The Millennium Marketer

I’ve always been good with foreigners, and was very well known in my college years to be the welcome wagon, give you a tour of campus and the best places in downtown San Jose, and whatnot.

But this is kinda silly, because I see a HUGE opportunity to now welcome digital immigrants.
I owned my first Mac when I was 9 years old (Thanks Dad!) so I guess that qualifies me as a Digital Native. As for Digital Immigrants, that is all you who are wondering “what is social media and what do I with it?”

The first rule of learning about social media is to be open minded. You can’t learn anything if your thought is “Well, that’s not how they did it years ago.”

OK, I agree social media is a HUGE buzz word, and maybe you really don’t have time to get involved. I admit, it is also a very addictive medium because it’s interactive.

But we all have to learn to innovate, and that also means playing nice with the late adopters. There’s apparently this entire market of people who are now familiar with the web when it first emerged in the 90s, and are curious about social media, but are absolutely confused about where to start. Ironically, I write a blog, so I’m not exactly sure how Digital Immigrants will find this post, but if you are curious about what is a:
“blog”
“Twitter”
“Cloud Computing”
… read on. Let’s see if we can make this a good jumping off point for you.

Blog: Blog=web log.
Why should I read a blog?
Sure, it’s not the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal, but I don’t think you can find good tips for things like “productivity” the way you can from Lifehacker or Zen Habits.

Oh, and commenting is a great way to get started too. Find a few blogs that you like, and write your thoughts. You may make some friends that way as well.

Twitter
What is Twitter?The challenge with defining Twitter is that it is anything you want it to be. You can use it to communicate with friends, use it as a news feed to track the latest breaking news and you can also use it to make new friends with similar interests. The fact is that Twitter can often times tell a story about one subject through the eyes of millions, namely in the case of conferences, or the recent Earthquakes in San Francisco Bay Area last year.

How can I use it?Start a conversation organically–reach out to someone who interests you, because it is more about people than it is about the actual technology. The technology is simple to use, but there is an entire culture created by the people who use it.
Update: I forgot to mention that the “@” plus username is used to address replies to specific people. This is good to know!

Also see Twitter is an odd phenomenon.

Cloud computing:This one really mystifies Digital Immigrants, because first of all, it’s data out there floating around on a server and that makes DIs nervous. “I want my data secure on my hard drive where no one can get to it.” Counter-intuitive to the idea that we can be collaborative.

Cloud computing was meant to address a certain kind of pain point: “I cannot find anything on my hard drive and my computer is slow.” There is a whole suite of services out there that can be pointed to via your browser. Actually, online e-mail is probably the first type of cloud computing service we had available to us, and that is a gateway to things like Google Calendar and an online to do list service called Remember the Milk.

Yeah, as a side note, I’m such a big promoter of RTM, that in fact, one of my old bosses once jumped out of his office one day and said, “You’re a Millennial!!” in which he then proceeded to describe the definition of a Millennial.

I will not forget that not even to this day, because if he hadn’t said it, then I probably wouldn’t be it. And really, to anyone who thinks it’s “perjorative” to be Gen Y or Millennial, I must add that I can’t think of a harder working age of people, because our parents sheltered us so much with strict curfews, requirements to do well in school and so on, that now as adults, day and night are the same: simply opportunities to do work whether you’re a morning person or a night owl, either in your office, at home or at a cafe.