Reaching millenials & why content matters

The NY Times did a story in the Sunday’s edition about the digital divide between parents and their children. As usual for the paper of record, it approached the issue in a manner which treats things like kids wanting to keep secrets from parents and trying to cloister themselves amongst their group of friends as a “new” thing as if it hasn’t always happened this way. Didn’t these people watch Grease?

I will admit to being astounded by how much teenagers text. My brother is about 9 1/2 younger than me and it wasn’t until he moved to where I used to live to go to school that I noticed how much folks text. Sometimes thousands of times a month. But they never use the phone and even then “it’s not for long.” Of course, he’s a guy and I imagine for women it might different. I have no empirical evidence to back that up though.

I will text people because it’s easier than talking on the phone or to send a teaser of something I want to remember to tell them later. But it’s not something I do with any sort of regularity.

For young millennials, keeping connected to their ‘network’ and developing new ones are something that is almost ritual. With the same speed and regularity that people would slough off friends over time, people of this generation seem more than comfortable with giving out their phone numbers and communicating with folks without actually talking to them. It does seep into things like their inability to communicate extremely well or disdain for long conversations and the lost art of writing letters.

I spent time working with a client who was trying hard to broaden their reach to this group and didn’t understand how to respond in ways that would attract their interest. You can’t expect to show up on the turf of what amounts to foreigners and expect that not knowing the language, they will offer you some sort of parachute or a translator. It’s why I implore people to spend more time honing their message and tailoring their content for the people they want to reach. It boils down to:

1. Knowing your audience(s)
2. Tailoring your content for the audience(s)
3. Making that content portable, accessible and adaptable in a variety of ways.

In other words, it doesn’t do any good to have a myspace page if you’re just using it as a way to ‘talk’ to students. You can talk to kids in the same latent ways in admissions fairs or in the same ways you’ve always reached them.

These kids aren’t on myspace and to a lesser-degree facebook to talk to you. That’s not what they’re there for. So sure, if I go to the mall I’ll get a free sample. And if they’re passing out free stickers or posters for something I like, then I’ll take one. Maybe I’ll even use knowing that person as a way to impress my friends. But the bottom line is, those sites are there for them to communicate with people they know or those they want to get to know. That’s it.
It’s pretty useless in the context of attractive the average prospective student and to entice them to do anything other than waste incessant amounts of time.

If you know your product and spend time tailoring your message, it makes it infinitely easier (not that there is anything easy about it) to begin to develop a cohesive marketing campaign around what you’re offering up. The web is a component in that, but as I’ve read before..it doesn’t start on the front page, it starts inside. Nice storefronts aren’t going to convert sales, the stuff inside does.

All of this stuff is basic, but every time I end up in a meeting with people revolving around the same questions, it becomes clear to me that the focus isn’t on the right things. Just saying Web 2.0 a lot or trying to slap together a host of new media tools onto your site doesn’t signal to anyone that you’re truly a web savvy institution.

It’s how you integrate those tools into your message, that determines how much the tools penetrate your market.

One suggestion related to this topic as a whole, I found Seth Godin’s latest book Meatball Sundae: Is Your Marketing Out Of Sync really useful, as it touches on marketing and how it’s changed and I think it would be a useful tool to have for higher ed marketing folks.

How I plan the ‘next big thing’

Prior to leaving for my current job, I developed this little sheet where I asked myself five questions about anything I wanted to do when it came to project/business stuff. If I don’t complete this sheet, it is not a project that I pursue any further.

The five questions are:

What I want to do
Why I want to do it
How I’ll do it
How I’ll eat doing it
My pipe dream after I’ve done it

Admittedly, it’s still a new thing and it’s very possible that I’ll jettison the whole idea after a while. But so far, I like it because it forces me to be less excited about an idea. Not in practice, but in terms of the sheer possibilities that abound and worrying more about ‘how cool it would be if I pull it off’ and instead, focusing my energy onto how I’ll get from point A to point B and so forth. The last question My pipe dream after I’ve done it is reserved for “what will you do if you actually pull it off? What is your goal beyond just setting it up and actually getting it going? What will you do after that?”

I wonder if other people have their own ways of “checking themselves at the door” when they’re in the midst of plotting a side project or something, especially those among us who are full-time idea spinners who run their own startups.