Meet Your Future Clients

The other day, I suggested in my Ten New Rules of Legal Marketing that:

9.  Your future clients have been living their entire lives onlineand will expect the same from you.  If you’re invisible on the web, youwon’t exist to them.

Now, I've stumbled across this article from Adweek titled Generation Watch Out that explains better than I ever could what I meant:

Today's young talent represents not-able cultural shifts: They'redigital, message savvy, global and green. (Listen to the Flobots'"Handlebars" and you'll get the picture.) They mark fundamentalchanges from previous grads entering the industry. They're moreassociative, culturally networked, nimble and intuitive. Whilethey're more cynical than cohorts past, they're also more apt tocall BS or volunteer for environmental or political causes. Theyare easy in their gay-or-straight, vegetarian-or-meat,tatted-or-not choices. F-bombs are tossed around like Frisbees.These kids run hard, adapt easily....

It's the shortcut generation. That toolbar up top is forold-timers; these guys learned to Cmd-Option-Shift-A in middleschool because it was cool, not necessary. Desktops areinstitutional holdovers. Everyone has a set of on-the-go tools:camera, laptop, videocam, hard drive, cool bag to tote it all.They're experts early on, manhandling Final Cut or Flash withintuitive authority. They're Idea 2.0, the mashup generation andone with confluence, that place beyond convergence where the oldsloughs off and the new quickly gets morphed into the cultural DNA.

All this makes them, at their best, unbelievably creative andproductive. On the other hand, they also think they have all theanswers. Morley Safer wrote recently of this generation'sentitlement issues: They've grown up with everyone as winners, withinspired birthday parties and planned events, with middle-classprivilege and opportunities at every camp, academy andtake-your-kid-to-work experience. They expect careers, not jobs.And they expect to have their names—very soon—in an annual or thismag. Hell, they know their blog on a good day might get moreeyeballs than the trades.

Get to know them. Understand them.  Because love 'em or hate 'em, they're not just your children, they're your future clients, employees and partners.  Learn to serve them or they'll serve themselves.