I turned 24 on Sunday.

A 24^th birthday is a seemingly insignificant blip. It’s a milestone not worth remembering, another random point in my individual timeline. The pivot-point birthdays, the ones that open up new possibilities and endless opportunity just by proxy of my age (16, 18, 21) are behind me.

But, given that it’s a nice time to stop and reflect on the past 8,760 days, here are a few things I’ve learned on this crazy adventure we call life:

You’re never as old as you feel and you’ll never be this young again.

You will miss an endless amount of opportunities. You will always feel like you missed some turning point in your life, and you will always be haunted by the road not taken, the girl you never talked to, the job you never accepted. You will feel regret. The more time you spend going down that imaginary road, the more time you’re wasting. Spend your time focusing on the opportunities you caught and what you’re doing with them. This is your life. Right now. It’s all you have, so you might as well enjoy it. There are very few pains worth holding onto, and regret isn’t one of them.

Own your vices, but get rid of your demons: Everyone needs something to hold onto. Some people (like me) find solace in pop culture, some (also like me) find it in food and drink, some find it in religion. We all have vices; some are good, some are evil, some are both, some are neither. The moment you let any of these things take over your life, you might need to reconsider your connection to them. Very few people are strong enough to do this on their own.

There’s a healthy balance between outside influence and intuition.  A lot of people will feel like giving you advice (I’m doing it right now, and I’ve done it before), and you will be tempted to listen. They will say that they know what’s best for you, and they have more experience than you, and that they’re right. They will poke and prod and nudge you in directions you don’t want to go. These people will try to drown out the little voice in your head, the one that tells you yes or no or stop or go. Don’t let anyone muffle your inner voice.

You will feel awkward sometimes. Remnants of that insecure teenage version of you will stick around and taunt you. That’s normal. Everyone goes through the same basic experiences you do: the thrill of a first kiss, the heartbreak of a first love lost, the explosion of hormones, the general gawkiness. The best you can hope for is that you take the good things about your early years (the hope, the excitement, the child-like wonder, the openness to connection) with you and leave most of the other junk behind.

You will never be perfect at anything, but that shouldn’t stop you from trying.

It is never okay to stop learning.  School’s over, and you’ll probably never go back. It’s up to you to read books, to devour culture, to jump into new situations head-first.  Hopefully you’ll learn from your successes and your failures. Hopefully you’ll learn from others. The only thing you can do is try to learn how to be a better person.  

Friends will arrive, friends will disappear. Meeting friends and potential love interests only gets harder, more forced, and more awkward as time goes on. You’ll like people you work with, and maybe you’ll like your neighbors, and maybe you’ll like your girlfriend’s friends, but you’ll never have an experience like high school or college again. Those friends will understand you better than most people, but they’ll be taken by new cities and new people and some of them will fade away. Try to maintain your connections; it’s pretty easy these days. You don’t have a lot of excuses to let those connections die out.

There are a lot of shiny things in this world. There are distractions everywhere. The hardest thing in this world of so much noise, so much bullshit, and so many different things warring for your attention is to find something real to concentrate on. Try to devote your time to whatever makes you nuts with passion, whatever burn inside you, the things you feel with every piece of your being. Nobody else can tell you what those are. Figure out how to enjoy silence and things that happen in nature.

Here’s to another 24 years.

[Art courtesy of Lauren Krukowski. Click the pic for more]

[November is National Novel Writing Month, and while I'm way too busy at work to actually devote much time to writing, I'm trying to give tiny stories a shot]

I’m a rare case; at the early age of 22 I was diagnosed with a hard-to-cure syndrome known as “a real job.” Others like me have the same symptoms: constant fatigue, irritability, disposable income, shrinking social life, and general maladjustment. We’re hopeful that they’ll find a cure in our lifetime, but none of us are holding our breath. Like everyone else, we spend our weeks waiting for Friday to come.

Luckily for us, we found medicine called Happy Hour. Happy Hour was a placebo that tricked us into thinking we were still in college. Over a few drinks, we could tell jokes about the rest of our coworkers and vent about all of the assholes and idiots we dealt with day to day. We did this without looking around at the rest of the patrons, because none of them looked all that happy anymore. We avoided the glum faces as much as we could and kept moving forward. Friday was only a few days away.

***

It was 4:59 on the first Friday of fall. The next 60 seconds went by at a snail’s pace, but once it hit 5:00 I remembered that I had about another hour of work to do. That’s alright, I told myself; the time between now and the night always drags by, and I might as well get something done. So I worked for another hour, hit the road and the liquor store and was home by 7:00. I was exhausted, but I still felt allergic to my couch. I had a whiskey soda, took a shower, and had another drink. I was revived and revved up, ready for another night.

My phone buzzed and I pulled it out to see what it wanted. “What are you doing tonight?”

A text from her was always welcome. She was a pretty girl, one that always had to deal with her looks overshadowing the rest of who she was. Girls like her always have an underlying sadness, as if they know they’ll be expected to play the role of the pretty, oblivious girl forever. She liked when people treated her a little differently. Before the party, I asked her and some other friends over to pregame.

Pregaming is the sacred art of imbibing with your friends before heading out into the night. It’s something we forgot to forget from college, a relic of a bygone era. It is a way to spend time with people you really like, not just the people you spent time with because they recognize you from school or work. It is an armor you put on before heading out to the dark bars or crowded parties. Smiles are brighter, laughs are louder, lives less inhibited. In the wintertime, it has the extra benefit of making everything warmer.

So we had a few drinks, turned the music up, and reveled in the crisp autumn night. Fall is the secret hero of the seasons here. Summer gets a lot of adoration in Madison; the Terrace is in full swing, the Farmers’ Market is vibrant and swarming with young families, and the city is oscillating between the sweltering summer heat of the day and the cool Midwestern breeze of the night. It is an excellent place to spend your lazy summers, watching the days float on like the sailboats over Lake Mendota’s waves.

But autumn is when the city reboots. The students reenter the city, the freshmen so eager and excited to start a new chapter of their lives, the seniors feeling the anxiety of their future saturating the air. In autumn the Badgers get back on the field, and the library is again filled with students pretending to get work done but really just casing the place for future bedmates. In autumn, the blood rushes back to the heart of the city and the world begins again.

After the third round of beer, gin or whiskey-whatevers and the second game of “ride the bus” we were ready to head out. The party wasn’t very far away; only a few blocks separated us from what was a comfortable get-together and what would be a wild mix of people I wish I never met, people I was avoiding, and a few people I genuinely liked. I paid the host and we received a red solo cup so we could have a few stale beers from the keg. Those cups were more artifacts from college we wanted so desperately to outgrow. We found an open spot in the corner of a room, and had our friends come to us.

As far as parties go, it was an uneventful, run-of-the-mill hour. We talked about how our jobs were slowly killing us, made fun of the host’s shitty idea of good music, and shared a few stories. We told jokes about the people at the party we didn’t like, relived a few of the glory days in college, and went about our night without looking back. There was nothing special about the party, but all of it hasn’t grown old yet.

The cup over the tap meant it was time to leave the party in search of somewhere a little darker and a lot more anonymous. There’s nothing worse than a dry party full of people you don’t want to know, so we flocked to the streets once more in search of a better buzz and a few more laughs.

***

My dad was a PC before being a PC meant being John Hodgman. I’ve worked on a Windows-based computer since I was playing Commander Keen as a three year old. We never had a Macintosh, but I do remember using iMacs in 4^th and 5^th grade. Even to a PC, losing the co-founder of Apple is a pretty big moment.

Yesterday, my generation’s visionary died, and we’re a little broken up about it. You can see it in the flurry of sincere tweets, obituaries, and blog posts from a normally-disaffected generation. He was our John Lennon, a dreamer who seemed to believe in himself and his own ideas on a supernatural level. I saw more than one tweet fly by into the ether last night about how losing Steve Jobs is my generation’s version of losing Walt Disney, someone else whose ideas were so brilliant and so new. People are actually laying flowers for Steve Jobs, a former executive at Apple stores he helped create. That is absolutely unheard of in an era whe

re our nation’s youth are protesting in front of Wall Street, an era where we distrust anyone wearing a suit and cast shame on executives across the country.

Steve Jobs showed us why we should Think Different. He hired the brightest people and expected them to make the best products. He pushed his employees to the edge because on the edge, legends are born. He proved to us that breaking the rules isn’t just the right thing to do, it’s the only thing to do. We learned from Steve that if you’re good enough, you make your own rules. Through his work, he taught us that simplicity in design trumps complexity every time. His products showed us that ease of use is a beautiful thing.

Steve Jobs taught us that sometimes, things break, and the world will crush you. He also taught us that there’s freedom in losing everything. After being fired from Apple in the 80’s, he could have sat on his couch, wallowing around with a bag of cheetos and daytime TV like the rest of us. He started Pixar instead. He taught a generation of underpaid, underemployed, and overworked people that life is too short to work in a job you don’t like. We learned from Steve that settling for a life we don’t want is far worse than feeling lost for a little while, and we each take that lesson with us well into our twenties.

The fact that the majority of my generation probably heard about his death via one of his products says more about the impact of Steve Jobs than words ever can. But Steve Jobs means more to us than the phones in our pockets, laptops in our backpacks and music in our ears. He showed us what we could be if we were brave enough and heard our inner voice in a clear and resonating tone. He was a genius, someone who changed the world, and he will always be an inspiration to each and every one of us.

Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish.

I didn’t take 9/11 very seriously when it happened (I wrote about comedy’s place in tragedy last year). I was 13, and I lived in a suburb in Minnesota. The day was filled with jokes about planes aiming for the buildings in our town: Go ahead, take out the teen center and ice rink. Nail the McDonald’s downtown.  That was how my classmates and I felt that day; there was no danger, no threat to anyone close, no damage done in our world.  We made jokes because we didn’t understand why our teachers were so solemn, so quietly fearful of how everything would turn out and what the ramifications of the attack would be.

They remembered the draft and they remembered Vietnam, so at that moment all of our teachers and parents probably had visions of their students and sons forced to wear camouflage, ready to fight another guerrilla enemy in a long war. History was again going to be repeating itself, and there was nothing anyone could do about it.

But there wasn’t a draft, only a generation of volunteers heading to the Middle East to fight for whatever we had lost that day. And many battles have been fought, and many lives have been lost, and many things will never be the same.

What happened and what changed and what evolved in the last 10 years is nothing short of astonishing.

We’re still involved in the same wars. We’ve seen the feeling of unity and “God Bless America” patriotism mutate into polarized political factions.  One of them is an overwhelming celebration of anger, fear and jingoism hiding as“Average American” patriotism. The other party is full of idealists hiding under a veil of irony and cynicism because they just might actually believe in the “Hope and Change” rhetoric of yesteryear. Everything is black and white. And anyone in the middle better duck and cover, because there isn’t a place for reasonable people who see value in both sides. Politics isn’t a buffet, it’s a prix fixe menu.  If you aren’t with us, you’re against us.

Economically, we’ve seen empires crumble, then banks crumble, and then we crumbled. Jobs were lost, and many more Americans had to deal with layoffs and job reductions. Gas shot up, loans went unpaid, and houses still remain foreclosed. The rich get richer, the poor poorer. Again, the middle is no place to be.

We’ve now fully realized that we’re on our own. The institutions won’t make us whole. Our political parties will only keep fracturing and moving towards the poles. The banks will let us down, religion will not save us, schools can barely teach us, and the government cannot protect us.

But, as the Springsteen song goes, “at the end of every hard-earned day people find some reason to believe.” We still have hope. The internet has evolved from a place for nerds to talk about episodes of The Simpsons and Star Trek into an all-encompassing ecosystem of its own. Social media creates communities of geographically-displaced human beings, and is even aiding in revolutions across the world. Pop culture is making us smarter and more aware. There is some light, even if it isn’t that much.

There will be good years, and bad years, and we will keep moving forward. Just remember that good things will keep happening. Kids will still laugh, friends and families will still get together, and comedians will still tell jokes. We will still smile. We have our freedom, and no group or institution or moment has been able to take that away. And we will never forget one of the moments that changed everything and defined our generation.

There are rules you should break, and there are rules you should respect. Which rule belongs in which category is completely up to you. You will ultimately be defined by the rules you break. The world is built and enhanced by those who break the right rules and respect the others.

You will be rejected, by girls and jobs and friends and enemies. You will feel left out. You will feel alone. If you’re strong and smart and brave and confident enough, you won’t let that darkness cover you and define you.

The biggest lie we tell ourselves is that we’re special, that we’re alone in feeling the way we do. The truth is, we all feel the same basic things. When you do feel rejected and alone, just remember that everybody else does too. Friends will dampen the bad times and enhance the good times.

You will have good friends and bad friends and friends you only keep around to compete with. Some will journey with you, others will fall behind. Find the ones you can spend lazy time with, time spent going to brunch or sitting at the park. If you can sit around with a group of people, watch crappy TV, and still enjoy yourself, you’ve found your best friends.

You will collide with strangers who will leave scars (good and bad) that you’ll carry with you for the rest of your life. Deep, ephemeral connections with strangers during an impromptu adventure are some of the most memorable moments you’ll have. Some of these collisions will last for a long time, some of them will be fleeting. Enjoy the moments.

If you’re not exercising now, start. We’re at the lazy peak of our physical existence, so it’s easy to forget to take care of our bodies. Right now, everything heals, and what we do often has little lasting power. Watch what you eat. Watch how much you drink. Soon your metabolism is going to shut down and the negligence will bite you in the ass.

Find something you’re passionate about and throw yourself into it. There is nothing more boring or useless than hating everything. Sarcasm, satire and cynicism are okay, but feeling electric about something is much better.

There are people who love to dichotomize the world, to assign people to teams, to categorize chaos. Remember that while some things are good and some things are evil, the majority of things lie in between those two poles. Don’t let anyone put you on a team you don’t belong on. Think for yourself and be a free agent instead.

Silence is your best friend and your worst enemy. Figure out how to find peace in silence and in nature. Nature has been here much longer than you, and it’ll be around long after you’re gone. Your job is to hunt for the beauty that exists in the world, and try as hard as you can to ignore the ugly.

As long as we’re young, we still have time. Take advice from your elders, take advice from the younger generation, and take advice from your generation. Most of all, take advice from yourself. Nobody sees the world like you.

Do things today and learn from the past. And never, ever forget to move forward.

(Inspired by/stealing from this)

Email wasn’t first social phenomenon the internet brought to the world, but it was the first to break through to the masses. It is behind the curtains; you have to be invited into a conversation. Maybe the person on the other end is a parent, maybe it’s a coworker, maybe it’s a friend. Email is a less urgent telephone call.

Then, Facebook arrived. It’s a safe way for long-lost lovers, could-have-beens, and just-missed-the-moments to reconnect and say all the things they wish they said years ago, when they were in their prime. It’s a time machine.

Facebook is also a way for college kids to get to know each other without really getting to know each other. Facebook is an avenue for you to spit out tiny bits of trivia about yourself: you like this movie, these are your favorite quotes. Here are a few pictures you’ve hand-selected that define you. It is you, but always the best side of you.

Before you know it, a few pokes back and forth with that girl you may or may not have met on Facebook turns into a wall conversation, which turns into going out together, and so on. Facebook is the most socially acceptable form of online dating we have. It is your past, present and future all rolled-up into one package.

Status updates brought Twitter to the party, where someone (or anyone) can get a quick snapshot of what you are thinking or feeling right now. It’s a way to share what you find interesting. It is a reassurance that you can shout out to the vast emptiness of the internet and know that someone, somewhere, is probably listening.

Twitter is an avenue for serendipitous social connections. It is far better than Facebook at cultivating a spontaneous, sometimes meaningful relationship with another person, regardless of where that person is physically located. It is the movie “Crash,” translated into ones and zeros and available to anyone with an internet connection.

Then came Foursquare. If people care what you had for lunch and what you’re thinking right now, then they’ll probably care about where you are right now, right? Foursquare rewards movement, going new places, and traveling in large crowds. Through Foursquare, the internet turns your world into the Oregon Trail.

And then there’s Instagram, one of the newer portals we have. If everyone cares what you’re doing right now and where you’re doing it, then surely they’ll want to see it through your eyes. Instagram is as close as an outsider can presently get to feeling what you feel .  Instagram lets you easily and wordlessly show the world things you have created that you judge to be interesting and beautiful.

The one pattern I can pull from this timeline is how much more personal everything is getting. If you started out with email, you were having one-on-one conversations with a previously established connection. Facebook allowed you to share tiny, trivial bits of yourself with others and has since turned into a five, ten, or fifty year reunion. Twitter and Foursquare convinced you that the world cares about where you are right now and what you’re thinking. Instagram invites others to see the uniqueness and beauty of the world like you do.

The social web is getting more personal, more intimate. Piece by piece, you are shedding your protection. You are standing naked in front of millions of people, so to speak. I think that’s interesting, and it makes me intrigued by what the future brings.

 

They say we hop jobs too often. We have no work ethic, expect too much, and want to be famous despite having no talent. We expect too many thank-you’s and pats-on-the-back, and we don’t take criticism well. Oh yeah, and we just don’t have enough respect for our elders.

At some point, hearing the same anti-millennial garbage over and over gets old.






Millennials get a bad rap. Look, I get it: Some of us are easy targets. Many people my age are poster-children for the Gen Y stereotype: They have helicopter parents, they received praise all of the time and thus expect a reward for everything they do, and they try to emulate Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan, and Snooki .

Unfortunately for us, this is a case of a few very rotten apples spoiling the bunch. For every Snooki-obsessed Gen Y stereotype, there are a ton of entrepreneurial, hopeful, caring, and hard-working millennials that go unnoticed.

Things are going to change for the Boomer generation, and they’re slowly catching on to this fact. Naturally, they’re terrified, so they’re lashing out and trying to discredit us. There have already been some quality posts in defense of Gen Y, but I think it’s time to throw my hat in the ring. It’s time to stick up for my generation by explaining or attacking some of the common misconceptions the best I can.

Those darn kids want everything RIGHT NOW!

Yeah, we’re a generation of impatient, ADD-addled people. We want “instant” everything, and waiting on anything is annoying. We want and need everything to be instant: Communication, customer service, information, feedback…everything. It’s not natural for us to wait on these things.

We grew up with the internet and instant messaging, so we had a world of answers at our fingertips and indirect contact to every single one of our friends at all hours.  We grew up with mobile phones and text messaging (or at least came of age when they became popular), so we always have had instant access to our friends, family, and customer service, wherever we are. Our life is instant. The older generations are used to waiting for everything, but we aren’t. This is something the older generations are going to have to learn to deal with, because we are in a culture of “instant.”

Those darn kids are unrealistic and entitled

One of the often-used words to describe Gen Y is “entitled.” They say we believe we’re entitled to unrealistically big salaries. And you know what, they’re right. We DO feel like we deserve all of that. But who can blame us? We’re the ones who are paying an incredible amount of money to go to college, yet many of us still haven’t landed a job after graduation. We need a nice job with a big salary because the previous generation made student loans a HUGE hurdle in our twenty-something lives.

We believe in our own abilities to an “unrealistic” level (yes, it’s overconfident, but at least we actually believe in ourselves) because we’re the “good job for trying!” generation that “earned” a trophy for being in last place, just because we participated. There’s a quote attributed to Alex Bogusky, and it goes something like this:

“Being nice about someone’s mediocrity is the worst kind of mean”

We’re a generation that has been constantly rewarded for mediocrity, so of course we’ll feel entitled to unrealistic jobs, salaries, and lives.

Just remember: We’re praise-hungry, entitled monsters because you made us this way.

Those darn kids don’t know how to work

Yeah, we don’t want to work 9-to-5 desk jobs in traditional offices. Get over it, because that’s not going to be the norm in 10 or 15 years.

Who wants a desk job? We’ve seen how miserable our parents could get because of their crappy, thankless desk job. Of course we’re going to fight against having that, and we’re going to do anything we can to avoid it. For us, it IS avoidable….we’re the generation of dorm-room entrepreneurs. We have laptops, the internet, and smartphones; “work” isn’t bound by location or time.

Those darn kids whine on social media

Hell yeah we whine on social media. It works; smart brands understand our influence and want to make us happy (ALL brands should want to make their customers happy). We found a way to be heard, so we’ll send out our grievances in 140 characters or less and hope it reaches someone important.

We found a way to create communities that aren’t bound by geography. We found a way to band together and take the power back from the massive institutions that we can no longer trust. So yes, we’re going to keep writing tweets & blog posts to get your attention, and we will broadcast our negative experiences and expect them to be rectified (instantly, of course).

Those darn kids are…just like us?

There are a lot of things that separate our generation from the Boomers or Gen X. We’re very different because we grew up in different time periods, with different cultural norms and different situations. But, remember this: Just like your generation and the next generation after us will, our generation wants to laugh, love, and live. The definitions of what these things mean may be different, but we’re still driven by the same desires. Of course I’m going to complain about the next generation, and I hope the next generation feels free to challenge their elders like we do.

But for now, shut up and give us some respect for once, will ya?

What do you think about Gen Y?

Hunter S. Thompson was a comet. The Good Doctor was the type of person that you only come across every few decades, the type who burns the earth with originality, passion, and talent. Someone who listens to his heart and does only what he wants. A true one-of-a-kind, a perpetual black sheep. We should all try to be comets.

Anywho, I enjoy Hunter S. Thompson’s particular brand of in-your-face writing. I like seeing people break the rules and succeed. It was a delight to come across a cover letter he wrote to the Vancouver Sun in 1958 and see that he even wrote his job applications in this manner. I think we can learn a lot about careers, the job hunt, and life in general from Hunter S. Thompson.

Forget everything you know about writing cover letters

I’ll never understand why we’re taught to fit in when we’re in school. In college, I was required to take a class devoted to “professional writing,” and we were taught how to create a cookie-cutter cover letter. It’s like they were setting us up to fail. The whole point of a cover letter is to STAND OUT from the mess of equally-qualified people. Hunter S. Thompson understood that. As you can see from his cover letter, he hit all the necessary spots: Who he was, what he expected from the job, what they could expect from him, and that he would like to work for them. That’s it. The rest is up to you. Forget what they taught you and start trying to stand out….it’s the only way you’re going to get anywhere in this world.

Pioneer new career frontiers

If the world isn’t giving you a viable career option, make one up. Gonzo journalism, a subjective, first-person-narrative form of journalism, didn’t exist before Thompson. He immersed himself in the world of his subjects and walked a mile in their shoes (or rode, as was the case in Hell’s Angels) and ended up creating his career. It is a form of journalism rooted in the idea that the story is more important than getting all the facts right, that true objectivity is a myth. Many bloggers write in that style today, and it’s more entertaining, informative, and trustworthy than most of the so-called “objective news” out there.

The point is this:You don’t have to try to fit into an existing career path. If you have a vision of what you want to do, but it’s different from any career you’ve heard of, make it up. Have enough confidence in yourself to create your own career. Hunter S. Thompson was filled with millennial spirit; our generation has created a lot of jobs where none had previously existed. Mark Zuckerberg created his own frontier with Facebook, and there are many other examples of successful Gen Y entrepreneurs on and off the internet.

Trust Yourself

If there’s any lasting message I can take from Hunter S. Thompson’s life, it’s this: Listen to your inner voice and screw the rules. I can’t stress that enough.  It’s true that you can follow the herd and survive, but to really live you have to figure out how to trust your own ideas. Like he said in his novel “The Rum Diary,”

“Like most of the others, I was a seeker, a mover, a malcontent, and at times a stupid hell-raiser. I was never idle long enough to do much thinking, but I felt somehow that my instincts were right.”

It’s not an easy road to take, and you’ll certainly have your enemies because of it, but it’s the only way to live.

Obviously, Hunter S. isn’t the best role model. He did a ton of drugs and was by all accounts an asshole, and in the end he took his own life. You could live for a hundred lifetimes and still not be as much of a badass as this guy was. But you can learn a lot from people who truly listen to their inner voice and have reckless disregard for social norms. Trust your instincts, follow your own path, and forget the rules. Be a comet like Hunter S. Thompson.

What do you think: Was Hunter S. Thompson a raving lunatic, visionary, or both?

(image via)

On a particularly moving episode of Mad Men this season, Don Draper fell apart. The only woman who ever truly knew him (Spoiler alert! He’s not actually Don Draper) had died, and he was having a very hard time dealing with it. For the first time in the series’ run, Don Draper broke down and cried.

12 hours later, an image of Don Draper crying exploded across the internet. Within hours of its creation, Sad Don Draper was the internet flavor of the week. It became an internet meme.

What’s a meme?

According to the term’s originator, Richard Dawkins, you should think of a meme as a tiny bit of culture that gets passed along like a gene. A meme is a cultural virus. It is passed between humans in person, through word-of-mouth, and through various forms of media until it remixes itself or reaches extinction.

An “internet meme” spreads primarily from the ground up on the internet. This means that memes don’t usually originate from Google or Facebook, but rather 4Chan, the lawless, “international waters” of the internet.  It then “infects” others through word-of-mouth, email, blogs and social media. Memes are all around us.

If you’re my age, you probably remember the Hamster Dance (and the mere mention of it probably brings back that horrible, horrible song). More recent memes you’re probably familiar with include The Rickroll (click the link, I DARE YOU), The Bed Intruder Song, Keyboard Cat and, of course, LOLcats.

Sounds quite a bit like going viral, right?

Yep. “Going viral” simply refers to a meme’s ability to infect culture online, often with a brand message. The most recent (and largely successful) viral campaign was the Old Spice Guy, Isaiah Mustafa. While that campaign was the result of previous paid media (TV ads came before the viral phenomenon), Old Spice’s viral Youtube campaign will go down in advertising history.

Brands understand the power of viral videos; word-of-mouth spreads, and consumers trust other consumers more than advertisers. While most word-of-mouth is still spread offline (the proverbial “watercooler” is still alive and well), viral videos have a large impact on offline culture. This is why Tosh.0, a show devoted to viral videos and internet culture, often gets bigger ratings than The Daily Show. Internet culture has become our culture. Like it or not, we are Generation Meme.

Let’s use memes to sell stuff!

Naturally, brands are trying to capitalize on our love of memes. They’re trying to find out what makes something go viral so that they can create the newest viral masterpiece. Some advertisers are beginning to use viral stars in their ads; most recently, the The Double Rainbow Guy was featured in an ad for Microsoft. So, will we continue to see more and more memes show up in ads?

It really depends on how fast the advertisers can react to culture. Old Spice’s viral campaign was about as low-latency as it gets; people were sending out questions via social media to Old Spice, and within a day an ad had been made and aired on Youtube. However, this isn’t the norm. By the time a lot of advertisers will have devised a script, developed a budget, and produced the commercial, the meme would already be decreasing in popularity or extinct.

The cycle time for a meme (from initial discovery to extinction) is getting much shorter. As soon as one meme pops up, another will soon follow. Memes are popping up weekly. This means that advertisers are going to have to get the approval of clients and create an entire ad in very little time. This is not easy to do.

For advertisers, it’s really a race to see if they can put together a coherent ad before the meme loses its place in pop culture. If there’s one thing worse than not making an ad at all, it’s trying to capitalize on pop culture after the fad is over and looking uncool and out-of-date (though, sometimes that’s the point).

I guess the real question is whether or not memes will stay around in culture long term. Is Sad Keanu going to be our generation’s Mona Lisa? Absolutely not. But for now, they make us laugh. As long as the internet allows us to share all the strange and wonderful things we find, memes will have a place in our funny bones.

What do you think: Are memes now a part of pop culture or are they just odd spasms of internet weirdness? Can advertisers use them without “selling out?”

Everybody has one: the party-pooper relative at family gatherings. While the “cool” relatives are playing touch football with the rest of the family in the backyard or telling funny, slightly-inappropriate stories to the kids, the party-pooper is sitting around talking about synergy, fluctuations in the stock market, and cash flow. He’s important to talk to if you’re in business, but not very much fun. Say hello to LinkedIn, the uncool uncle of the social media family.

LinkedIn is all about business. It’s a social network devoted to business networking. So before you dismiss LinkedIn because it isn’t all that fun, remember that it is a very crucial part of your social media toolkit.

Get Recommended

LinkedIn gives you the opportunity to give and get recommendations, which are sort of like virtual referrals. Getting a recommendation from someone on LinkedIn shows that you were once a valuable member of a team (or you know the right people to bribe) and gives others the opportunity to write nice things about you.  Of course, this also means that you’ll have to write recommendations for others, too. It’s a “you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours” sort of situation, and it is something you should embrace (and I should get working on!).

Select which tweets you send to LinkedIn

LinkedIn gives you the option to connect your Twitter account to your profile; this will put all of your tweets into your LinkedIn feed. Avoid this option like it was a cast member of Jersey Shore.  Not everything you tweet about is going to be relevant to your LinkedIn connections. A lot of it, like the aforementioned cast of Jersey Shore, is trash to them; they simply don’t care about what you had for dinner or what you thought about the most recent episode of (you guessed it) Jersey Shore. They’ll end up being turned off by your updates.

LinkedIn gives you the option to select which tweets go into your LinkedIn feed, which is what I do. When I want to broadcast a new blog post to my LinkedIn connections, I simply add the hashtag #in to the end of the tweet. It’s a good way of keeping my irrelevant tweets out of my LinkedIn feed, while still letting my connections know that I’m active on the service and have valuable things to say.

LinkedIn will also let you connect with your blog (if you have one). Especially if your blog is industry-related, you should definitely make your blog as visible as possible.

Join Groups

I don’t have a whole lot of experience with groups on LinkedIn, but I know that you should consider joining them. Join groups relevant to your industry and participate in discussions. Join college alumni groups; these will be filled with members of your alma mater, so you will already have something in common. Use groups on LinkedIn to try to create connections with people in your industry that you would never meet in person. It never hurts to put yourself out there and see if you can get yourself noticed.

Follow Companies You Want to Work For

You can “follow” companies on LinkedIn. This means that you’re able to see new hires, new departures, and new job openings that the company has. You can also use this feature to find someone within the company and send a message to them asking about job openings and what it’s like working for that company. You may not get a response, but it never hurts to try. Connecting with a company on social media lets them know that you’re active on social media (duh), which is good for any industry except Amish gift shop management.

Let’s face it; we’re in an age where prospective employers will use any and all tools at their disposal to check out applicants. LinkedIn is designed to help you find a job. What makes it so boring also makes it useful: it is all business, all the time. This means that professionals are probably more apt to check LinkedIn before they look at your Twitter stream or your Facebook page. It may not be as fun as Facebook or as interesting as Twitter, but it’ll come in handy once you’re trying to get into the professional world. Do yourself a favor and make a profile, keep it up to date, and use LinkedIn to your advantage. And be sure to be nice to your uncool uncle the next time you see him.

I’d be a little dull if I wrote an entire post about LinkedIn and didn’t  pimp my profile: Connect with me on LinkedIn, will ya?

Are you active on LinkedIn? Is it helpful to you?