News
2. Celebrities matter more
3. YouTube, TechCrunch, Break.com, Hulu and other sites get way more “Likes”

Now, this irks me in a way. Social media has the opportunity to reach out and massively spread topics like a wildfire through a dry brush desert. We have seen Twitter do amazing things during the Iranian elections by spreading the word and bringing focus and aid to a war-torn country.

Recently, with the ability to control what is seen online by basis of analytical results and dynamic programming we focus more on what the people want more so than the news they need to know. Not too long ago a controversial image appeared comparing the home page of CNN to the home page of Al Jazeera.

If we’d rather follow around Tiger Wood’s johnson than the acts of our own military, quite simply, we’re f—ed. At 0513 EDT my trending Twitter topics were these:

• #nowPlaying
• #PleaseTellMeWhy
• Justin Beiber
• #IHopeMyNext
• Iron Man 2
• #sometimesitsbetter
• Dear Haters
• #ihatequotes
• #HappyBirthdayDAE
• IPL

Not a single trending topic is news related, or anywhere important to society in the long run.

We have the opportunity here to do something good with the tons of resources we have available, but unfortunately we aren’t. We stick around and care about the “next big thing” or the new social tool to expand our image online. Being an arrogant self-imaging schmuck means nothing when you compare yourself to a country who can’t even have proper leadership.

I only ask you to think about what you Tweet or Like on Facebook. The availability to change what people see and the way we interpret our news is in our hands, the millions of users in each social network is controlled by us, the user cloud. So take a look around, think, and act accordingly.

Comments or concerns? Leave a comment I’d love to discuss!

Image by Zarko Drincic

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Start Practicing More

I keep getting inspired more and more to take on Yoga (Thanks to prAna for the inspiration), Rock Climbing, a healthier (possibly more organic) diet, running more often, replace weight training with more nature based exercise.

Firstly, Yoga. When I get back home to Chapel Hill find a beginners yoga class and begin to understand the concepts, ideas and the overall passion for yoga. By learning breathing techniques and efficiency of muscle usage and mental focus I expect yoga to give much more than just a way to get physical exercise.

Rock Climbing. The wall at the Student Rec. Center at Appalachian State gives me the opportunity to go, practice and focus training in Bouldering, Top Roping and Lead Climbing.  I want to go climbing at least twice a week.

Running, over 20 minutes for three times a week. Adjusting my diet to a one plate meal, with salad, and yogurt for dessert, until I come back home where I can do my own grocery shopping and not have to eat cafeteria food.

The Business Goals

Finding an internship is tough from overseas! I’m looking for a Social Media Marketing internship, in the Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill area, paid.

Start making my blog posts consistently longer and more concrete data packed. I currently write about 300-400 words per post and maybe post 1-3 times a week. I want to begin writing 500-600 words per post using data stacked resources to back up claims I make. Using case studies as resources for posts. Start guest-posting at other blogs, and finding people willing to guest post here.

Increase the amount of returning readers to my website in comparison to new readers.

Increase the number of new readers by 200% monthly.

That’s about all I’ve got. Help me out, keep me accountable!

Image by angelawagner

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The thing is, social networking and marketing is much more than just being a presence on the web. On the same hand, when I see people writing about the basics of human communication, it pretty much just makes me angry. Day in and day out we’re seeing more people coming to the rise about their new “proven theory”, but the only thing they’re doing is showing you how to take a face-to-face social life online.

There should be no difference in the way you behave online versus the way you behave online. You connect, you talk, you share stories, and you listen. Now, how is that a brand new proven marketing technique. Bullshit. It’s the basis of human communication.

Teach Marketing Not Human Relations

Marketing is a great mix of many studies: Sociology, Psychology, Business Administration, Design, Advertising, and many others. However, I don’t claim to sit here and run a sociology blog, or a psychology blog (that’s where Neuromarketing comes in – where brain science meets Marketing), but if your basis is to teach marketing, teach marketing at its core.

Give techniques that show the use of the tools in their best way. Answer the questions of, Why do these tools work? How do they work? What is best to share? What techniques have I used that show results?

All I ask is that you stop teaching common sense, and start teaching the real Social Media Marketing.

Disagree? Am I guilty of this too? Let me know!

Image by Hussain Shah.

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