image credit: Joey Gannon

Gen-Y will change the world. Right?

I mean, after all, we’re different. We’re the internet babies, we’re uber-connected and we’re ready to reinvent the system of business with blogs, Facebook, Twitter, Staction, and Yammer.

That is of course, if our ideas aren’t first crushed under the weight of 100 years of process-based enterprise thinking. Back in 2008, ZDNet asked if millennials would really reinvent IT. Larry Dignan’s answer:

Lately I’ve been pondering the potential of small business partnerships and what causes them to get hung up.

Imagine a social media startup partnering with a traditional marketing firm.

Imagine four small, independently-owed women’s specialty stores pooling their resources to send emails to an opt-in customer base.

Yeah, I know it sounds crazy.

The problem is that cross-company collaboration is most often kabashed by logistics concerns. By logisics concerns, I mean money.

Sure there are issues like intellectual property to hash out, but the bottom line is always green. Most of the time there is some overlap in the scope of services with anyone we’re thinking about partnering with. And that similarity makes us think “competitor” rather than “collaborator.”

In a recent interview, Bob Hutchins and Greg Stielstra claim that demographics no longer rule the marketing roost, ideology does:

…there are no Facebook groups for traditional segments like women 25-54 or households making $75k+/yr. Instead, people define themselves according to their interests [...] which is why there are Facebook groups for Scrapbooking, Yoga, and fans of the Green Bay Packers.

All of this is exciting and scary to me as a marketer. It’s easy identify 25-54 women living in households that made $75k+/yr. It’s hard to know who’s an avid scapbooker.

A few days ago I read Christine Crandell’s post on Forbes about integrating sales and marketing. Although the post was nothing that hasn’t been said before, I did appreciate this sentiment:

“The cultural shift [of sales and marketing integration] begins with the development of a common language…”

But do we find a way to make that cultural shift? How do you create a common lingo, demonstrate the value of each department, and develop strategic goals across departments?

A road trip.

A really long road trip to visit a prospect or client.

According to AdAge,* some upper-tier schools (e.g. Cornell) are investing more in marketing than they ever have before.

Frankly, I’m not surprised. Universities no longer have the power, students do.

Not too long ago, institutions of higher ed could self-select simply by seeing who applied and rejecting those they didn’t want, especially schools of Cornell’s stature.

That’s not the case any more. Schools now fight over the best and brightest students for many reasons, but it’s my opinion these two are the most important:

Today the band Grizzly Bear appeared on Philebrity.com,  the raucous and irreverent blog about life in and around Philly.

It appears that the guys from Grizzly Bear piggy-backed on the story of an actual bear that was gallivanting through nearby Doylestown, claiming they released it as a part of an effort to promote their new record, Veckatimest.

“We didn’t know that we had to keep the bear in the cage!” says the band’s Daniel Rossen. “It seemed so friendly, and we thought that it would be able to reach more potential customers if we set it free. It didn’t really work out so well, but it was totes worth it.”

We’ve all done it.

Businesses do it when they send seven unsolicited emails to the poor Marketing Director who happened to download a white paper (True story. And the white paper, totally not worth it).

Colleges do it when even when they mail a generic, 30-page viewbook they know will most likely go right from the mailbox into the trash.

Weight Watchers does it when they send coupons for women’s clothing stores to their male customers (Also a true story. Thanks for the tip Mike).

According to this story by the AP, two NFL teams (Redskins and Patriots) have partnered with their local lotteries to serve up branded scratch-off tix.

This blog post by Zac Bissonnette claims that using childhood heroes to peddle the lotto is similar to using Joe Camel to sell cigarettes.

I’m not the logic follows for that example. I guess, if we’re going to go after the NFL and the lottery, then we should probably go after the NFL and alcohol, too. Beer logos and team logos have long appeared together, and we don’t seem to have a problem with that.

I used to be part of a local marketing group, and so I volunteered my email address, happily. Now I’m rethinking my decision.

It’s not that I don’t believe in the work their doing. It’s that they’ve done some things lately that really annoy me.

First, they gave my email address to another organization that I have no interest in.

Second, to promote an event they send out way more reminders than is warranted. Lately it’s been four emails in a little over a week.