Twentysomething

Andru Edwards says goodbye

Andru Edwards, founder of Gear Live Media and the Seattle Mind Camp Events has a very moving online eulogy of sorts to his father, George Budabin. I met Andru at his last mind camp and he seemed like a very stand up guy. My thoughts and prayers are with him at this time.

Generation Y: The Hoodie and Jeans generation

I was asked to do an interview for CRM magazine earlier today, where they questioned me on a variety of topics concerning Generation Y.

It really got me thinking about what we are and what we stand for.

After mulling it over in my head, it became clear that this generation is more laid back than previous generations.  We don't feel the need to do the whole suit and tie thing and by and large stand by our jeans. We may choose to dress up later, but for now we are not ready to grow up.

Hollister's success stands as proof of this model.  They sell clothing that can only be described as slacker wear. Although a spin off of the much more preppy Abercrombie and Fitch brand, Hollister prides itself on a relaxed, day at the beach look.

I think that's an ongoing theme in this generation. Content is now incredibly accessible to us and we don't have to try hard to find anything. We expect to be catered to. That's not to say that we don't deliver. We still work hard and will deliver results but we expect them on our time.

As I dove deeper into thought I kept turning to the iPod and Apple's marketing. Apple's latest ads have the PC in a traditional, boring suit, white button up and slacks. Whereas the Mac is in a hoodie and jeans. I think that's a great representation of our generation: the hoodie and jeans generation.

A lot of marketers think that we don't like big brands. It's not that we don't like them, it's that were sick and tired of big marketing. We've had years of crap marketing campaigns that really don't have anything to do with the product being sold to us.

We trust our friends and our own sources much more than we trust big companies. That's why great marketers will find a way to identify with us by speaking our language. Some of the movie studios are starting to get this by creating MySpace pages and creating viral campaigns. Great companies will capitalize on the viral effect and dominate over those that can't adapt.

One of the brands I mentioned during my interview is Threadless.  I heard about them through a friend and thought I would check out their site. They have a simple yet great community driven business model: users submit designs, designs get voted on, popular designs get printed. I quickly found a great shirt that I loved and purchased it. I also signed up for their email newsletters and can honestly say that I am actually excited to receive them, because they're designed in a way that keeps me intrigued, always focusing on the newest designs.

I received my shirt a couple weeks later, with an address label ready if the shirt didn't fit. It also had a few stickers, which is more free marketing for the company. Since I've purchased the shirt, I've received a ton of compliments on it and spread the name of the business to those that commented on it.  I was so happy with the way that I was treated as a threadless customer that I would gladly give them referrals.

Combining technology and old fashioned good customer service is the best way to get to this generation. Let's hope more companies start getting it.

Marketing Reinvented

It seems marketing is getting turned upside down recently. Dell recently opened up a blog, to take on it's customers one on one. They've received a lot of criticism for their customer service in the past and I think this is a great step in the right direction, creating a win-win situation for both parties involved.

Companies need to understand that creating and maintaining blog gives the company a lot of pluses such as allowing your customers to feel their voice is heard, getting valuable information back from the customer and creating a human voice to the lifeless marketing field.

I do think more companies will follow suit and corporate blogging will become much more popular. This brings me to my next point on marketing.

Marketing and advertising are going through some ground shaking changes. Blogs are becoming a voice to reckon with, as the power users described in Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point can now broadcast their voice to their world, and viral videos and links are becoming the norm.

What happens in a world where marketing becomes less relevant ? It adapts. Marketing must learn to become one with the web. Doc Searls has a great article entitled "Markets without Marketing", which describes the end of marketing as we know it. I don't exactly agree with that viewpoint, as I think that once big corporations realize the power (and low cost) of this form of marketing they will capitalize on it.

Of course this will take some time and a lot of trial and error, because to create something viral it needs to grab someone's attention enough to send it someone else. It has to be clever, interesting or witty.

You can't just create your own social network for instance, which Wal Mart just attempted to do.
It is going to be a tight rope, but in the end, like with many other things in this crazy web world, the consumer stands to benefit from these changes.

Quest for the perfect Feed-Reader

I've been using netvibes to read the blogs I like for the past few months and it's worked great: it updates feeds very quickly, it's really easy to use and straight to the point.

Recently though, I've matured past what netvibes could offer me. As I've added to my blogroll, and added personalized feeds such as Craigslist searches, my netvibes page has gotten very cluttered.

Now that I've experienced the benefits of a feed reader, I don't think I could go back to surfing such as Fred Wilson suggests in his blog, so I need a better reader.

Today I found both a better reader and a hefty review of readers from Read/Write Web, a cool next gen blog that will be a new addition to my blog roll.

Pageflakes allows for multiple pages of content, with default set pages of work, fun and reading. It very developer friendly and has a pretty AJAX UI.  I noticed that it doesn't load as quickly as Netvibes but the features may be worth it. I'll be testing it out until Microsoft's Live.com stacks up to this start up's cool and unique features. Isn't that Web 2.0 is all about ?

The Emergence of the Neighborhood Blog

In the past week, I've found an emergence of area and neighborhood specific blogs.

The best example I've seen so far is for the Kirkland area,  a city on the other side of the water of Seattle (with a beautiful view in the summer btw):

http://kirklandweblog.typepad.com/kirkland_weblog/

The key to a succesful neighborhood or city blog seems to be in having multiple authors. The mix of real estate, local gossip, business, events, parks and restaurant reviews keeps the content fresh, diverse and well suited for mass appeal.

There seems to be a ton of blogs dedicated to the big cities in the United States. As suburbs and late adopters start hearing about the virtues of blogging, I think we'll continue to see more online, private resident content as a means of local news, and less reliance on the trash they call the 10 oclock news.