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Article on web 2.0 marketing to millennials by Strategic Enrollment Management February 2009. "Although we are not going to dedicate our article to a recap of millennial marketing, we do want to reinforce the importance of understanding the millennial mindset before you begin to build your Web 2.0 plan. Consider that 64 percent of your audience (teens 12 to 17 years old) are reported to engage in at least one type of online content creation, up from 57 percent just four years ago. Understanding what they are doing online allows our plans to be more comprehensive and effective and fully integrated into a successful enrollment plan. There is even an emerging classification of teenagers using a host of technology options for dealing with family and friends, including traditional landline phones, cell phones, texting, social network sites, instant messaging and e-mail. These "super communicators" represent about 28 percent of the entire teen population (Guess 2008). And possibly the most interesting statistic to watch comes out of Noel-Levitz's "E-Expectations: The Class of 2007" report, which claims that 43 percent of high school juniors have a profile page designed for use in researching colleges (Lenhart & Madden 2007). This all means that if you are not already participating in an active use of online marketing you are overlooking a large group of your audience. Frankly, they are keenly aware of marketing, and as marketers we need to understand their mindset to build effective plans to reach and educate them. We cannot expect that they will conform to marketing as it has been done in a traditional way. Tools of the Trade: Components to Consider The goal of any Web 2.0 is to inform and connect. Simply stated, the tools you choose should work to reinforce that goal and integrate with the other tools of the trade you are using. Enrollment managers who know their audience understand the need to consider a variety of marketing options, from traditional adve

Blog post by Ann Michaelsen, January 27, 2012 "Have you ever sat down in front of your computer, expecting a lot of work to be done in a certain amount of time, only to find that you have done nothing work-related at all? Or that you've done a lot - just not what you planned to do? Many people are thinking about the way we spend our time and what gets our attention in this digital age. Howard Rheingold calls it infotention and I've been learning a lot about it recently thanks to his challenging but rewarding online course, "Introduction to Mind Amplifiers." It's a five-week experience using asynchronous forums, blogs, wikis, mindmaps, social bookmarks, synchronous audio, video, chat, and Twitter. Participation requires a serious commitment of time and attention by every member of the learning group. Believe me, the skill of staying focused on what is important certainly proves to be helpful here! The world demands "infotention" Infotention is a word I came up with to describe the psycho-social-techno skill/tools we all need to find our way online today, a mind-machine combination of brain-powered attention skills with computer-powered information filters. ~ Howard Rheingold"

The new science of social physics which is about the way human social networks spread ideas and transform those ideas into behaviors. Alex Pentland has a new book: Social Physics: How Good Ideas Spread: The Lessons from a New Science that explores the patterns of information exchange in social networks, the ways humans are like bees, and how networks large and small can be tuned to increase exploration and community engagement.

An article for BBC by Maggie Jackson, September 2009, about our inability to pay attention in an age driven by speed through technology "Still, I'm worried. These digital age wonders will be squandered if we can't think critically, research well, and evaluate the data-floods we now have at our fingertips - and these are precisely the skills alarmingly lacking among both digital natives and older generations. Half of college students can't judge the objectivity of a website. Workers now switch tasks every three minutes, half the time interrupting themselves. As David Nicholas points out, we spend our time online 'power-bouncing' from info-snippet to data-point. And this propensity to rely on point-and-click, first-up-on-Google answers, along with our growing unwillingness to wrestle uncomfortably with nuances or uncertainties, keeps us stuck on the surface of the 'information' age. We're too often sacrificing depth for breadth in the ways we make sense of the world. Yes, we've always had 'power bouncing' and distraction. And surfing or multitasking may have an important place in 21st-century society as strategies of learning. But going forward, we need to do much more than hopscotch across the web, split-focused and pulled this way and that by choice distractions. We cannot mistake fragmented, diffused attention as avenues of higher thought. Instead, we need to do better at cultivating - perhaps resuscitating? - deep focus, keen awareness and meta-cognitive 'executive' attention - the skills crucial to creativity and problem-solving. "

article by Steven Mintz for the Chronicle of HE, July 22, 2013 Excerpt: "But the most important challenge involves a shift in the way students consume higher education. Instead of attending a single institution, students receive credit in multiple ways, including from early-college/dual-degree programs, community colleges, online providers, and multiple universities. Students are voting with their feet, embracing online courses and undermining core curricula, which served as a cash cow, by turning to alternate providers, and pursuing fewer majors that require study of a foreign language." Fifteen innovations: 1. e-advising 2. evidence-based pedagogy 3. decline of lone eagle teaching 4. optimized class time 5. earlier educational transitions 6. fewer large lecture classes 7. new frontiers for e-learning 8. personalized adaptive learning 9. increased competency based and prior learning results; 10. data driven instructions 11. aggressive pursuit of new revenue 12. online and low-residency degrees at flagships 13. more certificates and badges 14. free and open textbooks 15. public-private partnerships

Example of one page scrolling web site to tell a story--research plans, research results--populated with a little text and big graphics that move, make it very interesting. They suggest this is a better way to go than a PDF for sharing your story.

Forbes, 10/22/13, by Jacquelyn Smith "Entrepreneurial spirit is a mindset. It's an attitude and approach to thinking that actively seeks out change, rather than waiting to adapt to change. It's a mindset that embraces critical questioning, innovation, service and continuous improvement. "It's about seeing the big picture and thinking like an owner," says Michael Kerr, an international business speaker, author and president of Humor at Work. "It's being agile, never resting on your laurels, shaking off the cloak of complacency and seeking out new opportunities. It's about taking ownership and pride in your organization." Sara Sutton Fell, CEO and founder of FlexJobs, says: "To me, an entrepreneurial spirit is a way of approaching situations where you feel empowered, motivated, and capable of taking things into your own hands. Companies that nurture an entrepreneurial spirit within their organization encourage their employees to not only see problems, solutions and opportunities, but to come up with ideas to do something about them." Entrepreneurial companies tend to have a more innovative approach to thinking about their products or services, new directions to take the company in, or new ways of doing old tasks, she adds. "Entrepreneurial spirit helps companies grow and evolve rather than become stagnant and stale." According to Jay Canchola, an independent human resources consultant, entrepreneurial spirit is also associated with taking calculated risks, and sometimes failing. "

Commencement speeches at different colleges, June 15, 2014 Harvey Mudd College Beth Shapiro, evolutionary biologist "Your unique education has prepared you for careers at the cutting edge of innovation. This is both good news and bad news. It's good news because you're probably going to find a job, it will pay well, and it will be intellectually fulfilling. It's bad news because whatever you thought you were training for when you started this exercise might not actually exist anymore. Five years ago, when you guys were deciding where to go to college, there were very few mobile-app developers or big-data architects, and there certainly weren't any chief listening officers for social media outlets. It's hard to imagine where the next five years will go, but it's kind of fun to do so. ... Who knows, but you guys are going to be among the people that are actually making it happen. And it'll be awesome, as long as you're willing to take some risks and step outside of your comfort zone. When an opportunity arises, take it." UNC at Chapel Hill Atul Gawande, doctor and writer "Ultimately, it turns out we all have an intrinsic need to pursue purposes larger than ourselves, purposes worth making sacrifices for. People often say, 'Find your passion.' But there's more to it than that. Not all passions are enough. Just existing for your desires feels empty and insufficient, because our desires are fleeting and insatiable. You need a loyalty. The only way life is not meaningless is to see yourself as part of something greater: a family, a community, a society. ... the search for purpose is really a search for a place, not an idea. It is a search for a location in the world where you want to be part of making things better for others in your own small way. It could be a classroom where you teach, a business where you work, a neighborhood where you live. The key is, if you find yourself in a place where you stop caring - where your greatest conce

Jacob Morgan has outlined in this Forbes article from 11/11/14 the 7 Principles of the Future Employee. These are the 7 core ways that future employees will work. The 7 are: Flexible work environment; Can customize work; Shares information; Uses new ways to communicate and collaborate; Can become a leader; Shifts from knowledge worker to learning working; Learns and teaches at will.

May 23, 2012 by Leadership Freak Dan Rockwell "8 ways to run great meetings: Short agendas are better than long. Allow ample time to discuss substantive issues. Rush through trivial items at the end. Press for decisions. Create immediate, short-term action items. Set short-term incremental deadlines. If it's due in six months it won't be started for five unless you set clear, impending milestones. Identify champions - people who own action items. Follow-up with participants in between meetings. Ask, "How's your project coming?""

from Forbes.com, Leadership: Jeanne Meister reports that the average worker today stays at each of his or her jobs for 4.4 years, millennials for less than 3 years, and Gen Y for less than 2. The changing landscape of the economy as well as the desire for younger generations to have challenging, fulfilling work results in this job-hopping. For Gen Y, it is a necessity as they are hard pressed to find consistent, full time work any other way.

This article on Resource Link, September 21, 2011, captures the learning environments we wish to bring to businesses, nonprofits, and membership associations. "Social Media - what do you need to know? In the 21st century, learning networks are richer than ever before. Social media, including tools such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn allow connections with professionals to be developed in offline and online worlds in new and exciting ways. No longer are we limited geographically. Social media allows us to connect not only to those we know, but also to those who we don't know, but who share our passions, our interests and our profession. Despite never having met in the physical sense, it is now possible to share links, comment on educational research, debate, collaborate and create new knowledge with individuals no matter where they are working." Another excerpt: So….Social Media and Professional Learning Communities? What is the connection? A school which is a professional learning community focuses upon removing the walls between classrooms (metaphorically, in all cases, physically in some!), encouraging collaboration, dialogue, ready access to colleagues and an openness to challenge understandings and current 'accepted' knowledge. Excerpt: Roberts and Pruitt, in their book Schools as Professional Learning Communities (p3, 2009) quote research that suggests that the major obstacle for schools who wish to develop as learning communities is the provision of resources such as time to collaborate, leadership support, information and ready access to colleagues. Social Media is not the total answer; but in schools where money and time are in short demand (and which school isn't in this situation?), they can go part of the way in meeting these needs. 1. social media providing to time to collaborate 2. social media providing leadership support 3. social media providing information 4. social media providing access to colleagues

8 ways to think about tech in ways that actually improve the classroom by Laura Moorhead from ideas.ted.com. Although geared toward k-12, this has some good advice for teachers such as not co-opting the social media most used for personal connections and fun (FB), no app is going to do everything, sharing ones passion and exploration with students is a good thing, and bringing in social learning is key - let the students explore and help each other. The technology and apps should support them to do this, not drive the content.

The author David Bach argues that business schools need to go in a different direction - more like liberal arts. Frame problems and get out of the way. "When people hear liberal arts, they - mistakenly - think of content, of literature, history or philosophy. They think of curricula without structure, of students mixing and matching courses from the arts and sciences without plan or direction. But liberal arts education is something more. "It's a way of looking at the world, a mode of inquiry. It is what Albert Einstein called "the training of the mind to think something that cannot be learned from textbooks.""

Free Ebook from Jacob Morgan: 5 Ways People Over 50 Can Stay Relevant. How Older Workers Can Embrace the Coming Changes and Stay Relevant in the Future of Work. Has info on what does the future of work look like for the 50+ population; The 5 key trends shaping the future of work; Why you need to embrace the coming changes; The 5 ways older workers can embrace these changes and stay relevant in the changing world of work; Specific actions that you can take to help future-proof your career.

Very interesting blog post at Meetingsnet.com on how to create a viral spread of ideas/content/connections at meetings. Written by Alison Hall, August 5, 2013. Stresses that millenials, the focus of many women's organizations recruiting efforts rely on social media and technology to get through each day. They are completely connected, which has implications for how organizations need to use content generated in f2f meetings to attract engagement by people well outside the event itself. Excerpt: 12 Tips for Share-worthiness 1. Think from your audience's POV: What will they find interesting? What will help them prove the value of their industry, or their position? 2. Entertain. Infographics, photos, and (appropriate) humor have great pass-along value. 3. Feel good. What will make the world better? Emotional content spreads because it moves people. Find a way to make your content connect on a deeper level. 4. Plan your meeting with the idea that all content (with the exception of content at proprietary meetings) will be shared. 5. Loop in your presenters. Get their key insights ahead of time so you can "lock and load" content that's ready to go in real time. 6. Remember that real-time marketing only works if your audience can connect. Work diligently with your venue to ensure Wi-Fi is accessible and bandwidth is sufficient. Consider (sponsored!) charging stations to keep attendees powered up throughout the meeting. 7. Lead the way. Sharing will be (and should be) organic, but you need to be the guide. Start promoting hashtags and social channels at your event Web site and in your online registration process. On site, brand all event signage with the hashtags and channels. 8. Talk back. Hear what your audience is saying and participate in conversations. Deliver social value back to them by retweeting or sharing their content. 9. Make it easy. All content should have a one-click sharing option. Don't rely on the audience to cut and paste. Videos and phot

blog post by Caroline Kim Oh, August 19, 2014, on reframing networking to build on your strengths, and not be overwhelmed by "networking" expectations at a so-called networking event. "Slow Networking " What I've found is that there is no one right way to build and cultivate your network. It turns out that my way of getting to know people, what I will begin calling "slow networking," is what works for me. I find that I am much better at getting to know people over time. I enjoy "collecting" relationships with people who are doing interesting work both within and outside of my field, keeping in touch with them, helping them whenever I can, informing them of what I am up to and, from time to time, calling on them when I need help. I love the process of uncovering a natural rapport with them as we work together on things we care about. How do you find your bright spot? When you feel you are excelling at a form of communicating with other people, and it comes naturally to you, that is your bright spot. And when you build your networking strategy around your one or two bright spots, you are leading with your strengths instead of trying to replicate some networking best practices book.

Interesting look at associations' challenges in 2014 Following 2013, a year in which 42 percent of the respondents to the "DC Associations Salary Survey Report 2013-2014" reported a decrease in membership revenues, 74 percent of respondents reported that increasing membership is their number-one challenge for 2014. The survey also identified several of the ways associations plan to foster growth this year. "This pressing issue is confirmed by plans to find innovative ways to deliver programs and services-clear paths to increasing membership and revenues," according to the report. Increasing staff performance and productivity was also reported as a strategic priority to ensure growth in 2014. Fifty-eight percent of respondents reported that they plan to do so. Roughly 50 percent plan to increase staff in key areas and increase staff training and coaching.

Very good article on not overinflating value of our followers or what whom we follow says about us. Instead, look for value in other ways such as how those whom you follow/those who follow really listen to what is being said in social media. by Clive Andrews, NixonMcInnes (UK social media firm), 7/4/2012

Ridiculous blog post drawing on book "The Online Community Blueprint" by Katie Bapple, Joshua Paul, and Katie Oakes, on having an online community. It annoys me because it never mentions purpose, it's more a "build it this way, and they will come."