Disclaimer: The following post is self-indulgent. Most end of the year round-up posts are. Despite that fact, I felt like this was a good way to pay respect to the work that went into this year and to provide a review of content you may have missed (or have never seen before). Should you decide to keep reading, I hope that it will give you a foundation for where we’re headed in 2012.

Last January I wrote that I wanted 2011 to be about you. It wasn’t.

I wrote that I wanted to read 52 books. I read 27. I only reviewed 3.

I wanted to write more posts and ship a couple of projects. I wrote 47 posts this year, and only 5 after after July. I didn’t ship either project.

And yet 2011 was one of the best years of my life. It was *easily* the best of my professional career.

• I fell more in love with a job that affords me the opportunity to leverage social technologies and my knowledge of integrated digital strategies to market the nation’s #1 ranked cancer hospital while simultaneously broadening my overall marketing knowledge and picking up skills like video editing along the way.
• I spent a lot of time with my buddies drinking cold beers, listening to live music, hanging out by the pool, grilling, dancing, and watching sports.
• I visited with my family. At least one of my parents every day. I grew even closer to my sister. I absorbed lots of wisdom from my grandparents.
• I found an incredible woman who somehow puts up with me despite my desire to frequently say and do things that are “in the box.” (Notice where the post volume started dropping off…)
• I spoke at a really cool online conference to some very intelligent people.
• I stimulated my mind and body almost daily. (Which included running my first half w/ no competition, just for fun in 1:49).
• I started saying “no” more often and I stopped doing things I wasn’t intensely passionate about.

What You May Have Missed in 2011:
22 Key Mentoring Messages – Mentorship is a great way of growing and progressing your career. This post features some awesome insights from my organization’s C-suite the basics of mentorship, embedding it into your organization’s culture, approachability and more.

Reasons Your Employees Are Running for the Door – It amazes me how many organizations don’t “get” why their turnover is so high. Here’s 8 reasons that shouldn’t surprise you. And here’s me angrily ranting after a I read a tweet an executive sent about all her employees getting poached.

American Education: You Deserve Better – One of my favorite posts from 2011. I genuinely believe that modern day education is severely broken and this post details the change I’d like to see. Some people smarter than me chimed in as well. And here are some resources that initially sparked the discussion.

Carving Your Own Path – Carving your own path isn’t easy. You will have to think for yourself. You will invariably call attention to yourself. People will hate you if you’re successful. This is why most people yearn to be led. This is why most people spend their entire lives following.

Forget Social Media – There’s significantly more noise than ever before. Trying to keep up with all of it and be everything to everyone is a waste of time. It’s just fear manifesting itself through excuses and procrastination and we’re all guilty of it.

Why Being a Thought Leader is Boring – This post totally contradicts the predominant advice that you should try to be an expert in one, narrow niche. While many people successfully employ this strategy, I think it’s boring as hell and this post attempts to explain why I’d rather be well-versed on a variety of topics.

I Probably Un-Friended You Last Night – There’s so much noise, so many things to keep us utterly distracted from the things that really matter why do we insist on validating ourselves with excess “friends” who’s status updates we’re totally indifferent to? It’s time to de-friend those that no longer add value to your lives.

3 Things the C-Level Still Doesn’t Get About Social Media – This title is pretty self explanatory. And 6 months later I think all of these still hold true at most organizations.

Life is Adversarial Enough… – Don’t test people just to display your authority. Most of us (young professionals) inherently know that in the scheme of things we’ve accomplished jack shit. But that doesn’t mean we don’t want to. That doesn’t mean that it’s not really hard to balance our desire to climb with the gentle reminder that patience is a virtue.

The Easiest Way to Evaluate Most Tasks – Time, not money, is my most coveted resource; therefore, I get really annoyed when my time is wasted. Here’s the strategy I employ to ensure I’m balancing the execution of a project vs. the resources (time + money) used.

Forget the Dream Job, Take the Money & Run – I don’t necessarily believe this (as evidenced by my career path), but the notion certainly challenges the status quo and I think it’s an idea that warrants some thought, especially if you’re still in college.

Creating Higher Quality Stimuli – Reading things that challenge the status quo and/or oppose my own core values/belief system/internal dialogue require me to re-evaluate where I stand on these issues. More importantly instead of just saying “That’s outlandish,” or nodding my head in quiet agreement, I’m forced into the process of absorbing a multitude of information, evaluating that information, and then evaluating what I think based on that information. I recommend you start doing the same more often.

Disruptive Social Technologies: How Your Organization is Missing the Boat – I wrote a lot about topics that go far beyond business/marketing/social media this year, but here’s one that doesn’t. I think it serves as a good reminder that more organizations need to use social technologies for tasks such as cross functional information sharing and internal networking.

If you’re a glutton for punishment here’s My Top 10 Posts of 2010.

I haven’t thought too much about where this blog is headed in 2012, but I encourage you to:

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Or…

I recently attended our organization’s first town hall meeting under the tutelage of our new president. He spoke about the recent confluence of transformative identities and disruptive technologies that have come together over the last couple of years, leading him to believe that we will cure several major cancers in his lifetime.

I’m hopeful that I am a part of a place that can leverage new computational firepower, quantitative analysis of bio-specimens, and disruptive genome technologies to advance existing paradigms and cure this awful disease.

Your Organization Doesn’t Get It… Yet.

But in the interim, I’m rather dumbfounded and annoyed that more organizations aren’t leveraging disruptive technologies to enhance the way they communicate, organize and operate their businesses.

Even now, after all the hoopla around “social” has died down (a bit) and we know so much more, companies are still insistent about “integrating some of that social media stuff into our marketing.” Never mind leveraging disruptive social technologies to enhance business intelligence by listening to customers (patients in health care), conducting market research, solidifying customer service, managing a community and more.

I get it. I really do. I understand that your organization is big, siloed, doesn’t get social and so on and so forth. I also understand that most people don’t like change. Change is hard.

The Opportunities are Endless

But in a world where disruptive technologies give us the ability to potentially cure cancer, why can’t we leverage digital/social solutions to put an end to pointless meetings, collaborate across teams, dissipate important news or information, etc.?

Top-down hierarchical institutions wont always be the norm and the power of open source projects is becoming increasingly evident. Rule-followers and drones might keep their mouths shut and do what they’re told, but the industrial revolution is over and those people don’t impact meaningful change anymore.

Linchpins who ask hard questions, challenge the status quo, and demand to be pushed outside the comfort zone do. How do we scale the work that they do – the value they bring to the institution? How do we share it? How do we leverage it?

Oh, You Want Some Examples?

• Cross functional information sharing – What if there was an easy way for front line people to communicate issues to upper management, and then for upper management to share noteworthy changes to the PR/Marketing department?
• Increased Office Efficiency – What if instead of an hour long status meetings (# of people in meeting x how long meeting lasts) where people go around in a circle and say what they’re working on there’s a sharepoint employees keep updated where others can go and see what projects are relevant to them?
• Internal Networking – Most companies organize employees in such a way that all the account executives sit together, the creative sits together, the IT sits together. What if there were internal forums where employees could bond not just over their job description, but other things that interest them. Wouldn’t something like that unlock new collaborations and opportunities to learn and become more well-rounded employees?

How about?

• Increasing internal brand awareness
• Idea generation (brainstorming via Google docs anyone!?)
• Facilitating the spread of research, insights, etc. and making the information more accessible

The list goes on. And on.

What’s Next?

As we gradually come to understand how disruptive social technologies can enhance our own internal communications perhaps we’ll see forward thinking organizations take it a step further. Can you imagine MD Anderson, Mayo Clinic and Memorial Sloan-Kettering all leveraging these disruptive social technologies to enable their respective physicians, physicists, geneticists and more to collaborate with the other institutions in an effort to cure cancer?

The future is now. Don’t let your organization fall behind.

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The following is a guest post from Cameron Plommer. He’s a sharp guy who’s contributed a lot to this blog’s community so I am excited to get to share with you all some of his on-the-job insights and advice.

After I graduated from college December 2009, I didn’t get a full-time position until October 2010. This is another story, for another time. Instead, I want to share what I’ve learned in the past seven months as a full-time worker.

Working Eight-Hour Days

The biggest thing I had to get used to was having to devote eight (or more) straight hours to work. As opposed to school where you have multiple breaks in a day, work is consistent. Sure you get to do whatever you want when you get home and on the weekend, but it is still a big difference that takes time to get use to.

The Rhythm of The Workplace

Pay attention to how things get done where you work. In my office people where many hats, we all chip in to get things done. The lesson I had to learn was to be proactive. If you aren’t busy, lend a hand to someone else. The bosses will take notice and it will help you down the line.

One way to make sure your manager sees your initiative is to cc them in an email you send offering your help to a fellow coworker.

Example:

“Hey [name], I have some free time this [today/week] and noticed you are a bit swamped. I could help you do [task] if you need a hand. Just let me know.”

Productivity Tips

How could I not talk about productivity?! First off if you work in an office staring at a computer most of the day, make sure to take breaks. Not Facebook breaks. Get away from the computer. Get up out of your chair, go outside and take a walk. Or just stand and think. It’s a simple yet effective way to clear your head. It’s often very easy to work continuously even when you aren’t being effective. Breaks help.

Use the Pomodoro Technique. This is related to taking breaks. Essentially you work for 25 minutes at a time, take a 5 minute break, repeat. That’s one Pomodoro. Sounds stupid yes I know, but it simply works.

As an entry-level employee it’s also crazy-important to be organized. Tools I recommend are Evernote and Teux Deux. I use Evernote for projects and references and Teux Deux for tasks. Having your shit together is a great way to impress the higher-ups and is often the difference between moving up and being past up for promotion.

Push Yourself

If you aren’t a bit anxious or slightly paranoid that something won’t work out, you probably aren’t pushing yourself enough as a new professional. Seek out hard work that you don’t quite know how
to do. You want to put yourself in sink or swim situations. Even if you sink (fail), you will have shown initiative and have an experience to learn from when taking on future work.

Last week the senior project manager where I work went on vacation for the week. Up until that time I was helping her project manage, in an assistant-type role. If I didn’t know what to do she would generally take over. But when she left I was tasked with new responsibilities. If I didn’t step up and just figure things out, projects would stall and I wouldn’t be seen as capable.

This was my sink or swim situation. I sunk at times, but mostly swam. Now that she is back, she sees that I’m very capable of handling more complex tasks on my own.

Find Time to Actually Work

This lesson is especially true if you work in a services business or agency of some kind where lots of email and meetings are the norm. Meetings and email take up a big block of my time. As a project manager I probably do more meeting than others, but even you are aren’t a PM expect to have large chunks of your day eaten up by meetings and responding to email.

Both are necessary evils, so figure out how to do work within the day. One tip I have is to try batching meetings and batching email processing. For example, try to set up your meetings in the afternoon and process email in the morning and late afternoon (that’s only if you don’t have frequent urgent emails). The benefit of doing this is that you don’t have to do as much mental switching, compared to having a meeting every other hour. If you get them all done at one time, you can devote large chunks of
time to difficult mental tasks.

Be Okay With Sucking

This is a big one for entry-level workers. The fact is you are new and don’t know much about anything. Sure you may have good soft skills, but learning the hard skills is well, hard. For instance, I
work in market research and have no background in the industry. I’ve had to learn multiple processes such as how focus groups run, how surveys are create/launched and all the other details of the industry.

The only way to learn is by doing and in this doing you will get confused, lost, angry, and frustrated. It’s only natural, you are learning something new. I don’t care if you got a 4.0 in college, you still have much to learn. Role with the punches, ask a lot of questions and just do your best. You will get better.

Bio:
Cameron Plommer is lives in Seattle where works as a Project Manager by day and a productivity blogger by night. Learn more about him at CameronPlommer.com or just say hi on Twitter.

This post is part of the series entitled, “25 ways to get a new, better or different job.” The series is an effort to provide something actionable that anyone (not just Gen Y) can do that may directly or indirectly help you get a job. If you have any suggestions please e-mail me or leave them in the comments. After all, this series is for you!

The second post in our installment of 25 Ways to Get a New, Better, or Different Job features some key messages from Gary Vaynerchuk’s NYC Keynote speech. There’s a lot of buzz surrounding his speech, and for good reason. If he can’t convince you that you need to be searching (or creating) opportunities doing something you love then chances are nobody can.

First, watch the video, and then utilize the comments section to see if you can add to some of the key messages that I took away from his speech.

Some Key Messages:

• Patience and Passion are extremely important.
• Too many people are doing stuff they hate. There’s no reason in 2008 to do stuff you hate.
• Community – Listening to your users, absolutely, but giving a rip about your users is way better.
• Look at yourself in the mirror and ask yourself what you want to do for the rest of your life, and do that. You CAN monetize it.
• Stop crying and keep hustling. Hustling is the most important word ever!
• You have to have a business model. Work hard and build up equity so you can finance what you want to do.
• Legacy is greater than currency. Your great grandchildren will be able to find you online.
• Answer every single one of your e-mails.
• If you’re pumping out good stuff people will follow, but if you for a ½ second don’t believe in what you’re doing whether it’s your personal brand or a product, get out.
• We are sitting where the gatekeepers are no longer in control.
• You need to build brand equity in yourself.
• The only way to succeed now is to be completely transparent.
• Use all the tools available to connect to your user base, anyway you can, everywhere you can, as often as you can.
• It doesn’t matter how small your niche is.
• If you want it bad enough, work 9-5, spend a couple of hours with your family, 7 to 2 in the morning is plenty of time to do damage.
• Do what your about!

If you liked Gary’s speech you can check out this post (and corresponding video) providing Gary’s 13 tips on building a profitable blog (and/or business) on Darren Rowse’s blog.

What did you think of Gary’s keynote? I’ve watched it at least 3 times, and I just can’t get enough. What’s was your favorite point that he made? Are you doing what you love right now? If not, what is it that you wish you could be doing for a living?

If you find this series to be helpful in your job search, please consider subscribing to ensure that you get all 25 actionable posts.

So I expressed in my last blog post that I had some cool things planned. I guess that’s debatable, but I do have some new, different things planned. I am a firm believer that bloggers should mix things up so that their content doesn’t get stale, and also experiment with different kinds of content. What’s your favorite topic covered on RSM ?

If you tell me it sucks or that it’s irrelevant or inapplicable then chances are it won’t be back, but in the meantime I’ll be starting another series of posts in edition to, “What’s in My Feed Reader?”

In an effort to serve some of my Gen Y readers that have been e-mailing various questions about obtaining jobs, switching jobs, and upgrading jobs (yes, even in our current economy) my new series will be entitled (until I think of a better name), “25 Ways to Get a New, Better, or Different Job.” I’ll try to add a new one periodically.

The goal of this series is to provide something actionable that anyone (not just Gen Y) can do that may directly or indirectly help you get a job. This series also enables me to integrate some shorter posts onto the blog, and possibly update a little more frequently.

So without further ado …

25 Ways to Get a New, Better, or Different Job – Read ‘Never Eat Alone’

A few key things from the book:

• Keith teaches you, through brilliant examples, how to establish the right mind set for networking
• He teaches you the right way to network (i.e. not to keep score, and how to not be a networking jerk that you often associate with networking).
• He explains why you should never eat alone, why sharing your passions are so important, and how to connect with other connectors.
• One of my favorite chapters, social arbitrage, might be the shortest but most important chapter in the entire book.
• He literally takes you through the mindset, to developing the skills to be successful at networking, and finally how to leverage those skills.

When friends ask me how to become a better at networking, I hand them the book. I have two copies, I keep the other within arm’s reach at all times (at least while I’m at my work station). You think I’m kidding, but I’m not.

Hopefully in the very near future I’ll also be able to point them to a particular blog post on this blog, but that’s enough foreshadowing for today.

I mentioned just the other day that I write my blog as much for me as for you. That said, there’s countless reasons that I blog, but one of the primary reasons I blog is because I’m passionate about connecting with, and helping people.

I realize that a lot of the big guns probably get so many e-mails like this that they could never answer them all. Being relatively new at this, I still don’t get a whole lot of them, and so I still take the time to make sure I answer every one of them. Just as my blog sometimes propels my readers to keep moving forward with their goals, getting e-mails like the one below, inspire me to keep pushing forward (sometimes through the everyday grind) to continue blogging, trying to inspire, and helping passionate people with their marketing dreams.

Take special notice of the bolded part of the e-mail. And thanks Anthony for connecting.

Dear Ryan,

My name is Anthony Harris and I’m a college graduate from Post University. I have been working in the marketing field over a year now and I enjoy every bit of it. My main priority is to make a transition into the sports marketing field. I am person that is willing to put the time and effort in to make it happen. I follow your blog on a consistent basis and every time I read each one it just influences me to continue to go after what I want to do in life. I have the potential, work ethics and the determination to be what I want to be. As mentioned, I am eager to learn as much information in the marketing field, or should I say Generation Y industry, and I feel that you will be a valuable resource to speak with.

I look forward to speaking with you.

Thank you for your consideration.

Sincerely,
Anthony Harris

As a blogger, do you get lots of e-mails like this? What is your reaction to them? Do you take the time and effort to answer the majority of them?

So first of all I apologize for the lack of updates, but as I’ve alluded to if you follow me on Twitter, the 80+ hour work weeks are really hindering my ability to blog. One of my jobs this summer entails teaching foreign scholars (over on a grant) about the great American sports brand. The following is some of my notes from three speakers discussing the connection between sports marketing and their brands.

Disney’s Wide World of Sports -John Bisignano

• You’ve heard that Disney doesn’t call their workers employees, but cast.
• This is because service starts with people.
• In Disney’s case, they have nine separate teams. This includes one just for hospitality. (Think about that, a whole team dedicated just to hospitality.)
• Why are they a cast? Because they want to tell a story. (Good marketing is telling the right stories isn’t it?)
• They want to touch the athletes at the grassroots level by having them participating at their facilities when they’re very young, throughout high school, at the collegiate level, all the way up until the pros (i.e. NFL training camp, spring training, etc.) –> They’re experiencing the brand throughout their life, it will continue to resonate.
• They try to find the rockstars and appeal to them (great companies hire rockstars)
• They have an ‘opportunity model’ which demands they uphold a high standard and eliminate roadblocks. (Example: They got criticized while hosting a huge soccer tournament for having bad referees so they implemented a referee academy.)
• Their marketing input exchange is about creativity, vision, integration and innovation (does your business practice these things?)
• They always strive to celebrate the athlete (do you celebrate your blog readers?)
• “Intelligent risks, tolerating mistakes, respecting boundaries of taste, and having the right people in the right place to make the right choices,” Bob Iger – CEO of Walt Disney Company, when asked how they continue to succeed.

Toyota – Keith Dahl

• Their ideology consists of making an emotional connection that leads to long term brand relationship. (Nothing new here, but certainly important to remind yourself if you’re on the right track sometimes, especially if your brand isn’t one that relies on impulse purchases).
• 2 of Toyota’s 4 primary goals with their sport marketing initiatives is to build relationships and create a dialogue with the consumer. (Most good brands know this, but there’s a lot of brands that seem incapable of doing this effectively.)
• Toyota aims to be relevant, resonant and distinct
• There are often certain gaps in sports, their brand can alleviate.
• For example, motorcross wants shade, internet access, etc.
• Toyota delivers tents, engagement signs where fans can write things, free lunch, pressure washing, wireless internet tents, etc. (They listen to their customers and they actually improved the sport of motorcross. A sport that is heavily affiliated with heavy duty pickup trucks.)
• They leverage partnerships building synergy with companies like Joe Gibbs Racing, the Dew Tour, and Bass Pro Shops.
• They’re willing to enter a market and stumble and learn in order to earn their stripes and become a major competitor (i.e. NASCAR)
• Obtaining advocates of their brand is the highest possible achievement for engagement marketing. (They’ve actually been featured in advertisements they were unaware of merely because of their goodwill towards motorcross, and other sporting relationships tied to the brand.)

Coca Cola – Joe Prys

• You have to connect whatever you’re trying to sell with the consumer. (There’s a reason all of these guys mention this eventhough it’s a given.)
• Coca Cola draws on and from the passion of the brand, but also of the person and of the experience.
• They do not consider there to be any mass markets, just lots of big niche markets. (This is a very interesting approach from a massive brand with a very wide reach.)
• It’s more than just 360 marketing, there has to be plenty of relavent contact points. (Are the contact points of Ryan Stephens Marketing clear?)
• Coca Cola is utilizing interactive media partners such as YouTube, Facebook, etc. (I hope some big brands get a late jump and still need a social media manager when I graduate in December.)
• The company’s philosophy is supposed to be, “big, bold and inspiring.” (What’s your company’s philosophy?)
• The hardest thing for a brand to do when interacting with respect to marketing (and I suspect with social media) is to remain cohesive across all mediums/platforms/locations, etc.

Final Thoughts:

1.) Are you telling a story with your brand that engages your clientele, co-workers, readers? If so, are you stories consistent with your brand’s philosophy and goals?
2.) Do you know the rockstars in your industry? Have you reached out to them? If not, leave a response on their blog, shoot them a quick email telling them you admire their content, connect with them via linkedin, interview them, offer to write a guest post for their site.
3.) Are you creating dialogue on your blog, with your company? Chris Brogan does this as good as anyone I know. If you are, are you truly listening to what your consumers want, what your readers are saying?
4.) Are you constantly adding value to your industry, community, etc. (not just your company) without any expectations of return?
5.) What is your companies philosophy? Your touch points. Better yet, what does your company do in as few as 500 characters? Why don’t you try it in the comments section?

Danny Meyer is one of America’s most innovative restaurateur’s. Currently the owner of eleven uber-successful restaurants in the greater New York area, Meyer is truly a master of his craft. The following are some key highlights and notes from his book, “Setting the Table – The Transforming Power of Hospitality in Business.”

“Setting the Table” Information from Amazon

• “Hospitality is the foundation of my business philosophy. Virtually nothing else is as important as how one is made to feel in any business transaction. Hospitality exists when you believe the other person is on your side. The converse is just as true. Hospitality is present when something happens for you. It is absent when something happens to you. Those two simple prepositions – for and to – express it all.”
• “Hospitality is a team sport.”
• Core business lesson taken from success of Union Square Cafe is that “willingness to overcome difficult circumstances is a crucial character trait in my employees, partners, and restaurants.
• You can’t sacrifice hospitality for volume
• Providing maximum value meant not just for the guest’s money, but also for their time.
• Understanding the distinction between service and hospitality has been at the foundation of our success. Service is the technical delivery of a product. Hospitality is how the delivery of that product makes its recipient feel. Service is a monologue — we decide how we want to do things and set our own standards for service. Hospitality, on the other hand, is a dialogue. To be on a guest’s side requires listening to that person with every sense, and following up with a thoughtful, gracious, appropriate response. It takes both great service and great hospitality to rise to the top.
• ABCD – Always be connecting dots – take interest in people and create relationships at every opportunity.
• Actively encourage feedback from customers
• “Excellence is a journey rather than a destination”
• “Context is everything. What has guided me most as an entrepreneur is the confluence of passion and opportunity (and sometimes serendipity) that leads to the right context for the right idea at the right time in the right place and for the right value.
• Hospitality first with one another, then guests, then community, then suppliers, and finally investors
• A business that understands how important it is to create wealth for the community stands a much higher chance of creating wealth for its own investors.
• It’s important for guests to enjoy your products, but it is imperative that they enjoy the people. A company can only grow and remain successful if it attracts, hires, and keeps great people.
• Ideal candidate score on a 100% suitability test = 49% technical experience & 51% emotional skills for hospitality
• You stand a much better chance of ending up with the best customers if you have the best employers
• Effective businesses remain true to their core, but also know how to hear, respond, and adjust to constructive feedback.
• The most successful business is not the one that eliminates the most problems: it’s the one that becomes most expert at finding imagnative solutions to address those problems.What are some companies that you have had experiences with that excel at hospitality? What are some that are horrible? What could they have done to change their image in your mind?

So I have had an influx in traffic the last couple of days due to all the discussion surrounding Seth Godin’s Summer Internship. I was not surprised to see other applicants utilizing social media and the Internet in an effort to get noticed. Afterall, Seth’s internship will invariably have a very competitive applicant pool as I suspect it is one of the most sought after marketing internships for college students in the country.

 A large chunk of the traffic I have been getting is coming from I Want To Work With Seth Godin, and more specifically this particular post, Seth Godin Internship Applicants. Take the opportunity to check out Richard’s blog because this guy “gets it.”

Having the opportunity to work with Seth Godin would be a phenomenal experience, there’s no doubt about that. What I am anxious to witness though, is how many of the applicants abandon their blogs, social media campaigns, etc. the minute they found out that they did not receive the internship.

The shortest post in Richard’s blog is perhaps the most profound.

We should aspire to be something much greater than Seth Godin’s intern this summer.

We should aspire to be the guy/girl who in 20 years time, and by the reputation alone, can inspire the world’s best young talent to run marketing campaigns just to learn from us.

Now that is truly a great career objective.

So what if I do not get Seth’s internship? That’s okay because it is about a whole lot more than that in my opinion. It is about the time I took to connect with Richard and the possibility of us working together on something in the future. It is about reaching out to other young marketers who are not settling for a a generic account manager position at a boring firm that is unwilling to take risks. It is about expanding your network and sharing your passions with like-minded individuals.

Regardless of whether or not I get the internship, I am going to take advantage of the additional traffic I have received since I started my mini-campaign, and use it to meet new people that are passionate about marketing and cultivating new and intriguing ideas that have the potential to alter the pendulum of momentum in marketing, to unabashedly flip the script on current marketing viewpoints.

Expanding your network with people that share your passions transforms the work you do from tedious and mundane to more of a contagious and indirect repercussion of the way you operate and live your life.

So I was watching Jason Moffat’s first web TV show last night and someone asked what was the best way to get quality joint ventures, particularly for a newbie?

I thought Jason answered the question very well eventhough he had indulged on a few Mirror Pond’s (Can you blame him? It was his show’s sponsor, well that and Goji Juice).

Jason said that it was pretty simple. The main thing you had to do was be someone that people wanted to know and be friends’ with. It makes sense doesn’t it? Jason is a perfect example. The guy is successful, but he’d rather strum on the guitar, catch some waves, and have a few cold brews. There’s a little bit of all of us that would like to be successful enough to spend most of our time having fun, and so we can certainly relate to that.

The bottom line is that if you are a cool person and make a lot of friends, then a lot more opportunities are going to start presenting themselves. Nobody wants someone bugging them — especially if they don’t think that you have something of value to offer them. But guess what? If you have something of value (don’t overlook that part) and you are their friend, I’m willing to bet they would love to work with you.

So how do you start making these friends in order to get quality JVs?
1.) Become friends with other people that have a wide network.
2.) Expand your current network of people.
3.) Read my post about Social Arbitrage

Illustrate to the person you want to JV with what you can do for them. Let me repeat that, what you can do for them. If they can see the benefit that you bring to the table, and you’re a likeable person then chances are you are on the cusp of having a good JV.

Now, there’s lots of actual things you can say and do when approaching someone for a JV, but I’m not going to go into in this post. I’ll just say that you should make friends first, and then when it’s evident that you both have something of value that would help each other’s business it will come together.

How do you like the new blog design?

Ryan “It’s Good to be Back” Stephens

P.S. If you’re bored check out some of my friends:
Jenn Dize’s Project WAHM
Eric Louviere’s Warrior Events
Steve Iser
Mitch Mauldin (Might have to view in firefox)