One of the biggest factors impacting Millennials is the impact of a college education and financing that education.  Study after study shows that the college graduate is likely to make a million dollars more than the non-college graduate over the course of their lifetime.

Yet this economy has millennial graduates questioning the wisdom of their decision.  Jobs are scarce and student loan payments come due every month.  A COUNTRY Financial survey noted that 31 percent of Americans have borrowed money to finance their educations. Nearly two-thirds have paid off their obligation and only 16 percent said it had a significant impact on their decision making.

Forty percent of Millennials indicate that their student loans have a significant impact on their lives, a full 24 percent difference from the general population.  This differential is either an indication of the impact of the economy on Millennial mindsets, or an indication that pain mellows with time, or both.

Millennials have been described as the coddled, everyone gets a trophy generation and maybe some of that is true.  What certainly is not true, is that this generation is being welcomed into the workforce with open checkbooks.  The economic conditions may, in the end, be more formative on attitudes and work habits of Millennials than most other factors.

They have been forced to be thrifty and conservative with their dollars.  As a result, they may look more than most generations at the true value of the things they buy.  Cheap and good brands like Jimmy John’s and Chipotle Mexican Grill are well positioned to compete for the Millennial fast food dollar.

Cheap and good poses a wholly different challenge for higher education.   The four year university must build value in the four year experience to justify the cost.  It must realize that the college experience is much more than just going to Biology 101.  It is everything involved in helping a young Millennial grow into an adult with potential, dreams and ability.  The result of that experience is the reason students paint their bodies to cheer on their team.

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.

As an agency, we do a lot of work influencing personal behavior. It’s become a specialty. We reduce teen smoking, encourage people to seek treatment for problem gambling and substance abuse. We encourage middle schoolers to eat healthy and exercise.

Tomorrow I’m speaking at the 2009 Prevention Symposium put on by Training Resources a Division of Iowa Behavioral Health Association. The presentation is about communications strategies to reduce underage and binge drinking.

In nearly all social marketing situations the target audience already knows what the right thing to do is. Smoking is bad for you. Gambling too much is bad for you. Drugging is bad for you. Yet people do it. And if you tell them not to, they usually do it more. It’s not rational.

In all cases, the secret is within the target audience. We work really hard to peel back the layers of resistance to find messaging strategies that influence the audience’s thinking. Sometimes in an evolutionary way and sometimes revolutionary, but always in an honest way. Don’t tell a teen they’re going to die as a result of having a drink because they see people drinking who don’t die. Find a way to help them make intelligent decisions and remember always in the end it is their decision. If you respect that, you’ll have more effect changing their thinking.

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.