Non-Cluetrain Articles

What Motivates Cultural Influencers to Promote Change

Jim Ernst

Musicians by nature are emotionally connected to the world in profound ways. They are able to see and feel things in a way that is unique to their views. Because of their strong emotional connection to the world they are drawn to helping others and making the world we live in a better place. To understand why the creative culture gets involved with certain causes, here are five key reasons that drive their passions.

Raising Visibility
Many musicians support a cause because they want to elevate awareness in society. Bono is one of the best examples of this. AIDS awareness and prevention in Africa is a major issue, but does not always take center-stage in developed nations. Bono spends a lot of his time sponsoring AIDS awareness with (RED).  Through various concerts and speaking engagements Bono works with (RED) to raise awareness and educate the developed world on the prevalence of AIDS in third world nations.

Sharing Values
Through profound personal experiences, some musicians are inspired to reach out and spread awareness. These musicians are often cancer survivors or recovering addicts. Melissa Etheridge is a great example of a musician that has reached out to support breast cancer awareness after surviving the disease. From performing at Hard Rock’s Pinktober Breast Cancer Awareness event to writing the song “Run for Life” for the Race for the Cure event, Etheridge is constantly promoting breast cancer research and awareness.

Educate
Sometimes, the general public are not informed of the cause or ways to volunteer. The Barenaked Ladies are constantly working with groups to increase awareness and educate their audiences.  One organization they are currently working with is ABC CANADA–a private-sector group that tries promote adult literacy in Canada. They recently teamed up with Ben and Jerry’s Ice Cream and created the “If I had a Million Flavours” ice cream that helps raise awareness and the proceeds go to ABC CANADA.

Empower People
Part of the time musicians work to help others get back on their feet. Sweet Relief is a musician’s charity that aims to raise money for other musicians struggling with drug addiction. Sweet Relief holds benefit concerts to raise money to help pay struggling musicians to live and go through rehab. Each musician helped is encouraged to help out other musicians in need.

Fundraising
Bands are usually the first group to volunteer to use their creative talents to raise funds for an individual or a charity. Charity: Water is an organization that raises funds for well development in Ethiopia. This past year they reached out to local groups and created Twestival. On February 12th, 2009 five local Rochester bands, including Park Ave Band and Waxmen supported this cause and held a concert that helped add to the 250k that was raised.

Developing Your Online Reputation

By Jim Ernst,

If you were to type “social networking sites” into Google, you would get about 65,400,000 results. For business owners seeking to make an impact in the digital world, the strategies are seemingly endless. What online communities are best for your brand? How can your brand engage your customers within those communities? Is a company blog going to establish your credibility?

To navigate the digital landscape, we have synthesized key elements to develop your online reputation:

Perception Development

Before developing your reputation strategy, create a compelling and unique brand identity. To start your thinking about how to develop your brand identity, consider these three questions:

• What are people going to rely on you for? This is your value proposition. What value are you consistently offering? Are you delivering high-quality marketing insights or are you positioning your client ahead of the curve?  Defining value proposition is important in understanding how to position your brand.
• What is your unique selling point? Figure out what makes coming to you a better experience than going to one of your many competitors or why your product is something entirely new.
• Developing your voice. Is your company going to fall in ranks with the status quo, or are you the innovative alternative? Imagine your brand as a person. How would they talk, act, and dress. For a more detailed guide to online branding, read Jack Yan’s Online branding: A definitive guide.

Developing Online Strategies to Meet Your Objectives

After refining your brand personality, identify your objectives and prioritize your efforts. What do you seek to gain from building your reputation online? Market leadership? Building meanginful relationships? To start your thinking about potential online objectives, here are common industry goals and strategies to meet them:

Credibility

Establishing credibility in your field is essential in building meaningful relationships and elevating your online presence. Here are some strategies to establishing credibility in the digital marketplace:

• Answer questions on LinkedIn or Yahoo Answers—These platforms will allow you to give free advice to people who are searching for it. As you answer more questions, naturally you will build relationships and authority in the field. Potentially, this could lead to new business.
• Blogging—You can also develop a blog to post market insights and comment on industry news. Additionally, you can use your blog as a vehicle to market your business via business (Entrepreneur.com, LinkedIn, etc) and social networks. Take example from Mario Lavandeira (aka Perez Hilton). The opinion-orientated voice of celebrity gossip blog, www.perezhilton.com, Mario Lavandeira has made his career by successfully building his reputation into celebrity gossip columnist no. 1 through writing about the latest, most juicy celebrity news.
• Wikipedia—As the first-stop online research platform, Wikipedia is an excellent tool for establishing credibility—as you can create targeted inbound links to your site. Actively and intelligently contributing to the online encyclopedia can drive readers seeking more information about your expertise.

Market Leadership

• New, Innovative Tools—Creating a new tool for industry professionals can elevate your market leadership. Take example from PR Squared—a blog managed by the social media firm, Shift Communications. Their aim was to provide insightful social media advice and commentary without charging content fees. To establish their market leadership and forward-thinking philosophy in the marketplace, PR Squared released their revolutionary Social Media Press Release. The template sought to guide the PR efforts of industry professionals.

Connecting

• Professional Networks—Business-to-business networking is critical in building relationships within your industry. The Visa Business network on Facebook can be a useful tool in finding, reaching out and building relationships with other professionals.
• Social Networks—All the rave, social networks provide data and analytics on specific, granular, segmented audiences. Businesses are increasingly investing more effort into reaching the mass audiences using social media. Think Skittles. They have taken advice from the millions of people invested in social networking and designed their entire web presence around sites like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. By focusing on where their audience already spends most of their time, Skittles is able to effectively target and engage their consumers.

The Virtual Internship: Education in a Digital Age

By Jim Ernst

Remember your college days? You had at least five hours of class time, a part time job, six hours of homework, plus the clubs you were in, not to mention the two you served on as a board member. Your day was busy, but the one thing every “real world” person tells a college student is to make sure they take multiple internships.

True, it’s great advice for any college student because the knowledge gained from an internship gives a deeper toolbox to draw from, but trying to fit a “scheduled block” of ten hours a week into your schedule is almost impossible. That is where the benefit of the virtual internship comes in.

What are Virtual Internships?

Virtual internships are internships reformatted for the way business is moving. Students are able to gain the experience that is beneficial to their career, but they can accomplish that on their own time. Typically, the student meets once a week with their supervisor to discuss tasks and set goals for that week, just like the traditional internship. The only difference is the actual work is done at home on the student’s time. There is no pressure to sit at a desk for 6 hours twice a week when the same work can easily be done in the comfort of your own apartment. Students can have the ability to get work done and gain the experience in a schedule that fits best into their time.

The virtual internship concept is not only working for interns but employees. In the past two years there has been a rise in people who work at least one day from home. Nearly eight million people now spend one day at home instead of the office. This blending of bricks-and-mortar office and life outside it provides the flexibility the emerging Gen Y workforce prefers.

Employer Benefits

The virtual workplace also benefits employers. What businessperson in today’s economic climate has the time to take even an hour out of their hectic workday to make sure an intern is using their time effectively. Most people don’t have time to spend on the non-essentials especially when everyone is trying to maximize their own potential.  If there isn’t anything for them to actually work on one week, do you really have the time to create busy work?

Treating your intern like an employee, giving them a few tasks with a deadline, allows you to get what you need to get done, and allows you to gain from the skills of your intern without having to babysit. This also requires the intern to show results. Since they aren’t there by your side, they have to work harder to prove they know what they are doing and accomplish the tasks at hand. As an employer, you are able to focus on the actual work that was done instead of the appearance of perceived work.

A New, Emerging Business Format

What about the employer that doesn’t have that desk or even that office? Most new and smaller companies are working out of home or the local coffee shop. This new format works for both groups and now lets students tap a new source of knowledge and gives smaller companies a closer look at the talent that soon will be in the workforce.

Challenges

Most people would be concerned with the lack of communication during the week. With tools such as twitter, Skype, and every other social network you can imagine, there is the ability for constant communication between the groups. The virtual internship is growing in popularity in the US but still receiving criticism from academia due to its perceived lack of personal connection. In Europe, however virtual internships have had major success. Students are not only interning with companies located within driving distance, but they are interning in other countries, gaining an experience far greater than they may have received in their locale.

The Take-Away

If you are a student looking for a virtual internship, I would suggest going about it like a normal internship search. Look at all the places you would want to intern and mention the possibility of a virtual internship if they seem to be lacking the space or it might overall be the best solution.

If you’re an employer and this idea sounds great to you, just mention it to students who apply. Most students aren’t going to turn down a great opportunity. Knowing that you want to help and prepare them for the real world will just show them how much you are ahead of the curve. If you haven’t had much interest from students, just send out a few messages to the department heads at your local colleges.