As school comes to a close for our ASL crew, we thought you might be interested in seeing some of our class projects. Here is an assignment Amanda completed for her Creative Principles class at Emerson:

A representative from the Consulate General of Israel to New England asked our class to partner up and create a campaign to increase tourism to Israel during its 60th anniversary. Here is what my partner Geoff and I created. The video from YouTube is part of the presentation; it was a video I created to profile the target and positioning. There is a note on the slide when the video is meant to be played.

As school comes to a close for our ASL crew, we thought you might be interested in seeing some of our class projects. Here is Maria’s thesis she wrote for her honors program at Emerson (click on link below to view):

The Application of the Elaboration Likelihood Model and the FCB Matrix for Creative
Message Strategies: An Analysis of Magazine Advertising Content

As school comes to a close for our ASL crew, we thought you might be interested in seeing some of our class projects. Here is Mel’s senior class project she created for her digital production class at Emerson:

This is my first Flash animation, (a portion of my final portfolio) from a digital production class focused on learning CS3 programs.  It was a really interesting class/project for me as a theory master and production novice…so even though it looks a little silly, it took me a long time and I’m proud of it!

As school comes to a close for our ASL crew, we thought you might be interested in seeing some of ourclass projects. Here is Pamela’s senior class project she created for her design class at BU:

Here are two projects from my graphic design class this semester. One project was to design both a colored and a black and white logo for one of four fictional companies. The other project was to choose a candy and create a full-bleed magazine ad geared toward the college demographic.

As school comes to a close for our ASL crew, we thought you might be interested in seeing some of our class projects. Here is Amy’s capstone project she completed as a graduate student at Emerson.

Click here to see Amy’s project and see her description below:

New England HERC Integrated Marketing Communications Plan
April 29, 2008 for MH669 IMC Capstone Course

For the final project of my Masters program for Integrated Marketing Communications at Emerson College, our assignment was to develop a fully integrated marketing communications plan for the New England Higher Education Recruitment Consortium, or NE HERC (www.newenglandherc.org). NE HERC is an online job board for careers in higher education in the New England area. It offers jobs from 60 of the most prestigious institutions in the area, including Harvard, MIT, Brown & Emerson. Our “agency,” SaveFerris (after the movie, not the band), designed a plan that included print & online advertising, PR events and digital communications recommendations. In typical school project fashion, our budget with a non-profit client was just $40,000 for a year-long campaign.

Tomorrow Laura will kick off a weekend of ASL graduations as she graduates from Simmons. On Sunday, Pamela will graduate from BU and on Monday, Amy, Maria, Mel and I will all be graduating from Emerson!

To celebrate, we’ll be posting some of our school projects and a really special American Shelf Life Graduating Class of 2008 commencement speech from Laura. Stay tuned!

Image from Lowry Lou

-Amanda Mooney

Today, Sarah Perez (or @sarahintampa) included us in a great roundup of how Gen Y is changing the Web. Here’s what she said:

Gen Y is taking over. The generation of young adults that’s composed of the children of Boomers, Generation Jones, and even some Gen X’ers, is the biggest generation since the Baby Boomers and three times the size of Gen X. As the Boomers fade into retirement and Gen Y takes root in the workplace, we’re going to see some big changes ahead, not just at work, but on the web as a whole.

There’s some contention over where exactly Gen Y starts and stops - some say those born 1983-1997, others think 1982-1997. In this week’s Entertainment Weekly, Gen Y is defined as “current 13 to 31 year-olds” and BusinessWeek says they can be as young as five. Regardless, we know who they are - they’re the young kids of today, the most digitally active generation yet, having been born plugged in.

How They’re Different

They’re Plugged In: The term “digital native” applies to most Gen Y’ers. Those in Gen Y grew up around computers, the Internet, mobile phones, video games, and mp3 players. They are web savvy multitaskers, able watch TV, surf the web, listen to music, and talk or text on their phones, often performing several of these things at the same time.

TV Isn’t King: Although you’ll find some Gen Y’ers obsessing over the latest episode of “The Hills,” and other shows, they aren’t watching TV as much as other generations do. Instead, Gen Y’ers spend more time surfing the net and using other devices, like iPods and Xboxes, even when it cuts into TV viewing. For them, TV is often just “background noise.”

They Don’t Care About Your Ad, They Care What Their Friends Think: Because they are immersed in media, both online and off, Gen Y’ers are marketed to left and right. But when it comes to making decisions, Gen Y tends to rely on their network of friends and their recommendations, not traditional ads. “Ads that push a slogan, an image, and a feeling, the younger consumer is not going to go for,” says James R. Palczynski, retail analyst for Ladenburg Thalmann & Co. Instead, they respond to “humor, irony, and the unvarnished truth.” They’re also somewhat distrusting of ads, which is why grassroots efforts can also work. However, don’t get too comfortable, Gen Y doesn’t have brand loyalty - they’re quick to move the next big thing.

Work Isn’t Their Whole World: Sure, they’re going to go to work, but it had better be fun. For Gen Y, work isn’t their identity. It’s just a place. Gen Y sees no reason why a company can’t be more accommodating, offering benefits like the ability to work from anywhere, flex-time, a culture that supports team communication, and a “fun” work environment. They’re also not going to blindly follow orders just because you’re the boss. Sometimes dubbed “Generation Why?” they need to “buy in” as to why something is being done. Old school bosses may find their questioning insubordinate behavior, but they would be best to just change their management techniques and adapt. Gen Y hasn’t known much unemployment and they’re not going to put up with being treated poorly just for sake of a paycheck. (Bosses, your survival guide is here).

They’re Socially Conscious: Gen Y cares about the world. They pay attention to politics, the economy, social causes, and environmental issues. They think they’re a force to be reckoned with in elections and follow the candidates online on social networks. They read the news, but not in newspaper format, which is is going to hurt that industry even more as time goes by.

Gen Y & Technology

Since Gen Y grew up on the web, they’re going to be the driving force behind the way the web of the future is shaped. What Gen Y wants from the web will be the web.

Internet TV: Although watching TV online is something that few Boomers do, Gen Y is perfectly comfortable with this. They time-shift content all the time, not only on the web but via portable devices and mp3 players, too. When it comes to TV on the web, a recent study showed Gen Y leading the way when it comes to internet TV viewing:

• Generation Y (33%) and Generation X (27%) led early Baby Boomers (19%) in use of official TV program web sites.
• Gen Y (62%) users are much more likely to have watched a full episode on the program site than Gen X (41%) or younger Boomers (32%).

Socializing Rules…But They Want to Control It: Gen Y thinks a truly “private” life is a crock. 54% have used MySpace, Facebook, or some other social network. Most of Gen Y had to learn the hard way about the perils of posting everything online. As they’ve aged, they realized blogging their every thought and posting those embarrassing pictures might have hurt their jobs prospects at times, so now some of them are interested in more privacy on their social networks. They’re happy to continue over-sharing with friends, but also learning how to protect their updates and set their profiles to private. They’re also wary of old folks, like their boss, trying to “friend” them in their social space, especially if they’re tragically un-hip wannabes.

But that’s not to say their over-sharing is going to stop - Gen Y is getting into lifestreaming too, streaming live video via services like Yahoo! Live. In their own world, they’re celebrities. Says Jason Barg, a 2004 graduate of Penn State University and founder of an online real estate company, notoriety is more about standing out from the crowd. “A primary goal of people my age is not necessarily to become famous but to become distinctive,” he says.

Marketing Has To Change: Because Gen Y is media savvy and conscious of being marketed to, brands that succeed in the future will be those that open a dialog with their customers, admit their mistakes, and essentially become more transparent (save one notable exception, apparently). Companies’ web sites that want to attract GenY’ers will become more like today’s Web 2.0 sites. Social networking will be just a feature. Blogs will be standard ways for companies to reach their customers. Customer service won’t just be a phone call away, it will be available via non-traditional means, too. Today, savvy companies might be using Twitter, but that could change at any time if Gen Y moves on. Companies will have to keep up with Gen Y and not get too comfortable using any one format. (Oh, and you can stop calling everything “viral” - that’s lame.)

Work Tools Need to Mirror Web Tools: Gen Y will drive adoption of “Enterprise 2.0” products and services. Gen Y in the workplace will not just want, but expect their company to provide them with tools that mirror those they use in their personal lives. If socializing on Facebook helps them get a sale, then they’re not going to understand why they can’t use it at work. For more buckled down companies, if workers aren’t provided with the tools they want, they’re going to be savvy enough to go around I.T.’s back and get their own.

Companies wondering how Gen Y wants to use these tools at work should take a look at this - Sacha Chua’s Gen Y Guide to Web 2.0 at Work (made for IBM).

Web Sites Will Need to Cater to Shorter Attention Spans: No more long boring text! Thanks to constant media input, Gen Y has shorter attention spans and their “grasshopper minds” leap quickly from topic to topic. (They also didn’t read this whole article…too long!)

Mobile Web? Yes Please!: Gen Y will be happy to adopt the mobile web - they are practically glued to their phones. Currently, Gen Y is using the mobile web to socialize, not search. Steve Ives, Taptu CEO, in a company whitepaper, Making search social: Unleashing search for the mobile generation, concludes that “…Generation Y, who sees the mobile as a social device first and an information device second, is not using today’s mobile search as much as expected. But Generation Y is using mobile phones to access social networks.”

Conclusion

Ignoring the voices of Gen Y is something you should do at your own peril, especially if you’re a business looking to hire, a company selling a product, or an advertising firm trying to reach them.

Some good resources I’ve found recently for following Gen Y trends comes in the form of blogs (you know we love RSS here at RWW!). If you’re interested in this topic, you might want to subscribe, too. See below the list for additional subscription options.

• Ypulse (RSS)
• My Gen Y Life (RSS)
• Twenty Set (RSS)
• Our American Shelf Life (RSS)
• Millennial Leaders (RSS)
• Lisa’s Generation Relations Blog (RSS)
• Modite (RSS)
• Life Before Noon (RSS)
• Generation Y Voodoo (RSS)
• Personal Branding Blog (RSS)
• Newly Corporate (RSS)
• The Marketing Student (RSS)
• Young and Frugal (RSS)
• Employee Evolution (RSS)
• PR Interactive (RSS)

You can also subscribe to just the “greatest hits” from all of the above blogs by adding the following OPML file to your feed reader: GenYGreatest Hits (Most popular items filtered using AideRSS.) If you’d like to subscribe to a daily email digest of just the most popular posts from all of the above blogs (RSS) you can enter your email address in the box below.

This article is just meant to highlight some of the ways Gen Y will impact the future of the web. What other ways can you think of?

Despite what some say about Gen Y, I really love my work and especially the people in the industry I’ve had the chance to work with. Today was my last day working with the incredible team at Schneider Associates.

I have spent the past year working with the SA team to grow its social media practice and this amazing year was marked in the best way today. On top of enjoying a great day with the team, I was really touched by messages that kept popping up on my Twitter feed, Facebook page and PROpenMic profile. I was later told that all of my SA colleagues decided that in lieu of giving me a traditional goodbye card, they would leave me messages on some of my favorite social networking sites. I’ve been evangelizing sites like these in the “site of the week” presentation and social media class I helped to lead each week and it was really the best going away present I could have asked for.

SA team: Many, many warm thanks and appreciation for being so incredible this year. It was my first job in PR and my experience at the agency working with colleagues who’ve been so excited to learn about social media and integrate it as a part of their personal and professional lives is a huge reason why I can’t wait to graduate and work in this field.

-Amanda Mooney

Everyone has a Facebook reconnection story. The crush you had in middle school who now goes to your rival college, the childhood best friend who you haven’t seen in 13 years, ever since your dad got a new job and you were forced to move to MiddleofNowheretown, Arkansas (not that I’m bitter). Reconnecting on Facebook is sometimes wonderful, often awkward…and occasionally disastrous. Recently, I reconnected with an old friend who moved away to Wisconsin in middle school. It was one of those particularly painful friend-moving-away situations where I never really expected to ever hear from her again, so I was excited to find her on Facebook.

Little did I know that my dear friend had somehow missed the memo about proper etiquette for rekindling one’s middle school friendships on Facebook & was planning on using her newfound power for evil. Before long, I started getting emails from this friend, who had clearly poached my address from my Facebook profile. At first, I was excited. Yay, I thought, my friend was surely emailing me to find out how my life has turned out since she fled to Wisconsin. So you can imagine my shock & disappointment upon discovering that all the emails I got from her were—prepare yourself—chain letters & forwards.

That’s right, my Facebook reconnection had put me on her mass mailing list. Soon, my other friends who had also friended her were bringing it up uncomfortably in conversation & we were all dismayed to discover that not only did our dear old friend see our joyful reconnection on Facebook solely as an opportunity to add more people to her spam list, but she also had apparently never gotten over the great chain letter craze of the 90s.

So sadly, this experience really not only led to me wishing we had never reconnected, but also that we had never been friends in the first place so that I wouldn’t have been in the position where I’d WANT to reconnect, 10 years later. But hey, at least I found out that if I passed this email on to 50 of my closest friends, my crush will reveal himself to me.

-Amy Yen

This is a short but necessary rant: I think it’s funny/cringe at the incessant use of web 2.0-ish words in presentations, meetings, classes and conferences. Far too often, in the absence of actual strategy and ideas worth inspiring engagement, community, viral buzz or UGC submissions, these words are thrown around as meaningless space fillers.

“Our objective for this campaign for [insert generic brand here] is to…create…viral buzz. This… viral buzz will… increase…UGC submissions to our YouTube page and ultimately increase…engagement… build community…and have a direct effect on sales!”

Um… this needs to stop.

-Amanda Mooney