The star of the Gen Y social networking sites is not FaceBook. It is Yelp.com. .. a site that consists of mainly user reviews.

Sure FaceBook has more traffic and more media buzz, but Yelp! seems to be acing grassroots marketing and is the scoring big with the 20 and 30 somethings. Yelp provides lets users review anything – bars, clubs, doctors, lawyers, etc. It is taking on and gaining on local services such as GoogleMaps, YahooLocal!. Yelp seems to do at the local level. It’s blog highlights all the local marketing it is doing — getting to the local influencers. To read more about Yelp.. check out the web sites below:

• www.Yelp.com
• Red Herring: Yelp Gets $3M-Plus in VC Cash
• Forbes: Yelp: Not Your Mother’s Local Review Site
• The Register: Yelp! A viral recommendation system you can’t resist?
• Businessweek: Tech’s Best Young Entrepreneurs
• San Francisco Chronicle: CASTING THE NET / Yelp is on the way
• San Francisco Chronicle: Amateur reviews changing approach of small businesses
• Seattle Post Intelligencer: When diners speak up online, restaurants listen
• Fortune: Business paradigm shifts and free tequila shots

Points for reflection:

• Gen Y will listen to their peers
• Gen Y wants the bigger companies to go local if they are going to market to them
  Gen Y will listen to marketers and C-level employees if they can relate to them (if they are Gen Y) or if they can learn from them
• Gen Y might just surprise you and go against the trend

The Daily Show explains why young people are the only ones who enjoyed the YouTube Debate - they’re the only ones who can see it.

Delioitte recently had an internal film contest for employees to create films that could be used to recruit Gen Yers. The the first-ever Deloitte Film Festival, a new approach to leveraging employee-generated content to bolster Gen Y recruiting activities and drive workforce engagement.

Here’s how the program worked — the program where they recruited their own folks to make videos

Here’s how the program worked (and it did work):

Digital video production kits were offered to the first 250 registrants to encourage maximum participation.

Due to high levels of interest, Deloitte had to make an additional 100 cameras available to teams.

More than 370 short films were submitted by teams of one to seven members from offices across the U.S.

Each video offered what the company said was a “candid and unfiltered view of Deloitte’s culture of inclusion, leading edge talent and innovative workplace.” (Exactly how unfiltered it was is always difficult to say from the outside.)

The submitted films were posted on an internal “You Tube-like” intranet site where they were viewed and rated by Deloitte employees, with the best films integrated into campus recruiting programs.

Finally, in a corporate social responsibility bonus, the company integrated the program into its “Community Involvement Initiative” — according to the multimedia press release, “upon completion of the film festival, cameras and equipment will be donated to nonprofit organizations, including FilmAid International and IFP, that use the power of film to support displaced people around the world.”

370 +short films were submitted by teams of Deloitte personnel from offices across the U.S. firms. The submitted films were posted on an internal “You Tube-like” intranet site where they were viewed and rated by Deloitte employees. (Why not share them externally on You-Tube??)

The best-rated films will be integrated into campus recruiting programs, Deloitte said.

Generation Y is the fastest-growing population in the workforce, representing 22 percent of all workers. By 2010, approximately 10 million more “Gen Yers” are expected to join the working world, outnumbering their predecessors, according to RainmakerThinking, Inc.

Nice original approach, but shouldn’t they be asking perspective candidates to submit YouTube videos during their application process

Some info for this blog taken from PRWeb and other sources…