Wired for 2020 is the Mentoring Partnership of Minnesota’s year long engagement campaign to get more mentors involved with youth in the state of Minnesota. Their mission is to interest caring adults in becoming mentors to youth. Caring adults who are willing to help young people spark their future career interests and expand their possibilities.

Sponsors included names such as General Electric, Best Buy, Target, Federated Insurance, MN Dept of Education, Minnesota Interactive Media Association, Qwest, Science Museum of Minnesota, 3M, Thomson Reuters and many more.

With a daughter in college and a son in high school, you bet I care deeply about the future of education and work, the world they’ll inherit from us, and the value we can add to kids if we can help them locate their own, personal spark within and help them to see possibilites and opportunities that match their dreams.

In a world where high paying, yet low value jobs can be done elsewhere at a fraction of the cost of labor onshore, the challenge is in coaching our youth on how they can each strive and focus on higher value work and that they can, in fact, invent the future. It won’t be easy as global competition continues to grow. 

When it came out, I immediately devoured Thomas Friedman’s book “The World is Flat.” There was one concept that leapt off the pages at me: that even PhD-level, linear and serial processes could (and are) being outsourced because they are defined and understood. I thought about the profundity of that reality and realized that once a process is identified and mapped out — regardless of how sophisticated — it can be handed off to people elsewhere in the world who are willing to do it less expensively.

So do we want to focus our youth as innovators of tomorrow — and mentor them as such — to be more efficient linear, serial thinkers and laborers? I don’t think so and neither do others.

A Whole New Mind: Moving from the Information Age to the Conceptual Age by Daniel Pink accelerated my thinking along these lines about creativity and innovation with his premise: “The era of “left brain” dominance, and the Information Age that it engendered, are giving way to a new world in which “right brain” qualities — inventiveness, empathy, meaning — predominate.” In this book Pink describes a new era beginning to take shape in the global economy. This new economy calls for skills and talents that, historically, have been largely discounted in the workplace – creativity, empathy, intuition, and the ability to link seemingly unrelated objects and events into something new and different.

Seeing in parallel, making associations (i.e., connecting the dots), is a skill our kids must have for the future. While they will certainly need to understand how to link seemingly unrelated objects and events, that’s pretty useless if they lack the skills to communicate the idea, the innovation or the vision they have for an outcome. Our youth will need to understand how to grab all the relevant pieces coming at them in parallel, package them up and communicate them to people whom they may never meet in person but rather only virtually through some online venue.

Talk to anyone spending any time on the internet — looking at news, information, Twitter, or just trying to keep up with their friends in Facebook — and you’ll hear things like “river of news” or “I’m drowning in a tsunami of digital stuff” or “everything is getting a lot more complex” as we struggle to keep up with the flow of data that comes with online participation. Dealing with all of this in parallel, and drawing associative inferences from it or finding nuggets of gold within it, is already a skill most need but few possess.

Though my session was entitled, “Creating Online Content: Why You Need a Blog,” it really wasn’t solely about either content creation or blogging. Instead, the themes that ran through it was the imperative that mentors get their heads around the concept of dealing with the online world in parallel, engaging in social participation, why all of it is so potentially empowering for them and a must, and especially how we all are experiencing online media, news and information at different times of the day or night (vs. the old “watercooler talk” from pre-internet days when we walked in to work the next morning after seeing some live show broadcast, and we commiserated with our colleagues about that shared experience).

My overall point was that the only real way to understand this new realm of streams of information and social connection online and to have consistent and ongoing shared experiences today — especially between a mentor and mentee — would be if each was participating online within a social network, uploading photos to Flickr or videos to YouTube (or their equivalents), and sharing experiences while having them at different times of the day or night or even within a week or two.

The skills that both the mentor and mentee learn by participating online by creating and delivering their own content are invaluable (and there is no question that the mentee may become the technology mentor!). I can’t tell you how often I sit with 40+ people who want to know “the process of how to Twitter” or “what’s the workflow in publishing to a blog” or “if I do this participation thing, what’s my return?” as if they were still living in a linear, serial world where Step 1 leads to Step 10. Most savvy online participants are involved with the social web and online pursuits in a highly parallel way, connecting dots on the fly and being very fluid with their creation and delivery and connections to other people. Which is precisely the sort of behaviors that come naturally to youth today and will be a skill set necessary as a worker going forward.

What struck me about Wired for 2020 was how many of the people associated with the event, the organizers, volunteers, speakers and workshop creators (i.e., TEL.A.VISION and see this post on the Wiredfor2020 blog) down to those responsible for the Interactive Lab in which I participated (Mark Kurtz VP of New Media, Gage Marketing Group and someone with more energy than a bagful of bobcats, Wendy Meadley, from WM Consulting LLC), completely understood that there is a shift going on in the world and that they are completely geared toward ensuring our youth are ready to confront the challenges and opportunities facing them in a connected world with ideas and information moving around it at the speed of electrons.

Wired for 2020: Mentoring Our Youth is a post from: Minnov8 and published under a Creative Commons license.

One key trend Minnov8 is closely tracking in 2009 — especially when it comes to Minnesota startups or companies involved in it — is in the area of social media aggregation along with social marketing, analytics and communication extensions to existing products and services.

If you’re one of the accelerating number of people that are always-on, always-connected, and  participating all over the ‘net — or are an organization trying to figure out how to get online, be socially connected, and in a position to build an audience, community or ecosystem surrounding the space in which you’re involved — than trying to ‘herd the cats’ and get them to behave (either your social media participation with your digital stuff left all over the place, or a company trying to figure out how to reach influencers in some given category and reach out to them while measuring the impact of their effort) is an incredible challenge and coordinating and orchestrating either of them seems impossible!

The good news? Many of you reading this are already using a wide variety of emerging aggregation tools and you’re trying to figure out what approach works best for you as this space evolves. Minnesota companies, who understand that millions of people participating online is a meaningful place to be as a marketer, are looking at ways in which to herd their cats. Fortunately for both sets of needs, new tools are proliferating and there are many thought leaders working hard on methods to make our use and management of increasing social participation online significantly easier to manage in 2009.

Yahoo's MyBlogLog Service Enables a Participant to Aggregate Multiple Social Media Services

Several developments occurred in 2008, gained traction in 2009, and are poised to make big inroads this year. Ones like OpenID, a “single sign-on” for all of your Web applications, social media sites and social networks are key, but others that are promising to make our social connections more portable are emerging:

• Google’s OpenSocial: A set of common application programming interfaces (APIs) for web-based social networks, so that applications developed using the OpenSocial APIs will be interoperable with any social network system that supports them. Some critics point to the limited adoption so far and its capabilities
• Facebook: They created their own application platform that developers can use and have eschewed the Google OpenSocial approach
• “Friend Connect”: In competition with OpenID, Google Friend Connect and Facebook Connect were both introduced to leverage the huge mass of users already using their respective platforms
• DiSO Project: DiSO is a project that today is focused on the WordPress platform, but the people behind it (and many others) understand that, “Social networks are becoming more open, more interconnected, and more distributed. Many of us in the web creation world are embracing and promoting web standards – both client-side and server-side. Microformats, standard APIs, and open-source software are key building blocks of these technologies. This model can be described as having three sides: Information, Identity, and Interaction”
• Cliqset: is “a social development platform designed to enable an open mesh of innovation and creativity across the social web. Acting as the system of record for your social identity, Cliqset empowers developers to build socially aware applications that create, share and define your social data on behalf of you, enabling a social experience unlike anything that exists today“
  
• Open Mesh: Though that title is used in several different contexts, Marc Canter (founder of MacroMind that became Macromedia and now founder of BroadbandMechanics) has a concept of all of the elements that need to come together to form a holistically coordinated and orchestrated mesh of online services. Makes my brain hurt just trying to absorb it though.

Along with infrastructure pieces like those above are hosted Web applications that have positioned themselves as your “social graph aggregator” or what your content participation is being referred to more frequently as: “lifestreaming“. The objective of these applications is to bring together all of your online digital stuff in one place, including your friends stuff, and provide you with better opportunities to connect with others using various social media services that exist today as well as those not yet invented:

• The Flock web browser whose approach is to be a browser-centric aggregator of all your social media services
• Friendfeed and even a Firefox web browser add-on for it called “MySocial 24/7“
• Plurk, who says that they’re, “A really snazzy site that allows you to showcase the events that make up your life, and follow the events of the people that matter to you, in deliciously digestible short messages called plurks“
• SecondBrain: “Secondbrain makes it easy to manage all your social media, bookmarks and files in one place. Organize everything in your library, follow your friends’ updates and discover good content“
• …and many more.

Lastly, on the company-needing-to-connect with social media participants side, we’re seeing an acceleration in analytics tools and, as I suspected last year, a major enterprise-class vendor entering the social media services and analytics space:

• There are several social media analytics startups doing very interesting work and with solid approaches: Collective Intellect; Radian6; Techrigy; ScoutLabs, Visible Technologies, Cymfony, and Keenkong
• Last week, Salesforce.com released their Service Cloud, that has as this stated value proposition, “The Service Cloud is the next-generation platform for customer service. You can tap into the power of customer conversations no matter where they take place. Harness know-how from the right experts, whether they’re on a Web community forum or having a dialog on Facebook. Suddenly, you’re part of those conversations.“  With a relatively inexpensive price and several key features like customer relationship management; campaign management; along with hundreds of 3rd party applications in their AppExchange facilitating bolt-on capabilities that extend the Salesforce platform.

Minnesota companies and startups are also seeing this social media coordination and aggregation trend and are beginning to capitalize upon it:

• Target, General Mills and Best Buy (the latter doing much more with Remix, Giftag and other initiatives) are in the early stages of dabbling in social media
• OnePlace, a team collaboration, project management and personal productivity, recently added Twitter-like communication capabilities called “TeamCentral” for their collaborative offering with significant management capabilities of it
• Cullect, is an offering that helps you find and share the relevant, important stories from your huge array of news and blog feeds. They also created a branded URL shortener for MinnPost, a very important tactical requirement for many social media uses like Twitter requires, enabling MinnPost to make it easier for social media participants to link to their articles
• Tumblon, a site for parents of young children that helps them track their children’s development and, most importantly, understands that giving these parents the power to publish (either private or publicly) through an easy blog publishing for family and friends is an imperative in today’s social sharing world.

You’ll see more and more approaches to leverage all of these infrastructure developments, hone the aggregator/lifestreaming methods, and make it easier to collect and deliver all of your digital breadcrumbs. If you’re a company looking to market to, or connect with, social media participants, the ways to do that with superior analytics tied to campaign and customer relationship management will continue to accelerate and make it simpler to enter and leverage the social media space.

Of course, that doesn’t do anything about you collating and delivering stuff of value that your friend, family or future connections might care about (see my personal post, “It’s the Value, Stupid” for more) or that companies identifying discussions and people using social media — and deciding on how to enter into conversations with them, engage them in crowdsourcing, or build an audience or ecosystem around their company or products — still needs to be done properly, ethically and above-board by organizations using them. But the opportunity will be there and the tools and solutions to do so in a meaningful way will be yours for the asking as they continue to evolve and emerge in 2009.

Herding Your Online Cats is a post from: Minnov8 and published under a Creative Commons license.

As we’ve written here before, Best Buy is one of the leaders in the adoption of social media in the retail industry. Their CMO, Barry Judge, has started blogging and has taken to Twitter. He’s very transparent in his exploration of conversational marketing in interviews like this one. But probably the best overview is a video we posted here last month that features an interview with Best Buy CEO Brad Anderson who clearly is behind their use of social tools and techniques.

Target, in contrast, is opaque on all things social and their CMO, Michael Francis, seems from the corporate model of a brilliant planner, not innovator. Although they have been involved in conversational marketing — I recall meeting blogger Robert Scoble some 3 years ago after a day of meetings at Target — their efforts to date have been mixed. A well planned Facebook campaign was marred by controversy. And there was that episode with bloggers who took issue with a billboard in New York. Not the kind of case studies you would want from a company who clearly is a leading force in retail brand advertising.

So I will be tracking each company and their marketing efforts over the next several months and posting highlights here. If past is prologue, my gut tells me we’ll be seeing a lot of innovation from Best Buy, particularly in their use of social media. But the folks at Target might also surprise us. In these difficult times, the most innovative will likely win.

Marketing Innovation: Best Buy vs. Target is a post from: Minnov8 and published under a Creative Commons license.