Copyright 2010. All Rights reserved
- The Chronicle of Higher Education
- 1255 Twenty-Third St, N.W.
- Washington, D.C. 20037
via chronicle.com
8/31/2010
How is teaching millennials different? What are you doing differently?
How is teaching millennials different? What are you doing differently?
Check out this website I found at chronicle.com
Thesis | Outline | Social Media PR Tips
Here’s the working outline of my master’s in communications thesis at Eastern Washington University. I’m investigating how to promote higher education to Millennials via social media.
THESIS OUTLINE
ABSTRACT
CH. 1: INTRODUCTION
- HECB Open Forums
- HECB Portal Report
- Reference to Appendix B: HECB Open Forums [DONE]
- Research Questions
- RQ1: What are the characteristics of Millennials?
- RQ2: How do Millennials prefer to be communicated with?
- RQ3: What best practices/guidelines can inform the development of a social media communication plan to engage Millennials?
- RQ4: What metrics would be used to determine the effectiveness of this communication plan?
CH. 2: REVIEW OF THE LITERATURE
- Millennials & Higher Education
- Academic Journals on Millennials
- Academic Journals on Social Media
- Review of Communication Theories & PR Models
- Points to consider: A) Millennials’ communication preferences; B) Millennials’ use of social media; C) Current marketing plans; D) Metrics
CH. 3: RESEARCH METHODS
- Answer RQ1 with Pew Research Project
- Answer RQ2 with Pew Research Project and Marketing to Millennials
- Answer RQ3 with New Rules of PR/Marketing, Facebook & Twitter Demographics, My 10 Steps for Social Media Presentation
- Answer RQ4 with ROI/metrics of social media research
CH. 4: RESULTS & ANALYSIS
- Communication plan with metrics
- Reference Appendix A: Social Media Guidelines
- Reference Appendix C: Social Media Report Template
CH. 5: DISCUSSION
- Address specific populations (minorities, etc.)
- Address need for media mix
BIBLIOGRAPHY
- Citations
- Bibliography complete
APPENDIX A: Social Media Guidelines
APPENDIX B: HECB Open Forums Data
APPENDIX C: Social Media Report Template
Zac Hill: A Few Notes Upon Witnessing a Bunch of Pretend Lawyers Hoot, Holler, and Collapse Into Tears
Last week, the American Mock Trial Association released its 2010-2011 case packet, a 146-page document containing all the orders, instructions, stipulations, statutes, case law, affidavits, and exhibits needed for college students across America to try a case. If this list of fabricated legal documents doesn't exactly sound scintillating, that's because it isn't -- well, it wouldn't be, anyway, except for two things: 1) it seems like, as if via some mystical force, basically every student who has ever displayed an ounce of talent in the humanities has been told at some point that they ought to become a lawyer; and 2) because many of those students tend to be competitive, driven, and hungry for the chance to garnish their resumes with impressive-sounding extracurricular achievements, a lot of them wind up competing in mock trial.
What you get, then, is this unique microcosm of suit-wearing pretend attorneys who are nevertheless emblematic, to me anyway, of a broader 'achievement class' -- a subset of Millennials for whom aptitude and excellence have become a means of individual expression.
In the literature about Millennials you'll often find mixed reactions to this obsession with individualism: whether it's superficial, as with 'personalized' cell-phone ringtones and arcane social-media 'playlistocracies', or is rather born of genuine concern for self-realization. As an expression-obsessed media-saturated Millennial myself, I'll go ahead and hazard that it's a little bit of both. But as the coach of the University of Washington Mock Trial team, I can also say there's something almost beautiful about herding these Type-As into a courtroom and, over the course of a year, forging a unit called a "team".
A few months ago, I had the opportunity to judge the American Mock Trial Association National Championship Tournament, which was held in my hometown of Memphis, TN. The following article, which I originally wrote for a local paper but decided not to publish due to length, chronicles that experience.
--
A Few Notes Upon Witnessing a Bunch of Pretend Lawyers Hoot, Holler, and Collapse Into Tears (The American Mock Trial Association National Tournament)
"Why are we here?"
It is 8:30AM at the Shelby County Courthouse in Memphis, TN, and Steven Strasberg is wandering around in a circle talking to himself.
"As my colleague Ms. Taylor told you at the beginning of this trial, something is missing," he says. "So I ask you again: Why are we here? Ladies and gentlemen, you were asked at the start of this trial to listen carefully to the evidence and weigh the facts in coming to your conclusion as to whether or not Jackie Owens committed murder. As you've seen over the course of this three hour trial, that evidence doesn't exist. Those facts were never proven. To be frank, almost everything is missing. And so you must ask yourselves that same question that I've asked you: Why are we even here?
Jackie Owens is not a real person. A three-hour murder trial has not been conducted. Not a single piece of evidence has actually been weighed. But Steven Strasberg is not insane. And Steven is not the only person in this hallway pacing around with a notepad in front of his face rattling off a soliloquy.
In fact, a swarm of charcoal-suited students have infested the Courthouse's marble-lined hallways, and have spilled over into the Shelby County Criminal Court down the street as well. All told, over 500 students, judges, coaches, and hangers-on have flooded downtown Memphis for the 26th Annual American Mock Trial Association National Tournament. The self-talkers are the "attorneys" chosen by their teams to deliver opening statements and closing arguments, and they're drilling the latest adjustments into their brains.
Over the course of three-days, each one of these kids will spend over twelve hours inside a looming mahogany courtroom getting skewered. They will shout. They will storm. They will sweat. They might very possibly cry. Inside each room, a panel of judges will evaluate each student's performance as either a witness or an attorney, reducing a year's worth of effort to a single number. The team with the highest combined set of scores wins the round.
That is how this tournament works, and that is why every one of its participants (who represent the most elite ~5% of the country's nearly 700 registered collegiate mock trial teams) are guaranteed not to sleep for more than three hours per night while they're here -- but it's not the part that captures me.
I am captured by the minute-long roar of support that rocked the full length of Beale Street when it was announced that eventual tournament champions New York University had won their division.
I am captured by the reasons why one student dropped out of the tournament and refused to even speak with his team because a judge's comment left him sobbing on a bathroom floor for the better part of an hour.
I am captured by the startlingly-large number of mock trial veterans who went on to marry the witnesses whom they directed in competition.
I am captured, in short, by how what has got to be the most contrived activity on the planet -- a bunch of people pretending to ask pretend people pretend questions about other pretend people -- can be so very real.
Let me explain.
The very structure of college mock trial makes concepts like "goodness" or "sincerity" or "honesty" useless. This is because even though each team has the exact same fact pattern to work with, they have to construct coherent arguments for both the prosecution and the defense, and they aren't assigned a side until just before the first round starts. Then they have to switch sides and refute that very same case in the next round. Truth, therefore, isn't merely relative -- it's nonexistent. Now, one might argue that in something like basketball, goodness or sincerity or honesty or whatever don't come into play very much, either. But in mock trial you're scored -- and I'm taking this right off the sheet they handed me when I sat down to judge my first round at the tournament -- on qualities like "passion," "believability," and yes, "sincerity." It's all about technique. Whoever is best at faking being genuine wins the round.
This is what some of the best and brightest students in America are training upwards of twenty hours a week to do. At first glance, this should scare the hell out of us.
Why?
Indulge me for a second.
I am a game designer by trade, and one of the surest ways of getting someone to play your game over and over again is to make up sets of objectives and spell out very clearly how your players should attain them. The player completes those objectives, wins a gold star, and goes to bed feeling like he or she has accomplished something. The he or she wakes up, digs up another objective to check off the list, and repeats this process ad nauseam.
This is a fine thing to do when you're playing a game. It helps you perfect technique. But if the good ol' "best and brightest" actually believe that this is what they should be doing in life -- that what they're supposed to focus on is achieving something, anything, regardless of whether it's good or sincere or honest --we have a huge problem on our hands. Because when you fixate upon doing something just to do it, just to check it off a list -- that's called addiction.
That reason, addiction -- what amounts to a societal addiction to achievement -- is why every single one of these students can recite his or her SAT score from memory, and is why every single one of these students has been told, "You'd be so great at it!" when they ask a parent or teacher or mentor why they should pursue a career in law.
And yet.
Let's head now to a toast inside a bar. The bartender has just handed me a Crown Royal on ice while congratulating my mom on her phenomenal choice of sweater, and in front of me a girl is standing on a chair.
The girl, whose name is Maggie and who has been described to me as "actually as sweet as she seems even though she seems way too sweet to be real," seems way too sweet to be real. She calls people "sugar" with zero signs of irony. Her shoes have bows on them. And she's obviously cool, in the way that you knew Samuel L. Jackson was cool before people had to tell you that Samuel L. Jackson was really really cool. I want to hang out with this girl, and I want to have a beer with this girl, and I want to sort of find a casual way to ask her for her autograph without it getting all awkward -- except the thing is she's crying. I don't mean she is sobbing casually and accidentally and maybe it's just a trick of the light. I mean she is hardcore bawling her eyes out standing up there on that chair, and she's trying to talk but she can't, and the audience is captivated by the radiance that pours from this girl, they are best I can say enthralled, and I am enthralled, and I wait for the words on her lips like the first drops of a flood.
Rhodes College, the team whose after-party I am crashing, has just been crowned one of the top ten teams in the nation. What is beautiful, what gives me hope, is that at this very moment no one in the room cares about this. And they don't care about this because for the last three hours, they have been participating in a ceremony that is passionate and sincere and un-ironic and good.
Every year, after Nationals, after all the work is over, members of all three Rhodes teams get together to toast their teammates. To talk to them as peers and tell them how they feel. To explain to the team's graduating seniors what the last four years have meant. Speeches last as long as they need to last. Bullshit is expressly prohibited. And everyone -- maybe for the first time in their lives -- is vulnerable.
A guy named Kashon walks up to me.
"Thanks," he says.
"For what?"
"I don't know."
Maggie's words never come, and she alights from her chair, and still everyone is staring, and she too is staring, and she is blinking. What she wants to say is, "All this time we have spent together, all this work that we have done together -- it is somehow very important," but she says nothing. Yet she says everything, and everyone knows. More people speak. Time passes. In the audience a boy and a girl lean against one another like the ruined pieces of an ancient statue. In the corner a kid named Michael is crying, he cannot stop crying, and he falls to his knees, and no one in the room will ever fault him for it. And there are grown men holding one another, they hold onto one another like the edges of sheer cliffs, and they stand with one another, and they stand there together, and they stand.
Why are we here?
Before she started talking, Maggie, who is maybe 5'1 in heels, hauled that chair up over her head and announced to everyone that she'd be perching on it.
"So I can see you," she said, climbing up on top.
Follow Zac Hill on Twitter: www.twitter.com/zdch
Two Common Mistakes of Millennials at Work - Andrew McAfee - Harvard Business Review
My previous post here highlighted the smart practices that the digital-native Millennials are bringing to the workplace. Here I want to talk about a couple not-so-smart ones.
The first is simple oversharing. I wrote before how narrating your work is a very smart strategy because it lets you be helpful to others, and also increases the chances that they can help you. But narrating your every opinion, emotion, lunch, happy hour, hangover, etc. on your company's emergent social software platforms is just narcissistic clutter.
One of the knocks against Generation Y is that they've been encouraged to believe that everything they say and think is interesting, and should be aired and shared. This is simply not true for anyone, no matter what reality TV producers would have us believe. Periodically sharing bits of personal information is valuable because it humanizes you, lets others know what kind of person you are, and facilitates socialization and trust-building. But oversharing in the workplace just makes you annoying and immature.
The second not-so-smart practice of a digital native is to act as if all employees are equals, and equally interested in airing the truth.
Most if not all of the digital communities where Gen Y has spent time are highly egalitarian. They're indifferent to pre-existing hierarchies and credentials, and sometimes even hostile to them. And these communities seem to Millennials to work really well; Wikipedia gives them good information on any topic under the sun, Intrade prediction markets tell them who's going to win elections, Twitter lets them know what's going on in the world better and faster than any other source, their Facebook friends answer their questions for them, and so on.
All this can make a strong case to Gen Yers that hierarchy and credentialism are passé as concepts, or should be. So when they show up after graduation at their first employer, some of them start acting this way.
They assume that their contributions and opinions will be as sought after and valued as anyone else's. They feel free to voice their thoughts on topics both related and unrelated to their job descriptions. In short, they implicitly follow the explicit philosophy of most Web 2.0 communities, which is "we're all equals here."
This is a really bad idea, for two main reasons. First, it ignores the fact that the newest workers might not be the most knowledgeable on the company's core topics, and that they'd be better served at the start of their careers by listening and learning, rather than broadcasting what they already (think they) know.
Second, many people in the organization's existing hierarchy are kind of fond of it. They're fond, in fact, of the entire notion of hierarchy, and of the related idea that employees should respect their places within it. These people don't really desire more egalitarianism.
A more unpleasant truth about organizational life is that some people also don't really desire more truth or accuracy. They're in charge of a project that's not going well, a product that has no real chance of succeeding in the marketplace, a group that lives in fear of them, and so on. More accuracy about their situations would be good for the enterprise as a whole but bad for their careers, so they'll do what they can do keep the truth from coming to light. And as any veteran of real-world organizations can tell you, there are a lot of ways to silence or marginalize truth-tellers.
In light of the above, I've got two pieces of advice for Gen Y as it enters the workforce. I'll convey them using the words of much wiser men.
First, Voltaire on digital oversharing: "The secret of being a bore is to say everything." A good ground rule, I believe, is to primarily use an enterprise's 2.0 platforms to share information that passes a simple test: would a coworker I've never met find this professionally interesting?
Second, Goethe on the difference between how people in companies should act, and how they actually do: "a confusion of the real with the ideal never goes unpunished." The advice here for new Gen Y workers is to understand the political and organizational lay of the land before engaging in egalitarian online interactions and fearless truth telling. You may well decide that you'll take the consequences, but you should first be aware of what the consequences are. Confusion here is not likely to go unpunished.
What other causes for concern have you noticed among the digital natives as they enter the workforce? And what advice do you have for them?
via blogs.hbr.org
Tyler Mahoney: How to Manage Me: Millennials and Communication
It's mid-afternoon and I overhear my boss pitching someone on the phone about the need for a housing first homeless shelter in Anchorage, Alaska. After a string of exposure-related deaths among the local homeless population over the last year, starting a housing first homeless shelter had become more important than ever. My boss didn't have the exact numbers on Anchorage homeless deaths at the beginning of his phone conversation, but luckily I knew someone who could help. I sent a text message to my social worker friend, who was working at a soup kitchen down the street. Minutes later and before my boss hung up the phone, he had the exact number of homeless deaths in writing on his desk ready to give to the person on the other line.
I'm 23, and I'm a millennial. Like the other 60 million or so men and women born between 1982 and 2001, I carry my network over into the business and non-profit world. We millenials have been networking since we set up our first AIM accounts; to us business lunches and conferences are a primitive form of networking. From Facebook to instant messaging, I can gather information quickly from a wide range of sources. Millennials can gather information quickly, and we expect to: we are children of Google.
Myths about millennials in the work place abound. Gen X and baby boomer managers have come to believe, as Bruce Tulgan pointed out, that millennials won't do grunt work, don't respect their elders, and want the top job from day one. To manage me, you have to understand how I grew up. Coming of age in a high-tech world has affected who millennials are and how they act in the workforce.
I went to author and historian Neil Howe, the man who coined the term "millennial generation." Howe has written several books on millennials, with William Strauss, including most recently Millennials in the Workplace. Military recruitment commercials, he says, exemplify the shift seen between Gen X and millennials. Gen X recruitment focused on "risk, the individual, and personal conquest," while millennial recruitment focuses on why we're fighting in the first place. Millennials, says Howe, "are looking to be on team that is more than just the some of it's parts." We millenials are looking for meaning in what we are doing.
"The drill sergeant won't yell at millenials when they get off the bus for basic training," says Howe, "They will thank them for their service in a time of war." That service, provides meaning.
The Parent Factor
This is most poignantly exemplified in the different military commercials used for Gen X and Gen Y. Whereas years ago Marines commercials featured a lone soldier braving adversity and squaring off against -- by today's standards -- a poorly-animated lava dragon, today's ads show young people explaining to their parents why they want to join up. This trend in inter-generational marketing, according to Howe, rests on the fact that "parents are being brought into the equation" in ways they weren't twenty years ago.
This degree of parental inclusion may strike some as odd, even overbearing, but millennials received more attention from parents than boomers and Gen X-ers. "This is a special generation," Howe says, "Everyone was special in the millennial generation." This may seem odd, because "no one thought Gen X managers were special when they came up in the world."
Teachers first observed this trend among millennial parents. Howe says "Parents have been the number one problem for teachers." This is because of the "helicopter parenting" phenomenon: parents constantly hover over their children to keep them safe and make sure they do well. Teachers often counter parental encroachment by asking parents to let them do their job. "If you tell parents, 'get out of here, I'm a professional,' you've created an enemy," Howe said, "Instead, partner with parents. It's like jiu-jitsu: you need to redirect the focus of parents." Helicopter parenting will likely carry over into the professional world. In the work place, Howe says that "first, managers will resist, but [they should] partner with parents. Parents are part of the conversation, just include them early."
The Generational Gap
Managing is a two-way relationship. People my age also need to understand our bosses' worldviews. Peter Brinkerhoff, nonprofit consultant and author of Generations: The Challenge of a Lifetime for Your Nonprofit, says finding an appropriate work/life balance and flextime are two of the main points of tension the millennial generation faces in the workplace. "We [boomers] think of work as being a place," he says: "If you're not at work, you're slacking off." We millennials however are consistently looking for a better work/life balance than our parents- who by in large were workaholics.
If I've finished my work, I want to go home early, play recreational soccer, and watch the Daily Show. Brinkerhoff says this is a source of disconnection between millennials and Boomers. "We [Boomers] take our work home, but we don't realize that you [millennials] do work at 3 p.m., 9 p.m., or 11 p.m.," says Brinkerhoff, "You're always wired so you always have the opportunity to work. We don't understand your level of connectedness."
This confusion owes to the fact that the schism between the millennial generation, Gen X, and baby boomers is much larger than in past generations. "It's not just age difference, it's a cultural difference," says Brinkerhoff. I know and grew up around technology that enabled me to speak and communicate in ways my parents could not have imagined. From our smart phones to our Facebook accounts, we are living in a connected world that allows us to work on the bus, on planes with Wi-fi, and at home after dinner -- and, for some of us, even during dinner. Work to us is not just one place: it's any place where there is a CAT-5 cable, Wi-Fi, or a 3G signal.
But there are limits. No email welcome can ever replace a good handshake. That's why Brinkerhoff emphasizes caution when finding a work/life balance. "All work/life balance choices are correct," he says, "but they are not all good for the organization. People need to be at meetings and helping clients, so there are limits." Brinkerhoff says the best way to address the work/life balance issue is to talk early about what is expected in terms of outcomes. Once outcomes are understood, managers and employees have clear expectations about work regardless of what the schedule looks like.
Don't Cut Us Off
A young woman at a conference told Brinkerhoff, "We have the keys to the kingdom. You have to listen to our discussion about tech or you're lost."
She was onto something critical. If the organization I now work for had a policy against instant messaging, I couldn't have gotten my boss the statistics he needed. Thanks in part to the coherent and fact-based arguments my connectedness helped my boss make, zoning for the new homeless shelter was recently approved. Don't take away our most potent communication tools: we millennials live on a network that includes our friends and our parents, and it can be a powerful tool for your business or non-profit. Brinkerhoff equates telling a 26-year old to not use Facebook to telling him or her not to breathe. Managers who want to get ahead need their millennial employees connected and networking--it's a natural skill set we already have when we walk in the door.
"If you have policies against IM's and Facebook, you are cutting off powerful tools of the millennials," says Howe, "If you're worried about them wasting time, simply give them more work."
How to Manage Me Millennials and Communication | All Global News on One Page
How to Manage Me Millennials and Communication
It’s mid-afternoon and I overhear my boss pitching someone on the phone about the need for a housing first homeless shelter in Anchorage, Alaska. After a string of exposure-related deaths among the local homeless population over the last year, starting a housing first homeless shelter had become more important than ever. My boss didn’t have the exact numbers on Anchorage homeless deaths at the beginning of his phone conversation, but luckily I knew someone who could help. I sent a text message to my social worker friend, who was working at a soup kitchen across the street. Minutes later and before my boss hung up the phone, he had the exact number of homeless deaths in writing on his desk ready to give to the person on the other line.
I’m 23, and I’m a millennial. Like the other 60 million or so men and women born between 1982 and 2001, I carry my social network over into the business and non-profit world. We millenials have been networking since we set up our first AIM accounts; to us business lunches and conferences are a primitive form of networking. From Facebook to instant messaging, I can gather information quickly from a wide range of sources. Millennials gather information quickly, and we expect to: we are children of Google.
Myths about millennials in the work place abound. Gen X and baby boomer managers have come to believe, as Bruce Tulgan pointed out, that millennials won’t do grunt work, don’t respect their elders, and want the top job from day one. To manage me, you have to understand how I grew up. Coming of age in a high-tech world has affected who millennials are and how they act in the workforce.
I went to author and historian Neil Howe, the man who coined the term “millennial generation.” Howe has written several books on millennials, with William Strauss, including most recently Millennials in the Workplace. Military recruitment commercials, he says, exemplify the shift seen between Gen X and millennials. Gen X recruiters focused on “risk, the individual, and personal conquest,” while millennial recruiters talk about why we’re fighting in the first place
“The drill sergeant won’t yell at millenials when they get off the bus for basic training,” says Howe, “They will thank them for their service in a time of war.”
This is most poignantly exemplified in the different military commercials used for Gen X and Gen Y. Whereas years ago Marines commercials featured a lone soldier braving adversity and squaring off against — by today’s standards — a poorly-animated lava dragon, today’s ads show young people explaining to their parents why they want to join up. This trend in inter-generational marketing, according to Howe, rests on the fact that “parents are being brought into the equation” in ways they weren’t twenty years ago.
This degree of parental inclusion may strike some as odd, even overbearing, but millennials received more attention from parents than boomers and Gen X-ers. “This is a special generation,” Howe says, “Everyone was special in the millennial generation.” This may seem odd, because “no one thought Gen X managers were special when they came up in the world.”
Teachers first observed this trend among millennial parents. Howe says “Parents have been the number one problem for teachers.” This is because of the “helicopter parenting” phenomenon: parents constantly hover over their children to keep them safe and make sure they do well. Teachers often counter parental encroachment by asking parents to let them do their job. “If you tell parents, ‘get out of here, I’m a professional,’ you’ve created an enemy,” Howe said, “Instead, partner with parents. It’s like jiu-jitsu: you need to redirect the focus of parents.” Helicopter parenting will likely carry over into the professional world. In the work place, Howe says that “first, managers will resist, but [they should] partner with parents. Parents are part of the conversation, just include them early.”
Managing is a two-way relationship. People my age also need to understand our bosses’ worldviews. Peter Brinkerhoff, nonprofit consultant and author of Generations: The Challenge of a Lifetime for Your Nonprofit, says finding an appropriate work/life balance and flextime are two of the main points of tension the millennial generation faces in the workplace. “We [boomers] think of work as being a place,” he says: “If you’re not at work, you’re slacking off.” We millennials however are consistently looking for a better work/life balance than our parents’.
If I’ve finished my work, I want to go home early, play recreational soccer, and watch the Daily Show. Brinkerhoff says this is a source of disconnection between millennials and Boomers. “We [Boomers] take our work home, but we don’t realize that you [millennials] do work at 3 p.m., 9 p.m., or 11 p.m.,” says Brinkerhoff, “You’re always wired so you always have the opportunity to work. We don’t understand your level of connectedness.”
This confusion owes to the fact that the schism between the millennial generation, Gen X, and baby boomers is much larger than in past generations. “It’s not just age difference, it’s a cultural difference,” says Brinkerhoff. I know and grew up around technology that enabled me to speak and communicate in ways my parents could not have imagined. From our smart phones to our Facebook accounts, we are living in a connected world that allows us to work on the bus, on planes with Wi-fi, and at home after dinner — and, for some of us, even during dinner. Work to us is not just one place: it’s any place where there is a CAT-5 cable or a 3G signal.
But there are limits. No email welcome can ever replace a good handshake. That’s why Brinkerhoff emphasizes caution when finding a work/life balance. “All work/life balance choices are correct,” he says, “but they are not all good for the organization. People need to be at meetings and helping clients, so there are limits.” Brinkerhoff says the best way to address the work/life balance issue is to talk early about what is expected in terms of outcomes. Once outcomes are understood, managers and employees have clear expectations about work regardless of what the schedule looks like.
A young woman at a conference told Brinkerhoff, “We have the keys to the kingdom. You have to listen to our discussion about tech or you’re lost.”
She was onto something critical. If the organization I now work for had a policy against instant messaging, I couldn’t have gotten my boss the statistics he needed. Thanks in part to the coherent and fact-based arguments my connectedness helped my boss make, zoning for the new homeless shelter was recently approved. Don’t take away our most potent communication tools: we millennials live on a network that includes our friends and our family, and it can be a powerful tool for your business or non-profit. Brinkerhoff equates telling a 26-year old to not use Facebook to telling him or her not to breathe. Managers need their millennial employees connected and networking in this accelerated business world.
“If you have policies against IM’s and Facebook, you are cutting off powerful tools of the millennials,” says Howe, “If you’re worried about them wasting time, simply give them more work.”Source:www.huffingtonpost.com
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Millennials Want Communities: How Does this Translate to an Online Course? - Inside eLearning by Susan Smith Nash, Ph.D. - Inside eLearning by Susan Smith Nash, Ph.D. - eLearners.com Community: Online Education and Distance Learning Discussion Forums & Bl
Check out this website I found at community.elearners.com
Generations: Millennials Didn’t Invent the Wheel or the Text Message
« The Mindset of the Class of 2014 | Main
Aug 30, 2010
Millennials Didn’t Invent the Wheel or the Text Message
By Kel Gratke
Kel Gratke is a Generation Xer.
Most Millennials feel like they invented the wheel when it comes to modern technology. If it’s something new and cool happening in the workplace, the marketplace, or just in normal everyday life—this youngest generation wants to claim credit. That’s why a new exhibit opening this winter at the British Library in London is so refreshing. It reveals that long before cell phones, people have been using “text speak” to communicate. To learn more, click here.
One of the highlights is an early poem written in 1867, which uses letters and numbers in the same way we use them when texting on our smartphones today. Those from the Victorian Age considered this a very clever style, long before today’s teens started texting their buddies about getting together for pizza.
While Millennials are amazing at using and adapting to today’s technology, they aren’t always the first to come up with the concept. The original ideas were often developed by their predecessors—maybe not from the Victorian Age, but usually from their Traditionalist, Baby Boomer, and Generation Xer coworkers. Millennials don’t have to go back to the 19th century to grab a cool idea. There are several sitting just a cubicle away, with mentorships and job shadowing helping to start the flow.
Millennials may be the new kids on the block, but they’re not the first new kids on the block. Yes, we can chuckle a bit and enjoy letting the Millennials know that they weren’t the first to discover texting. The same way the Boomers felt about the Xers and their cell phones. The same way the Traditionalists felt about the Boomers and their huge computers. There really is no such thing as a new idea.
But the great thing about the Millennials is that they’ll accept this with a good-natured smile and plenty of questions. The passing of information from generation to generation is extremely important to most Millennials, and they crave knowledge any way they can get it. Keep in mind that this is the most mentored and coached generation in history, and they like to hear what the other generations have to say. And the last thing the Millennials want to do is waste their time reinventing the wheel . . . or in this case, reinventing the text message.
Posted at 12:32 PM in Innovation, Knowledge Sharing, Millennials | Permalink
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Great article! It's surreal to read the poem knowing it wasn't written 5 days ago. This makes it clear, there's a lot to be gained from listening to previous generations' successes and failures. Our environments aren't so very different after all.
Posted by: Alex | Aug 30, 2010 at 01:23 PM
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Alloy, Kmart Get Ready for High School in 'First Day'
If content is King, marketing Queen, and distribution a Prince or Princess, then Alloy Media + Marketing is the entire royal family.
The provider of “youth-focused innovative media” has produced some of the most popular teen-oriented programming in recent memory, both online and off (including Gossip Girl, Vampire Diaries, Haute & Bothered, and Private). The company is behind some of the most trafficked online destinations (including www.alloy.com, www.teen.com, and www.gurl.com), drawing more than 51 million millennials every month across its network. And Alloy also owns and operates Channel One, a news program broadcast to middle schools and high schools across the US with a daily reach of over six million teens.
With these assets, Alloy has developed a model for web TV success: 1) Find a web series that targets teens (possibly based on a popular novel from Alloy’s book publishing division), 2) attach a sponsor looking to reach teens, 3) market the hell out of the series across Channel One and on all of Alloy’s websites, 4) distribute the series across those very same properties, 5) repeat steps 1 through 4.
It worked with Haute and Bothered and LG. Then again with Private and Johnson & Johnson. Alloy’s now hoping the model holds for First Day and Kmart.
Starring Tracey Fairaway (Make It or Break It) and Elizabeth McLaughlin (Ugly Betty, The Clique), First Day follows a “teenage girl who repeatedly relives her first day at a new school.” It’s like Groundhogs Day for pubescents, showcasing back-to-school gear and Selena Gomez’s fashion line instead of Bill Murray.
The eight episode original web series debuts tomorrow and features “unique retail components” in each installment. Viewers will be able to click over to Kmart.com and by products worn by First Day characters. A sweepstakes will also send one lucky winner to NYC for his or her (most likely her) head-to-toe Kmart makeover.
In addition to First Day, Alloy is scheduled to release two more digital properties before the end of the year. Hollywood is like High School With Money, a web series adaptation of Zoey Dean’s New York Times bestselling novel of the same name and Talent, a music talent search that’s part scripted series and part reality TV show.
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