I am a big believer that all of us need to need to help the generation of professionals that is following us.  For me, that means giving back in any way that I can to our country’s colleges and universities.  This spring has been a busy one on that front as I have had the chance to speak to local classes at both the University of Cincinnati and Northern Kentucky University, present at Pi Sigma Epsilon’s National Convention, and attend the Board meeting of the VCU BrandCenter.  In every single one of these sessions, a common question was asked by students:

“What should I be doing in order to get a job in marketing  and / or brand management?”

Of course this is a question that is always going to be on the minds of college students as they near graduation.  But with competition for jobs even higher this year because of the economy, it is a question that is more important than ever.

And with the importance of the question, I have thought hard about the answer and what I would do if I was in the shoes of students today.  At then end, the answer is a relatively  simple one:

College Students need to start going the extra mile today in order to get their 10,000 hours of practice in marketing.

I have written before about Malcolm Gladwell’s theory that being great at something takes around 10,000 hours of practice.  The same holds true for anyone that hopes to get a job in marketing or brand management.  They should be viewing college as the first few hundred (or even first few thousand) hours of practice in their marketing careers.

But I am not talking about just the classes.  Those are extremely important of course, but the best and the brightest go beyond that.  After all, everyone has to take roughly the same classes to graduate so just doing that workload won’t set you apart from the other 1.5 million students graduating in the US this year.

So how do you set yourself apart?  As I told students at those recent classroom visits, setting yourself apart starts with three simple steps:

1. Join a professional organization to start gaining real world experience: My good friend Anthony Portuesi recently wrote on his blog Driven Leaders on the topic that “College Students: Professional Organizations Can Separate You From the Pack.”  Anthony and I were both fortunate enough to be members of Pi Sigma Epsilon during college.  In this marketing fraternity, we had the chance to work for dozen of real marketing clients including Procter & Gamble and Ford Motor Company…all while going to school.  The best way to start your career early is to start getting work experience early.  Professional organizations like PSE are the perfect way to do just that.  And it gives you real things to talk about in an interview instead of just this great group project that you did in a marketing class.
2. Choose an internship over that study abroad program: This might not be a popular choice, but I think every student should be thinking about an internship instead of studying abroad for a summer.  Sure that summer in Europe or Asia will be a great time and you will get exposure to another culture.  But skipping that internship will put you 3 months behind the person that choose a paycheck over a fun trip.  And more importantly, you never know when that internship could turn into a real job…which means your senior year will be much less stressful when you have an offer in hand before the year even begins.
3. Use social media for real networking instead of posting photos from last night’s party: This is Google’s world and we are just living it.  That means that anything you put up on Facebook, MySpace or Twitter will be there for any recruiter or HR manager to see (whether you mark that profile private or not).  So instead of using Social Media to just be social, start putting those networking skills to use by marketing yourself.  Step one is to embrace LinkedIn.  Fill out your profile to 100% completeness and make sure it has all the buzz words important to your career choice.  Step two is to start becoming involved in industry chatter online.  This does not mean finding everyone that works for a company in your field and asking them for a job.  Instead, start interacting with people in your industry early in your college career.  Follow them on Twitter and ask them questions.  Read their blogs and leave insightful comments (not on every post… you dont want to be a stalker).  Social Media is for participating and it gives everyone an equal chance to talk with the smartest people in their industry.  Embrace that level playing field.

Now that does not sound all that tough, does it?  Just remember that the key is not waiting until your senior year to start thinking about your career.  Start practicing your marketing skills early on and you will get those 10,000 hours of practice in sooner than your colleagues.

Related articles by Zemanta

• College Students: Professional Organizations Can Separate You From the Pack (drivenleaders.com)
• Professional Development in a Networked World (bwatwood.edublogs.org)
• Malcolm Gladwell: How David Beats Goliath (joshharris.com)

Go to Source

RSS Readers – Click through for embedded video or view it here.

Go to Source

Over the next few weeks, you will be a seeing a new design for Hard Knox Life.  Thanks to the help of Bryan Radtke, fellow P&G’er and web guy at LookTone Design, we are trying a new design template for the site.  If anything on the site looks off, please let us know so we can continue to make tweaks.  And of course, I would love your feedback on the new layout as well.

Thanks to Bryan for all his help to get this up and running.

Go to Source

Over on MarketingProfs, Beth Harte recently wrote an article about “The Value of a Marketer.“  Beth starts out the piece by claiming:

“Frankly, it’s just not a fun time to be a marketer. Those who have a job are fearful and waiting for the axe to fall and those without a job are struggling to secure one in a sea of rough competition.”

No offense to Beth, but I couldn’t disagree more.  You see, the rationale of the article is that in these economic times, “it’s tough out there right now” for a marketer.  But you cannot equate economic uncertainty to mean that an entire industry is unenjoyable and/or faces an uncertain future.

Frankly, I cannot think of a better or more fun time to be a marketer.

Conveniently enough, I was having drinks with Michael Troiano right after I read the MarketingProfs post.  When I mentioned my struggle with Beth’s post, Michael reminded me his manifesto on Scalable Intimacy in which he proclaimed:

Let’s face it folks… marketing has become what HR used to be, before somebody figured out we were spending more money on people than on anything else. It’s the place where arty intellectuals can travel, interact with like-minded pretty faces over cocktails, and hide from the accountability that has transformed every other corner of the 21st century corporation. Most marketing people are mediocre. Most marketing is the sexy part of sales without the pesky accountability, and it is worthless. Harsh, perhaps, but you know it’s true.

Michael definitely put it more bluntly than I would have… but he’s so right.  Over the past decade, marketing has started to undergo a radical transformation.  The days of Mad Men are gone and with it the easy road of a creating a TV spot that made everyone happy.  In fact, I would say there has been a direct correlation between the decline of mass media and the increase in marketers needing to put in serious time and effort into creating brilliant brand building.

And in my eyes, that is a good thing.

Marketing is not and never should have been just fun and games.  Real marketing is hard work in both good times and bad.  It is a job that is about taking insights on your consumer and turning those into brilliant strategies that move more cases.

And for those of us that somehow get a thrill out of this, there is no better time than now to be a marketer.  Why?  Well consider just a few things:

1. More than ever, management needs leadership on how to grow the business: ROI has always been extremely important but never more so than now.  If a marketer can show management that their marketing expenses are actually an investment, instead of a cost, than this is the perfect time to make the case.
2. Marketing is more dynamic than ever: Marketing has changed more in the past 5 years than in the past 50 years.  In this age of Facebook, Twitter, iPhones and any hundreds of other shiny objects, marketers have the chance to lead this change.  Marketers have a chance to lead the strategy of how your brands and business will use these new tools to really connect with consumers.
3. Consumers are expecting more from us: It wasn’t too long ago that marketers had all the control.  If consumers wanted great TV shows, they had no choice but to watch the commercials.  After all, there were no remote controls and DVR was just three letters in the alphabet.  But that’s changed completely today and as a result, consumers have a choice.  And once they have a choice, they are going to start expecting more from us as marketers because they can easily skip us.  That challenge is what makes it fun to be a marketer today.  We have to find the next Nike+ that goes beyond just shouting at people and instead adds values to their life.

Great marketers live for a challenge and they live for change.  Today’s marketing world features both, which means there has never been a more fun time to be a marketer in my eyes.

Now let me end by saying I don’t want to discount the tough times some people are going through because of the economy.  Layoffs aren’t a laughing matter.  But at the same time, we can’t take the view that the industry is “no fun” because of the current crisis.  If anything, these tough economic times present one of the greatest opportunities ever for marketers to show why are jobs can truly build the business.

It is just up to us to be brave enough to seize the opportunity.

Go to Source

Over the weekend, I finally had a chance to read the Nielsen Global Online Media Landscape.  An easy read at 20 pages, the report covers six broad topics including: 1.) Internet Audiences, 2.) Online Video, 3.) Social Media, 4.) Mobile, 5.) Online Display Advertising, and 6.) E-Commerce.

While I highly suggest any Brand Manager read the entire report, here are the nuggets that jumped out to me:

While 2009 will not be a banner year for online advertising revenues, the longer-term prospects for the global online medium continue to be bright: In 2009, online will once again outperform all other media.  China will likely be fl at to down, partially due to the global slowdown but more importantly because it will be hard to match the Olympics-related surge during 2008. The U.S. and Japan will be fl at to up slightly. There will be pockets of significant (25+%) growth, but it will be limited to small-to-mid sized advertising countries such as Brazil, and throughout Eastern Europe and Southeast Asia.

Digital Content / Online Video are among the fastest growing areas of the Online Media Landscape: When you consider these facts, it is no wonder that the TV industry is struggling to find direction:

• The number of American users frequenting online video destinations has climbed 339 percent since 2003.
• Time spent on video sites has shot up almost 2,000 percent over the same period.
• In the last year alone, unique viewers of online video grew 10 percent, the number of streams grew 41 percent, the streams per user grew 27 percent and the total minutes engaged with online video grew 71 percent.
• One of the more interesting trends in online video is the increasing attraction to long form videos: the total minutes spent watching long-form (average of six-to-eight minutes) is considerably more than minutes spent on short-form, and has grown about 20% in the fi rst two months of 2009.

The impact of Social Media cannot be ignored by marketers: Brands such as Motrin and Domino’s have learned the hard way the impact of Social Media.  It is no wonder when you consider these facts:

• There are 87 percent more online social media users now than in 2003, with 883 percent more time devoted to those sites.
• In the last year alone, time spent on social networking sites has surged 73 percent.
• In February, social network usage exceeded Web-based e-mail usage for the first time.
• Social networking plays a prominent role with Mothers aged 25-35 with at least one child at home. In addition to e-mail, they are 85% more likely to spend time with Facebook compared to the average online consumer.

Mobile is finally taking its rightful place in the spotlight: Marketers have anticipating the “year of mobile” for almost a decade.  It appears that in 2009, Mobile is finally starting to live up to its potential:

• In the U.S. today, nearly 50 million mobile subscribers access the Web via their devices on a monthly basis. In the U.S., the mobile Internet audience grew 74% between February 2007 and February 2009.
• While historically US has been behind in mobile adoption, the US is now one of the leading markets for mobile Internet penetration, with more than 18% of subscribers accessing mobile Web.  This is the highest penetration of mobile subscribers among the markets Nielsen reports mobile Internet adoption.
• Penetration of smartphones doubled between Q4 2007 and Q4 2008, from 7% of U.S. mobile subscribers to 14%. Penetration of faster 3G devices now stands at 37% of handsets in use in the U.S
• iPhone users are unique in their use – a hint at the mobile media behaviors of users of next-gen phones to come.  iPhone users, for instance, are more than four times as likely as a typical subscriber to use mobile Internet, six times as likely to use mobile applications and six times as likely to consume mobile video.
• 12 million U.S. mobile subscribers access their social networks over their phone. At the end of 2008, Facebook was just slightly ahead of MySpace in terms of unique mobile users: 7 million compared to 5.7 million. Mobile usage of social networking sites grew 260% during 2008 in the U.S.

Go to Source

There is no denying the impact of Twitter these days.  But what if we talked in “real life” like we do on Twitter?  That is the very question that Dan Gurewitch at CollegeHumor answers in this funny video.

(RSS Readers: click through for video).

Go to Source

“The amount of change in marketing over the past 3 – 5 years probably equals the amount of change over the past 30 years.” – Robert Liodice, CEO, ANA (Association of National Advertisers)

Let’s face it; it used to be a lot easier to be a Brand Manager.  People were looking for brands that delivered functional benefits like “better tasting” or “longer lasting.”  They heard about those brands through a handful of media vehicles like TV, magazines, radio and billboards.  And when they decided to buy that “longer lasting” brand they saw on TV, they went to the neighborhood store, which was happy to stock the trusted brands.  The purchase funnel was a simple, straightforward process that Brand Managers could easily follow and plan against.

Those days are gone and are never coming back.

What people want out of a brand has changed dramatically over the past several years.  While functional benefits still play an extremely important role, consumers want more.  They want a brand to stand for something more than just “best tasting.”  They want the brand to have a purpose and in many cases, they want to have an emotional connection with the brand.  In particular, these changes in attitude are being driven by a new generation of consumers:

• Gen Y is 40% more likely to “pay more for products consistent with an image I like”
• 59% of Trendsetter Youth would rather buy a $4 Organic Vegetable than a $2 Non-Organic Vegatable”
• 62% of 14 to 34 Year-Olds claim to have taken steps to “living a more environmentally conscious lifestyle”, including 14% who have bought environmentally conscious brands.
• Gen Y is twice as likely to claim to be “influenced by what’s hot and what’s not.”

Digital is transforming how people interact with brands and with each other.

Just as important as the change in what people want from a brand is the change in how they interact with brands.  You see, thanks to digital, people today have been permanently reprogrammed and they are engaging with different forms of media and technology like never before.  Their time is being split across all sorts of media channels and their opinions about products are no longer shaped by just what marketers tell them. Consider these facts of today’s digital world:

• Nearly half of US online adults are social media users, but 71% of online tweens and teens connect to a social network at least once a week.
• There are more Paypal accounts than Visa card holders.
• Americans sent 75 billion text messages in June 2008, a 160% increase from June 07.
• 70 million of the 90 million homes in the United States that are online have broadband connection speed and 37 percent of US Homes have Wireless or Wi-Fi.
• 9 out of 10 teens considers themselves to be “video gamers” and more than half play video games at least 3 times per week.
• 29% of teens would rather shop online than in a store.
• Consumers aged 18 – 26 are spending more time using the Internet (12.2 hours per week) than watching TV (10.6 hours per week) according to Forrester.

These are just a few facts that provide the background for what Forrester describes as a Groundswell.  In this Groundswell, dramatic changes in technology and media have caused control to shift away from companies and shift to consumers.  As a result, the Brand Manager no longer has the control of creating a message, buying 3 television spots and then sitting back as everyone in markets starts to hum their advertising jingle.  Today’s empowered digital consumer has completely changed the game…but its not just about new marketing tactics or media.  What we are witnessing is not only a shift in the fundamentals of marketing, but also in brand building.  Simple put, the digital consumer is revolutionizing the basic duties of a Brand Manager.

The brand builders of tomorrow need to change what they are doing today.  The fact is we cannot afford to sit this one out.  People are not limited in their choices of brands and they are starting to hold us to a higher standard.  The fact is that digital is fundamentally changing the way companies and consumers communicate….it’s not just another marketing tool.  Instead, digital is an enabler of new means of communication and conversation between people and brands.  To thrive in this new world, brands and businesses need a new type of leader with a fresh set of brand building skills.  They need a Brand Manager with a new leadership philosophy.

So I guess the question is, “What are you doing to be that brand leader of the future?”

Go to Source

David Armano is only a few weeks into his new gig at Dachis Corporation and he’s already back contributing to the Social Media space with another great presentation.  This time Armano talks a look at what the Future of Advertising might just look like for Ideas, Products, Interactions, Service and Conversations.

Related articles by Zemanta

• The Future of Advertising. WTF? (slideshare.net)

Go to Source

I found this stellar presentation by Stephen Anderson thanks to John Moore at Brand Autopsy (side note: John is a must read for brand marketers).  In the words of Stephen, the presentation is about how:

To be good user experience folks, we need to crack open some psych 101 textbooks, learn what motivates people and then bake these ideas into our designs.

Go to Source

We took a look at copywriting for audio and video content recently in the Multimedia Copy series. Just after that, I released a new video for the Thesis Theme for WordPress that might have given you some ideas about using video, whether you’re interested in Thesis or not.

Today I’ve got another example for you.

John Reese put out a great instructional video on affiliate marketing a few weeks back. It was originally opt-in only, but John gave me permission to embed the video here at Copyblogger.

There are two reasons why I think you should watch this:

1. If you’re interested in learning about affiliate marketing via permission-based email, this video lays out a solid strategy that works.
2. Whether you’re interested in affiliate marketing or not, John’s video is an excellent example of video-based content marketing. It’s got solid instructional value that also naturally creates interest in what John is ultimately promoting.

This video was the lead content for the launch of Opportunity.com, which is a set of affiliate marketing tools and resources. I am NOT using an affiliate link in this post, and I am NOT making any money at all for posting this.

So why am I doing it? Because it’s a great video that provides you value in two different ways.

Check it out (click through if you don’t see the video):

If you’re interested in finding out more about Opportunity.com, there’s another great video that provides an introduction here.

About the Author: Brian Clark is founder of Copyblogger and co-founder of DIY Themes, creator of the innovative Thesis Theme for WordPress. Get more from Brian on Twitter.

Go to Source