Suggest your 13-year-old  shut down the X-box and exercise, or drink a glass of milk instead of Mountain Dew and you’re in for a battle.

But if the same suggestions come from one of his friends, it’s an entirely different story. For young teens, peer pressure is everything.  

That was the idea behind the Super-Power Summit — a youth wellness initiative that we managed for the Midwest Dairy Council, the Iowa Department of Education’s Team Nutrition Program and Iowa State University Extension for Families and 4H.

The day-long summit feature inspiring speakers such as Charlie Wittmack, who climbed to the top of Mount Everest, and Tim Dwight, an All-American from the University of Iowa who went on to become a leading kick returner in the NFL.

The event also featured a street marketing events that engaged the downtown lunch crowd with physical activities and important messages about eating healthy.

You Google childhood obesity and the first image that comes up contains your logo. You can just imagine the blame every viewer of this photo places on McDonald’s. Is it McDonald’s fault? It is if they do nothing about it.

To McDonald’s credit they have taken some initiative by offering healthful substitutes to the french fries it offers in Happy Meals and if you happen to have your laptop with internet access while you’re ordering, you can get nutritional data for the meal you select.

By the way, did you know a Big Mac, large fry and a medium Cokes comes in at over 1200 calories?

I suppose that by doing more they would be admitting what is patently obvious to everyone else and that is that their food…along with nearly every other fast food restaurant….can make you obese if you eat too much.

Yet they miss an opportunity to do well by doing good. If they would provide people with encouragement to make good choices from their menu, they’d find people making more good choices from their menu. I’m guessing that the profit margin on a box of lettuce is at least as good as the Big Mac.

Imagine, if they conducted a social marketing campaign that encouraged parents to fight childhood obesity by bringing their children to McDonald’s and serving up fruit burgers. Then they would actually change the eating habits of a generation and firmly plant themselves and their franchisees at the forefront of the new way. Their profits soar, stockholders are happy and the government stays off their back.

Just a thought.

When we talk to teens, and we talk to them a lot, they tell us their biggest motivation for doing anything is fun.

They go to shopping malls for fun.  Football games for fun.  Facebook for fun.  MySpace for fun.  YouTube for fun.  They watch fun television programs.  Like fun movies.  Come to think of it, it’s not much different for adults.

Nothing supports the need for a fun factor more than social networks and YouTube is a prime example.  Marketers lust after the views that amateurs get by accident.  The “Charlie Bit Me…Again” video above had 118 million views.  But not all amateurs are any more successful than the pros who think they can make their YouTube channel the next NBC.

Without fun, your video will be limited by those searching expressly for you.

Facebook is much the same.  Take the State of Nebraska’s Facebook page.  It has 1,587 friends and fans.  Not bad.  But when you look at the page it is a never ending list of governmental announcements.  Should Nebraskans be interested?  Probably, but it’s not fun.  Contrast that with the fan page for Nebraska Football.  It has over 52,000 users who access the page at least once a month.  Fun, as well as life and death.

The fun factor influences our job satisfaction, life, marriages and leisure.  It’s why we spend mone on vacations, dining, dancing, concerts and sporting events.  It’s why we celebrate when we win and cry when we lose.

If we can harness fun in our communications, they become far more effective. Hopefully, Charlie helped this post be a little more fun.

Remember the Borg?  It was a race on Star Trek that assimilated worlds into a collective intelligence to conquer the universe.  It used the thoughts of billions to outsmart the thoughts of millions.  They collaborated throught telepathy.  Well, substitute digitally for telepathy and you can start to wrap your brain around the collective intelligence of the Net Generation.

The Net Generation lives in a world where it can collaborate with its members spontaneously.  Want to know about life at a university, find a FaceBook page on the university.  Go to Youtube.  Look for student produced videos.

Insert any product that the Net Generation is interested in and you’ll find a collective intelligence about that product.  You’ll find ideas to make the product better.  And you’ll find members feeding off one another to brainstorm and develop better products.

If two heads are better than one, are two million heads better?  Maybe when it comes to creativity.  If you believe one creative thought leads to another, potentially better creative thought than maybe two million brains working on a problems is better than two.  Regardless, marketers can use this drive to collaborate to their advantage.

We’re doing market research using social networking sites as a platform to involve respondents and it’s working very well.  The involvement of our respondents is deeper than typical focus groups, we’re not bound by a 90 minute time frame and we don’t have to sit behind a mirror eating Peanut M&Ms.  We’re exploring brand identities, testing strategies and learning better ways to engage this audience.

If you’re selling to the Digital Borg, otherwise known as the net generation, they will gladly help you improve your product, communications or service delivery.  All you have to do is tap into the collective intelligence.  You may not immediately know what they’re thinking, but you can beam yourself in digitally.  But remember, Captain Picard always won.

Live long and prosper.

There have been two notable experiences in that past week that gave me some grins and perhaps a better understanding of the social nature of our marketing world.

Business books are a habit of mine.  I buy them, read them, listen to them, quote them and pass them along.  Last week I bought and read one that I thought was good money wasted on a premise meant to sell books and not to help marketers.  I had read the reviews on Amazon and all but one was positive.  So, my expectation for the book was fairly high.

After reading the book, I reviewed it on Amazon and added a negative review.  The first time I had ever done such a thing.  Then I forgot about it and the book.  A day later, an email from the thin-skinned author shows up on my iPhone.  From there came argumentative emails that were condescending and insulting suggesting that perhaps I wasn’t smart enough to know the “truth” as known by the author.  And that if I couldn’t see that he was “absolutely right,” well then…

Two things come to mind.  First, he could have a point about my intelligence.  Second, his response perhaps destroyed the intellectual ground on which he made the initial accusation.  As of this writing, I know of no marketing author, theory or practice that is absolutely right and his response really demonstrated a lack of understanding of the influence of social media.

The very next day, Wendy Gray, a friend of mine and the agency, emailed me because she had gotten an alert about my review.  She then sent me a link to another blog who had reviewed the book poorly and had gotten the same kind of response from the author.  I left a comment of common experience.

So now the guy who was “absolutely right,” had multiple people saying he was absolutely wrong.  And they were saying it more believably that he could ever claim to be “absolutely right.

All this guy had to do if he wanted to stop a negative process was to thank me for my review and my insight.  Tell me that he would consider my point of view in the future.  Ask me, to do the same and to watch for his next book.  An amazing difference.

I listened to someone I really respect say that she was afraid of social network media because she was out of control.  I thought back to the author.  He was not in control of how I felt about his book, but he was in control of how he responded to how I felt about his book.  And that my friends is the lesson.