On June 8,  High Road hit up Strategy’s Understanding Youth conference – a wonderful event aimed at educating marketers about the trends that are shaping the behaviour of tweens and teens.

With 10 per cent of Canada’s population being under 20, making meaningful connections with youth is a huge part of what the High Road team does for our diverse roster of clients.

The conference featured some great speakers that spanned a range of topics, such as engaging and motivating youth through gamification and the power of storytelling. The speakers also provided a great snapshot of current trends, and highlighted some fabulous case studies.

We all know that the youth demographic is a powerful group. The message that echoed throughout the conference was that the youth focus and priorities are sometimes different than that of the average PR or marketing team trying to captivate them.

With that in mind, here are some key considerations for marketers trying to get the youth vote:

• Get in the game: We’ve seen increasing instances of gamification – the integration of game dynamics into campaigns is a fantastic way to drive participation and interest. If you’re prepared to go one step further and offer real-life rewards, all the better.

• Transmedia storytelling: Don’t just share your brand’s story across multiple platforms and formats, give your audience an experiential marketing moment that will encourage them to share the story with their peers. Make the story entertaining!

• Talk to your audience, not at them: Marketing is a conversation. Engage with your audience. Ask them what they think. Respond.

• Know when it’s time to let go: With social media sites like Facebook, YouTube and Twitter, more and more it is the consumer that owns the brand – and in many cases it is the active, online youth audience.  Youth are talking about your brand whether you like it or not, it’s up to you whether or not you want to join the conversation.

At High Road Communications, we are known for having an incredibly talented team, and this week our very own Ian Buck was featured in the Globe and Mail talking about how we harness the power of social media to recruit the very best in the business.

The article, written by Lynn Greiner, rightly explores how recruiting quality staff is “no longer a matter of placing an ad in the newspaper and then wading through a mountain of (horror of horrors) paper resumés. Today’s tech-savvy candidates expect to find jobs the same way they do much of their social interacting – online.”

For us, using social media to recruit is a no-brainer, says Buck.

“Everything we do in our work life – for our clients and for our own company – goes through the social media filter and recruitment is a natural fit,” he says.

“We’ve found that social media actually gets a much higher quality of applicant versus job boards and career websites,” says Buck, adding that we also use social media and search engines to scan for extra information about candidates and check for existing connections to our team. “By starting with our own network and that of our employees, it’s a quick way of attracting candidates with the right skills, experience and background. Even a three- or four-times removed connection on a social network is already a better qualified lead in general.”

High Road’s stealthy Office Ninja even received a bit of attention in the article, for his creative face-to-face recruiting methods.

“High Road also puts its own playful spin on good old fashioned person-to-person networking,” writes Greiner. “At the 2010 Mesh Marketing conference, the company sent in a recruiting ninja, who somersaulted around the halls stealthily setting his sights on Digital Ninja recruits and handing them High Road branded Ninja Stars. It worked, according to Mr. Buck, resulting in what he calls ‘an amazing hire we never would have achieved via career websites.’”

Please visit the Globe and Mail to read the full piece: “How to use social media as a recruiting tool”.

Ian Buck’s top tips for job-seekers

Looking for a new job and want to make sure you put your best foot forward?

Here is a bit of advice from Ian:

1. Check your online footprint: Search your own name to see what comes up, and do your best to fix it if there’s something that’s not appropriate! It’s pretty much guaranteed that employers will be doing the same search.
2. Build your personal brand online: Do more than just clean up your social networking profiles before you start applying for jobs, engage in the field that you’re interested in joining. Share your expertise. Connect with key players in the business.
3. Market yourself: Don’t be afraid to feature links to your social profiles on your CV, it gives potential employers a lot more insight into you than what goes into a one- or two-page application.
4. Be proactive: Shooting, uploading and sharing a video CV or “about me” to YouTube shows initiative and creativity; following the company on Twitter and LinkedIn shows you’re interested in the job.

You can find High Road online on our LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook. See you there!

To recapture mindshare and online discussion for webmail service Hotmail (which turns 15 this year), Microsoft launched a series of influencer events in late 2010. The first two Hotmail & Cocktails events – informal networking and demo sessions designed to highlight how new Hotmail can help people de-clutter their digital lives – were held in Toronto.

Now Toronto is a large market, with an ever-expanding base of bloggers and online influencers. Marketers recognize the value and relevancy of reaching consumers through influencers in this market, as evidenced by growing the number of blogger events held on any given night in the city. But it’s important for organizations to remember that there are high-reach influencers outside of Toronto – and they’re hungry to engage with brands at events that bring their online communities together.

Based on online conversation in regional markets sparked by our Toronto-based Hotmail & Cocktail events, we decided to take the format on the road in 2011, starting with Ottawa. What we discovered was a largely untapped and underserved market with a highly engaged online community.

As our event host, award-winning Canadian author and social media personality Kathy Buckworth brought together a group of professional moms, many of whom knew one another by Twitter handle only and had never met face-to-face. With a hashtag (#HMCocktails) in place to track online conversation pre-, during and post-event, we watched the Twitter chatter build from excited “can’t-waits” a few days prior to the event to a crescendo of buzz at the event, which became a trending topic on Twitter in both Ottawa and Canada that evening.

This regional market test not only reinforced the value of the Hotmail & Cocktails format, but also some advice High Road CEO Mia Pearson gave on making the influencer connection in a recent Your Business column, Smart Marketers Make Friends with Bloggers:

1. Do your research: Identify relevant influencer groups in both large and small markets;
2. Be unique in how you reach out: A third-party host admired by your target community can be a draw;
3. Provide something of value: Often as simple as the opportunity to connect with other members of an online community offline;
4. Work together: Find ways to engage; and
5. Have reasonable expectations: Understand that the Twitter chatter will focus on the food, the venue and the members of your target community as much as it will on your product/service. Have a designated Tweeter on hand to monitor the conversation and add to/gently direct it.