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Yesterday I had the privilege of speaking to a conference of TAFE teachers who teach business to students across Queensland.  They had asked for my view of the Gen Z’s – and what was different about them. Now I am not a social demographer (just an interested business observer), but here is a bit of what I shared.

The eldest are about 14 at the moment. This generation can best be described as technology on Ritalin. For these kids being connected 24/7 is the only way to live.

By Grade 4 or 5 they have built their first websites and projects are always done in something like Publisher or Movie Maker and handed in on USB. Forget the old-fashioned cardboard projects – these days it is all electronic and interactive. By Grade 7 they have built their first computer games.

From this age they are playing on social network sites such as Club Penguin or Habbo. By Grade 7 most have graduated to their own Facebook/MySpace and MSN accounts and pretty much 99% have their own mobile phones. At least 20% of Grade 5 and 6 kids have mobiles.

They value speed over accuracy (which explains their spelling!). Most don’t know of life without broadband or wireless internet. They bring I-pods to class and teachers allow students to listen to their iPods when they are studying, quietly reading their textbooks or when they are doing something like art.

On a demographic basis, the median age of first time mums to Gen Zs was 33. Families are smaller.

The challenge is that this group is also the smallest number in terms of the size of the generations due to the decreasing birth rate, so this will have implications for jobs, homes & schools. People will compete for their attention (and don’t they already know it).

They are opinionated, passionate environmentalists and have no boundaries in terms of privacy or distance. Teachers are expected to give their class their email address for contact and kids will regularly send through jokes and other fascinating trivia at all hours of the day.

The world is very small to them. If you don’t have at least 100 friends (most of whom you have never met) on Facebook, you are loser. They chat with people all around the world – as long as their interests are the same, they are deemed a friend.

This is also the Ritalin generation with significant numbers of kids taking some form of medication for ADHD. We are seeing increasing violence with younger kids, with regular reports of kids as young as Grade 1 wagging school.

Gen Z loves love interaction – while they are watching TV they are on MSN, texting or some other form of social media.

These kids are tech savvy, opinionated and have a worldview. This has impacts in terms of how we teach them, interact with them and hire them.

So, what will you be teaching Generation Z’s? Discretion (the net is forever), how to respond to online real time feedback, & managing international online businesses (with the odd bit of unravelling multi-tasking thrown in for good measure).

What do you think about Gen Zs? Are they really that different than Gen Y’s?

Ingrid Cliff

We put your business into words

Heart Harmony – Freelance Writer

One of my favourite new words is Lekking (thanks Cosmos Magazine for sharing this one). It first came from the Swedish att leka meaning “to play” and originally was used to describe male behaviour when females are around in the animal kingdom.  It can be as simple as peacock displays or as complex as male cichlid fish that build underwater cities in the sand to grab the eye of a passing female cichlids.

But lekking is not just limited to animals. The University of NSW in Sydney showed that human males also form leks – with power-dressing and verbal insults as a way of showing off.

The funniest study was one published in Human Nature that showed men also lek with their mobile phones – they display them in public places (even if they don’t intend to use them). The more men in a group, the more mobile phones were pulled out for display. Women tend to keep them in their handbags and only use them when needed, blokes on the other hand put them on display and then constantly fiddle with them even when not in use (read a full version of the article reported in the NY Times here).

As I read about this study in an airport during peak early morning business meeting transit time I of course looked around … and lo and behold – males with their mobiles out on display as far as the eye could see. Take a look for yourself  in the next group of blokes if you don’t believe me – check out how many of them display their mobiles – it is lekking in action.

So two things stood out for me – first lekking is just a darn good word and we need to use it more. And second – how little gadgets can quickly become adopted to satisfy our core animal instincts. Wonder if the mobile phone companies will consciously adapt their newest lines to make them more obvious?

Until next time

Ingrid Cliff

We put your business into words

Heart Harmony – Freelance Writer

Readers of this blog know I love technology – the more techno toys the better!  I was stoked when I could play my Powerpoint presentations from my mobile phone – just plug it into one of the baby projectors you can get these days and I was off and presenting. But what if I could do away with the baby projector altogether?

Well … the next generation of mobile phones look like they will be carrying in-built projectors – so you can run your presentation on a handy wall. New Scientist

At present phones like the Samsung Anycall Show phone carry a low resolution chip, but there have been advances in the past few months which means high resolution projections are not too far away.

How can you use this for your business? Imagine your sales team being able to run professional presentations on the fly. What about constantly changing “specials of the day” in your store. Business meetings could take on a whole new look at restaurants and coffee shops.

Like much of the new technology there is a downside. New Scientist raised some interesting ethical challenges with this technology. In the hands of teenagers we could see some “interesting” videos being displayed on the walls of trains and buses.  Given human error is also likely for mistaken projection of private information such as bank details. It is questionable whether current legislation is tight enough to cover for these sort of situations and I would recommend all businesses review their policy manuals to cover these new developments.

And you thought mobile ring tones were annoying … imagine what is likely to happen with mobile phone projectors until we learn to self regulate. For me I say bring it on!

Until next time

Ingrid Cliff

We put your business into words

Heart Harmony – Freelance Copywriter

Recently when I talked about the 20 year web anniversary, some people wanted to know what would be next … so I went to check out TED. TED stands for technology, entertainment and design, and while originally a conference where leaders in thought would meet annually, it now hosts TedTalks, where the best and brightest speak and share their ideas. It is worth getting the RSS feed of their blog to stay across some brilliant information.

http://blog.ted.com/

Here is a fascinating February 2009 presentation by Patti Maes on an amazing human interface under development. Watching it gave me lots of clues as to possible direction of technology – where information on the net becomes an integral part of your everyday decision making. It is worth watching and then thinking about the implications for your business and the words you use on the net.

Until next time

Ingrid Cliff

We put your business into words

Heart Harmony – Freelance Copywriters

I was reading New Scientist and they mentioned that the servers at Google and other major search engines now consume 1% of all of the world’s electricity based on the calculations of Jonathan Koomey of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California.

He also estimates their consumption is increasing at 17% per year which means server farms will consume nearly 5 times as much within a decade.

Makes you appreciate the rapid growth of computers even more … and appreciate those computer companies who are only using solar power to power up their servers (I have found a few around the world that do this – mainly in the USA at present).

Until next time

Ingrid Cliff

We put your business into words

Heart Harmony – SEO Copywriters

I am not the world’s best cook (OK I am dreadful!). My spice tub (I gave up on a rack ages ago) has lots of containers and packets of spices that rattle around and go out of date. There is only so much nutmeg I can use in a year!

Enter the Spice Girls, or to give them their correct title – The Seasoned Palate. Two mumpreneurs who have packaged spices the way most people really cook – in single teaspoon servings. They only use high quality organic spices and as a result their product is a premium priced item … and it is taking the US by storm.

The thought for me is how many other everyday products do we have that could do with some creative rethinking in terms of packaging and bring out a whole new profit line?

Until next time

Ingrid Cliff

Heart Harmony – SEO copywriter

We put your business into words

I finally got back to reading more on the MYOB report on small business I mentioned the other day. Here are some more stats that caught my attention.

• 33% of all small business owners work over 51 hours per week
• 46% work a 6 or 7 day week
• 34% work more than 10 hours per day in their most recent work week

Queensland small business owners had the longest average working day of all the states with 37% of all owners regularly working over 10 hours per day.

My question is – how productive are we really? Are we making the highest and best use of each of those more than 10 hours per day? Yes … we are really busy, but are we making a difference?

I know there are days I burn the midnight oil when I am in peak creativity mode. Those are the times when all I can do is write copy for my clients and I can’t stop until every ounce (mg for those metrically minded) of creativity is drained out of me.

The phone isn’t answered, dirty coffee cups pile up around me like the Great Wall of China and it is as if my keyboard is somehow wired into my internal circuits – there is this amazing connection between brain and keyboard. It doesn’t seem like work – it is much more fun and exciting when that flow happens!

There are also some days when I pfaff around distracting myself beautifully from anything except the task at hand. I go wander through my Google Reader feeds, hit the Stumble button a few too many times and all of my contacts get to hear from me. Those days it feels a bit like I am playing hooky and work seems almost insurmountable.

Then there are days when I turn the computer off totally and go for long adventures with my kids (I call them adventures – the kids just reckon I get lost and don’t know how to get home). Work – what work?

So am I productive 100% of the time – NO WAY! But on balance I reckon my 10 hour plus days when I am hyper productive seems to balance out the down times. Overall I know I am making a difference somewhere to at least one person each day.

Enough of the philosophy – how balanced overall is your life? Do the MYOB stats for you reflect a life of overall happiness and fulfillment, or one of struggle and hardship?

Just some questions to get you thinking ….

Until next time

Ingrid Cliff

Heart Harmony

Freelance Writers – Putting your business into words

I just finished re-reading Richard Branson’s “Let’s Not Screw It, Let’s Just Do It”. I am fascinated by Richard Branson and his approach to business. This book published in 2007 picks up where his first book left off.

One of the biggest shifts I noticed in the book is how Richard Branson is embracing the need to change the way businesses relate to the environment or “Gaia Capitalism” as he termed it.

His philosophy for this is simple:

• Leave the world a better place
• Pull your weight
• Take the long-term view
• Always consider the implications of your actions
• Big victories are made of many small ones
• Confront the big issues, they won’t go away
• Understand the situation then consider whether to fight and how
• Never lose sight of the end goal
• If something is wrong – fix it.

Some of his snippets of information are fascinating – such as Henry Ford and Rudolf Diesel never intended cars to use gasoline. In 1925 Henry Ford told the New York Times that ethyl alcohol was the fuel of the future. Also the first Model-T Ford was built to run on fuel made from hemp and hemp plastic panels. Diesel the inventor of the diesel engine designed it to run on vegetable and seed oils. He ran it on peanut oil for the 1900 World Fair. It makes you think about where we went wrong doesn’t it!

This philosophy resonates with every business, no matter how big or small they are. If you haven’t read his book, go out and buy it or borrow it from the library. It makes fascinating reading.

Until next time

Ingrid Cliff

Heart Harmony

Putting your business into words

With the growing trend to recycle, many small businesses are embracing this with a passion and forging a whole new business out of repurposing products.

Elena from EP Designs is a classic case study for repurposing – taking old products and with a twist of creativity making new (and profitable) products for sale. This week in her blog she talked about repurposing an old stainless steel gravy boat to become a candle, complete with decoupage! Now that’s creativity.

Repurposing doesn’t have to be restricted to physical products. If you sell e-books you can look at repurposing them as well. Can they become e-courses, bundled into larger packages, read aloud or talked about in a teleseminar, edited into becoming articles, or presented as physical seminars.

I am all for creating something once and using it for multiple purposes! Many of my clients repurpose our direct mail pieces and use the words on their websites or visa versa. What can you repurpose today?

Ingrid Cliff

Heart Harmony

Putting your business into words

Just to prove that you don’t have to be all sweetness, light and positive in your approach to make money, despair.com is re-inventing the motivation niche.

It started as a parody on all those motivational posters that litter workplaces (and yes as HR Manager I was guilty of buying them also). It then progressed into t-shirts, coffee mugs and videos.

So what sort of thing can you find on despair.com?

Tradition – Just because you’ve always done it doesn’t mean it’s not incredibly stupid.

Mistakes - It could be that the purpose of your life is only to serve as a warning to others.

Meetings - None of us is as dumb as all of us.

Challenges - I expected times like this – but I never thought they’d be so bad, so long, and so frequent.

Me … I prefer the positive approach, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t a market for cynicism. Are you ignoring potential markets?

Ingrid Cliff
Heart Harmony

Putting your business into words