Crashing Hangouts

This morning I stumbled my way into a Google Hangout with none other than Joseph Jaffe. You know, the author of two of the best marketing books you’ll find, host of the Across the Sound Podcast, and founder of Evol8tion LLC. I noticed a tweet from him this morning inviting folks to join his Madison to Mountain View hangout. Madison to Mountain View is an Evlo8tion project to bridge the creativity of Mad Men and hyper technosphere of Mountain View California.

I joined the call late, due to a couple hiccups getting the link from twitter to work (it kept taking me to the app store to download Hangouts, which I already had downloaded), and not having setup hangouts on my new phone yet. Once I joined, I found a handful of other participants who were talking about tech innovation and how marketers perceive Millennials. The most poignant thought in the couple minutes of conversation I heard was that we tend to forever see Millenials as they were when they were defined as Millenials. Even as they grow up, marketers tend to first think of them first as college kids before we can accurately reimagine them as leaders of households with kids and pets and discretionary spending. It’s definitely something to be cognizant of the next time you picture Boomers as empty-nesting globe-trotters… they’re older than you imagine them too.

After the Hangout, Jaffe was cool enough to hang around for a minute and explained that they were in the early phases of developing this live water cooler approach where they convened weekly on Tuesday mornings. He said that they were going to start taking it more public in the future, which makes sense in a content saturated world where we all need to find new ways to connect more intimately with others. So, if you’re into marketing and technology, and want to listen to smart folks conversation, watch for Jaffe’s Twitter feed next Tuesday morning for the link.