Why You Need One of These People in Your Business

"...keeping you great"

HEADLINES:

Private Equity Firms -- do any of you have connections with Private Equity Firms? If so, let me know vharnish@gazelles.com -- thanks.

Eleven-Page Must Read e-book -- Matt Heinz, Heinz Marketing, sent along his new e-book entitled Six Essential Social Media Tools for Every Small Business -- it's both concise and specific on what businesses should do re: Facebook, Linked In, Flickr, Blogs, YouTube, and Twitter. Review at your next one-hour marketing meeting (you have this meeting, right?).

How Twitter Will Change the Way We Live -- Raghoo Potinii, founder and CEO of Knowledge Capital in India, pointed me to this excellent Time magazine piece by Steven Johnson, the famous author of Emergence. In the article Johnson describes precisely how Twitter enhanced a conference on school reform he attended earlier this year (attended by entrepreneurs, VCs, educators, etc -- the kind of group that could actually reform school!). Take 3 minutes and read this article.

10 Ways Twitter Will Change Business -- the Time article also points you to their equally excellent piece on applying Twitter to business. Here's the link that provides the specific list -- you can then choose which idea you wish to dive into. Again, review this at your next one-hour weekly marketing meeting -- that's all it takes to stay on top of your marketing initiatives.

Best Use for a Summer Intern -- frustrated with my own lack of time to understand and execute how our company can use Web 2.0, I hired a summer intern who just graduated from high school (they get it). He has 20,000 twitter followers, his neighbor is the VC behind Twitter, and he's launched his own social networking business. I found him through my own staff whose children and spouses knew of Greg and his talents -- and who thought that working with us might be more educational than working at a Smoothie King this summer to earn some spending money for college. BTW, I used Topgrading's five screening interview questions to interview Greg (you use them as well, right?) to make sure he was a great fit with our culture and company -- it still matters even with interns.

Specific Assignment -- his project is to get Gazelles up on Facebook and to figure out how best we can connect with existing and potential customers. With Facebook projected to have 500 million users by the end of this year, your customers are likely to be there. He'll also structure a Twitter strategy to help us communicate with those customers who prefer this channel (I was up teaching at MIT yesterday and several CEOs in the class used Twitter as a way to take collective notes of my lecture which are permanently stored on Twitter and available to the other Executive Management Program attendees).

Reading and Watching Assignments -- I also gave Greg several books to read, starting with David Meerman Scott's New Rules of Marketing and PR and World Wide Rave. He also watched Scott's two hour webcast from our Sales Summit and is excited to tune-in to Keith Ferrazzi's webcast next week since Keith is so well known in the marketing and internet/Web 2.0 world. In addition, I have him reading Steven Johnson's famous book Emergence, which is the strategy behind Google, Facebook, Amazon, Wikipedia, etc. Last, I had him Google "Olgivy's Five E's of Marketing" which provides an outstanding PowerPoint and white paper on the Five E's that have replaced the Five P's of marketing. It's been fun for me to see Greg light up over this material vs. the mind numbing stuff they teach 18 year olds in high school i.e. the need for school reform.

Cost of Intern -- actually Greg wanted a high-end laptop (roughly $2200) as compensation for a summer of work. He's in our offices each day cranking hard and reading at night -- and its great having his youthful energy and insights injected into our offices. And I feel we're helping to educate a future entrepreneur. What's better than that! So find a young person and mentor them this summer.

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