Paul Gillin, author of  The New Influencers and Secrets of Social Media Marketing, writes one of my favorite online newsletters.  In his latest issue, he provided a stellar summary of the advice he gives to college students.  In fact, the advice is so good that I thought the piece deserved to be reposted in its entirety.  If you like the writing, be sure to subscribe to Paul’s newsletter to hear his latest thinking.

Paul Gillin – Message to Graduates

I asked the students – all of them senior marketing majors – the same question I always ask college classes: How many of you subscribe to a daily newspaper? The response was pretty typical: three students out of a class of 34.

Here are some of the things I told them:

• Much of what you’ve learned about marketing over the last four years will be irrelevant five years from now. The field is changing too quickly. You’ve been learning about how to tell a story and position a brand, but in the future your job will be much more about listening to customers and working collaboratively on brand definition.
• You should discard much of what your teachers have been telling you about the media. Traditional media is collapsing and what emerges from the rubble will look very different than the institutions we now know.
• The best skills you can bring into the marketing field today are resourcefulness and curiosity. You must be willing to reinvent your skills constantly because the playing field is in a constant state of turmoil. This is very exciting for you and it’s very scary for the people you will be working for. Be sympathetic, but don’t get stuck doing things the old way.
• Traditional media was built upon a foundation of inefficiency. The clothing retailer who wanted to reach the .01% of the population who want to buy a wedding gown at any given time has had to pay for the 99.9% who don’t. That’s crazy, but it’s the only way we could get a message across in the past.
• The worlds of media and marketing are undergoing enormous improvements in efficiency right now. Unfortunately, efficiency is usually painful because it destroys institutions that were built upon inefficiency – institutions like newspapers and magazines. In the end, we’ll be better off, but we’re still in the ugly destruction phase right now.
• In the last decade, Americans have shift from browsing to searching for information. This has huge implications for the way decisions of all kinds will be made in the future. Search engine marketing and search engine optimization should be part of any core university marketing curriculum today.
• The shriveling of traditional media creates new opportunities for organizations — and that includes businesses — to fill the trust gap that’s been left behind. Businesses can become media if they so choose. Most of them haven’t accommodated themselves to that fact.
• Trust is complex in the new world because we are losing our traditional trusted brands. I trust Wikipedia to tell me the date the Yalta Treaty was signed, but not necessarily to interpret the poetry of Edgar Allan Poe. Trust is also situational. We are learning to trust some sources for certain kinds of information but not for others. It will take time for us to sort this out.
• Today, individuals can choose to be celebrities all by themselves. They need to have something interesting to say and the knowledge to use new channels to say it. This is very cool. We no longer have to depend on others to decide if we can be important or not
• This is a great time to be a college student getting into marketing. The old guard is struggling to learn the new tools that this generation intuitively understands. Companies like Edelman are going so far as to create reverse mentoring programs in which younger employees train senior executives. This doesn’t mean you young people know it all. Be open-minded about learning from the experience of others and be generous about sharing what you know.
• In the old days, the marketer’s job was to media-train a few key executives. In the future, the marketer’s job will be to media-train the entire company. This will be enormously empowering for marketers.
• Marketing’s traditional role has been to talk. Its future role will be to listen. Branding and positioning will be defined as much by a company’s constituents as by its employees. If you choose simply to talk, people will choose simply not to hear you. Marketers have an unprecedented opportunity to increase their importance in the organization by becoming listeners.
• Messages spread from the bottom up much faster than they spread from the top down. Cindy Gordon’s story at Universal Studios is just one example. She told seven people the news and within a couple of days, 250 million others knew.
• By the time you graduate, have a LinkedIn profile. And for goodness sake, clean up your Facebook profile!

Via Amazon

Recently Paul Gillin, the author of The New Influencers, offered up 250 free galley copies of his latest book Secrets of Social Media Marketing.  The book arrived right before we left Arkansas and it turned out to be a great read for the road.  What I loved most was the honesty from Gillin upfront.  As he wrote in the beginning:

This book isn’t intended for the 10% of marketers who are on the leading edge.  It’s for the 90% who are still figuring out how to start.

Along these lines, Paul bluntly calls out the book as a “How To” guide for marketers to get into Social Media.  I think this step by step approach is exactly what most Brand Managers need and it is something that has been missing from most social media books out there.

Now with that in mind, here are my favorite quotes and facts from Secrets of Social Media Marketing:

“Embracing change is the only sure success strategy in a business world that is evolving faster than we have ever known.”

“[Marketers] spent decades refining tactics built around messages…they are now being told messages don’t matter.  They need to become Chief Conversation Officers.”

“It took 40 years for the TV to reach 2/3 of homes in the US.  The Internet did it less than 15 years.”

“47% of marketers cited ‘fear of loss of control’ as an impediment to social media adoption”

“Jupiter Research estimates that $12 billion dollars worth of TV advertising is blown away by TiVo and similar devices in 2007″

“Many marketers measure their importance and influence by the size of their budgets.  Social media campaigns are so cost-efficient that marketers may actually see their budgets – and their status – fall over time.  While this doesn’t make much sense, it is a fact of corporate life.”

And finally, I love this quote from my good friend and fellow P&G’er, Ted McConnell:

“How much control do you give up?  That’s like asking the person holding you up at gunpoint how much money to give them.” @ ad:tech 2006

Needless to say, this book has quickly gone to the top of my must read list for Brand Managers.

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