Saturday, July 15, 2006

Interesting insight from the Youth Trends folks, data at left and following thanks to eMarketer.com

The Males 16-25 Top 10 were:
1. Google 34%
2. ESPN 26%
3. Yahoo 21%
4. Facebook 17%
5. MySpace 13%
6. Amazon 11%
7. YouTube 9%
8. Major League Baseball 8%
9. iTunes 8%
10. Best Buy 8%


For females posting and sharing photos is big. "...You can essentially say: females are to digital photos as males are to sports" said Josh Weil of Youth Trends. Check the entire article by Debra Aho Williamson via eMarketer.com here.

Keeping talent happy. Jason Calacanis gets it...

When you're on the business side your job is to:

  1. Keep talented folks focused on making great product.
  2. Get talented people paid (so they can focus on making great product)
  3. Let talented people grow and support the hell out of them (so they can focus on making great product)
  4. Make talented people feel comfortable that they are not going to get screwed (so they can focus on making great product)
  5. Make a bunch of money (so talented folks can get more money and get more focused on making great product)
And Jason goes on to say...

As I tell folks on our team, there are three types of people in the world:
  1. People who make stuff.
  2. People who sell stuff.
  3. People support the first two groups of people.

Bravo Jason! Excellent counsel. Jason has learned the very important lesson of servant leadership. No matter what my business card "title" over the years my real role has been to serve gifted creative people. A first-time manager once said to me "when you were at WCCO or WBZ or CBS were all those big name personalities difficult to manage?" My response was I never tried to manage them. I worked for them. In my experience the exceptional, the best, the most gifted talent are always "difficult" (especially when you expect them to behave/think/live like "normal" people). I love so-called "difficult" talent. btw, every person on the team is talent, every person is a creative in their own way.

I would only add - on the business side it is also your job to spend a part of every day searching for and getting to know talented folks; continuous recruitment is mission critical, find gifted talent before you need them. Recruiting, developing and retaining great talent is job 1. Read Jason's entire post here.

1 comments:

jo_jo said...

Yeah, and be absolutely sure that what you really, really, REALLY want is gifted people. Because gifted people are amazing and can do incredible things for your organization, AND they have extremely high ethical and moral standards. They are able to sniff out the actual mission of the company (as opposed to the one on the company website) and will be quick to point out all kinds of uncomfortable factors. They will grow and change at a phenomenal rate, especially if you are giving them challenging work to do, and you need to embrace their needs for constant learning. These people will stop producing or be miserable or cause trouble if they are feeling undervalued or lied to. So, bottom line is, if you get a person with an IQ or developmental level much higher than that of your organization, it's going to be a wild ride!