NORTH ANDOVER — In the movie "The Graduate," a young Dustin Hoffman is pulled aside by a family friend for an important, coming-of-age conversation.
"Just one word," the older man earnestly tells a skeptical Hoffman. "Plastics."
Hoffman nods. In hindsight, of course, plastics did become a huge industry, and remains so.
But today, that same conversation might go something like this:
Lu Ann Reeb, owner of the new media consulting company Skyways Communications, takes her college-age son aside and says, "One word: Search."
But instead of nodding blankly, her son would say: "Yeah, mom. I know."
Yesterday, Reeb told a room full of businesspeople that the key to success in an era dominated by social media networking sites like Twitter and Facebook, and colossal Web sites like Google and YouTube, is one word: "Search."
Because that's what millions of people, many of them college-age "millenials," are doing every day, in some cases all day long — at work, at home and even in the car or on the bus.
"People are searching the Internet for ways to solve problems," she told about 100 people at a Weathering the Storm breakfast meeting sponsored by The Eagle-Tribune in the newspaper's North Andover office. Last spring, Reeb spoke during the first Weathering the Storm series, and figured she could just repeat her old speech. She said that as soon as she read it over, she threw it out.
"Everything has changed," she said. "Mobile phones have changed everything and will continue to be the driving force in marketing. Everyone is connected via their phones. Pretty soon, no one will be sitting at a desktop."
Twitter, a social networking site that lets people post short messages to anyone who they are linked to, has usurped e-mail as the communication medium of choice for many young people. Facebook, a social networking site, is the other place where most young people, and a growing number of older folks as well, get news about friends, family, hobbies and other interests.
Youtube has become one of the largest repositories of videos in the world, with people posting 200 clips every minute. Google, of course, is everywhere.
The trick, said Reeb, is for businesses to figure out how to take advantage of the viral nature of these Internet tools so that they have marketing "pull" instead of "push."
That is, potential clients and customers are pulled to your Web site, and the products and services it offers, because key words about their businesses have taken them to the top of the first page of any Google search using those words.
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Next Weathering the Storm
When: Thursday, Nov. 12, 8 to 9:30 a.m.
What: Preparing for Growth — "Ready? Set? Go!" with Robert Cuomo of Merrimack College and Michael Barretti of Suffolk University.
Location: Eagle Tribune Publishing Co., Route 114, North Andover, Education Center. (Follow the signs.)
