Ryan Anderson dot ca

Every now and again, I’m asked to give lectures on marketing and social media. I truly enjoy doing it, simply because I enjoy the feeling of actually educating a room full of people and helping them understand something new or to shed a new light on something they already knew. I don’t think I’d ever want to be a teacher full-time, but the occasional guest lecture is always fun.

I particularly enjoyed speaking to the group I talked to at the University of Ottawa last Wednesday. In the last few years, the business school started an entrepreneurship track that is led by a friend and former professor of mine – Bruce Firestone. I had a lot of business professors when I was in University, but I have to say that Bruce definitely had the biggest impact on my career and my life. Plus, it’s always easier to take business advice from someone who has done something as incredible as found an NHL team, rather than just another academic. It’s exceedingly rare to find both in one person.

My lecture was on, as you may have already read, The Social Startup – the notion that the group most perfectly aligned to make use of social media is entrepreneurs. The entrepreneurial culture of networking and creating opportunities has been largely overtaken by the corporate broadcast mentality – something that has sullied the name of the entrepreneur and created shills and laughable late-night commercials. In reality, the possibilities afforded by social media to the masses are much more in line with entrepreneurship in its purest form – being connected to your customers, understanding their needs and responding quickly.

In an hour, I gave them a brief overview of advertising history, the way media consumption habits are changing, an introduction to the ethos of social media and some examples of entrepreneurs and corporations alike who “get it.”

Overall, I was impressed by how many took what I said to heart and got thinking about how they can start getting more active with social media. I’ll go into more detail on what I said and the questions they asked in the next couple of weeks, but overall, speaking to a group of really smart young entrepreneurs underlined for me the importance for entrepreneurs (or intrapreneurs) to be active in their online communities. We may not be face-to-face with all of our customers anymore, but at the very least, we can understand and connect with them as individuals – and that’s a big part of what being an entrepreneur means.