How to Use Social Media in Connecting with Gen Y Relatives

How well do you engage and communicate with your teenage and college age nephews, nieces, cousins, grand sons and daughters? Have you ever considered using social media to keep in touch (connect) with your kids or grand kids?

Social media and social networking sites can be a very effective way for you connect and communicate with your Generation Y children, friends or nephews and nieces. Social media is increasingly an invincible bridge that can allow you to reach out to them.  Unlike their older cousin mass media, social media gives you the opportunity to share ideas, stories, experiences with them, on a one to one basis.

5 Ways Social Media Will Bridge The Gap Between You and Your Gen Y Relatives

Ice breaker

Social media can break the ice between you and your Gen Y children or relatives. If you ask to join their network, in most cases, they will be pleasantly surprised to know that you are interested in being friend on Facebook or a follower on Twitter. When they let you join their ‘gang of friends,’ you can be sure that any icy relationship will thaw up over time.

Stay-tuned

Social media allows you to stay tuned to their challenges, their fears and aspirations. New social media platforms allow you the possibility of having a direct link, bridge or path through which to extend encouragements, and to support their inspiration. Through Facebook, you may also get know more about what issues they are facing.

Cool effect

By joining a social networking site, you are also making a fashion statement that you are youthful at heart to your Gen Y relatives. It may also imply that you are “cool.” They will be delighted to know that ‘old dogs can learn new tricks.’

Precursor

Social media now offers a new opportunity for you to monitor what kind of activities your children or grand children are part of. If they are being lured into a gang or some negative activity, you may get some clues based on their updates and posts on social networks. How useful is that?

Family fun Site

Take for example Flickr, youtube or vimeo, you can use one of these sites to upload some compelling and fun family moments with your children. This is a great place to share your photos from visiting the Great Wall of China. By sharing and getting comments, this is one way of bonding or connecting with them.

To a large extent, social media is a channel through which to connect and communicate effectively with your Gen Y friends, pals and relatives.

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The 5 Elements of Persuasive Storytelling

Whether you are speaking to corporate audience, entrepreneurs or teenagers, there is one common denominator you can use to convince and persuade them. Storytelling. Without a good understanding of the 5 key elements of persuasive storytelling, your stories may have an undesired effect- put them to sleep.

By writing this short article, I hope that you will not put them to sleep, but rather ‘grab and keep them alive and engaged’ all through your presentation. It is my hope that after reading these five key elements, you will improve your storytelling ability in at least one dimension. If you can do that, I will be pretty happy that I accomplished my goal of sharing this with you something that I found useful and interesting. Here are the elements:

#  1. Passion

By passion, I mean the energy, the urgency or the momentum with which you tell your story. Your audience is drawn to your passion and feeds on your energy or ‘fire’. While the audience watches you in action, they are telling themselves, they are also carried by the swing of your momentum. Your burning passion and zest that makes an audience to listen and buy into the ideas you are selling or presenting. With passion, your story comes across as full of live and action.

Your passion can be communicated through a variety of ways: your voice, gestures, pace, words, eye contact, emotions and so on.

# 2. Hero

A story with a hero grounds an experience or incident into reality. It is through your hero that the audience will have a perspective based on what he or she is going through. When your hero embraces a course of action or shuns a piece of advice, that draws the audience into either the moment of the story. If your hero has a worthwhile ambition or goal, you can be sure that the audience begins to take sides, have preferences and dislikes. That is a moment of engagement.

In order for your hero to look real and for your audience to relate to the hero, give your heros some human qualities, especially some frailties or weaknesses.

#3. Antagonist

The antagonist can either be a person, a conflict or circumstances that challenge, prevent or obscure the hero from getting what he wants. When the antagonist is effectively present in a story, there is friction, controversy and drama. The drama creates anticipation and the anticipation creates anxiety in the minds of the audience. When this happens, you can be sure that your story will be memorable.

The best way to create a memorable story is to inject a tough antagonist that does some prickly or testy things to upset the hero. When this happens there is excitement and audience experiences adrenaline rush, which causes images of the incident to be imprinted on their minds.

#4. Awareness

The awareness part of your story is crucial in that it enables the audiences to see what the hero has learned from an experience. Highlight it. Was it a positive or a negative lesson? How did the hero come to this awareness or relization? Was it through someone ‘s advice, or through his or her own discovery? By shedding light on this, the audiences can take a deep breathe and find some closure. Without awareness, there is no raison d’etre for any story at all. The awareness is the reason you tell the story in the first place.

Thus, in telling your story, ensure that you give your audience the opportunity to understand what was the point of the whole story, that way they can came to terms with themselves like the hero does.

#5. Transformation

Transformation refers to the changes that follows the realization or awareness. How did the hero and his environment change? Does the hero make a conscious effort to be different when approaching such a problem again? Another dimension of the transformation is your audience. In a sales story, a storyteller may have used the story to illustrate the benefits of moving from one place to another.

One way to improve your transformation is to explicitly call for action and let the audience know what you expect them to do. This is common in political speeches.

For more on the five elements, read The Elements of Persuasion by Richard Maxwell and Richard Dickman.

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