Rarely a day goes by when the words Facebook or MySpace doesn’t enter my brain either in conversation, or my RSS Reader.
If you’re an out of the know adult, you probably couldn’t care less about Facebook and MySpace. If you’re an in the know adult, you stand a good chance of having a Facebook page to stay in touch with old friends and college buds to exchange pictures of your kids. If you’re a teenager or college kid, you likely have a myspace page since pop culture tells me “MySpace is the new bootie call”.
Point being, most people (including me) only think about what these internet sensations can do for us terms of communicating the inner workings of our daily lives. If we’re lucky, they might help us get some nookie on the weekends.
A chosen few, look at them as a gigantic Rolodex (an outdated term I know) of potential clients that might buy what they’re selling or read what they’re writing. They knew sites likes Facebook had tremendous business potential!
So if anyone has an advantage to successfully navigate these social networking behemoths, it’s likely the people who are using it the most — those darn kids!
Which leads me into an interview I saw earlier today with Mark Victor Hansen, author of The Richest Kids in America.
[Email and RSS Readers please click to website to view video]
Hansen gives a few examples of internet entrepreneurs like Mark Zuckerburg (creator of Facebook), but also gave a few names and success stories from teenagers that doesn’t get nearly enough attention in my humble opinion.
After learning about these teenage millionaires, it makes my teenage law mowing gig (where I earned ~$100 a weekend) seem like pocket change. Then again, social networking back in the early 90s consisted of posting a flier on a heavily stapled over bulletin board.
So if you have a teenage kid with too much time on their hands, email them a copy of this post just to show that kids their own age can do more than they may think. The only thing that limits (potential) success in this day and age is imagination and the willingness to work at it.
Wow, this book isn’t even released yet…. what an amazing story, too – I’ve heard the Ashley Quails story, not the other two yet. It really is amazing – we’re really all on the cusp of new career paradigms where the old rules just don’t apply as much – of course many old rules do, but there are just so many more new ones…. and possibilities. Matt…. early 30′s is NOT old! 30 is the new 20….:)
Nice post, I tweeted it…
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Hey 33 feels old! When your kid sister makes fun of you for not knowing the cool music anymore… you’re old!
But yeah, it’s quite amazing how many ways we can successfully monetize the Internet. I’ve been blogging for almost a year and while I feel like I’ve learned tons of worthwhile info, I know I’ve got way more to learn.
Thanks for the tweets!
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8:50 pm
Good article SF. These kinds of reports are great for teenagers to read, but they’re useful for us late 20-somethings too!
I was lucky enough to have some good mentors in my teens that led to exciting things which have helped put my life in the direction it is now, almost 10 years later.
Good luck to all you teens out there reading this. You’d be amazed what you can do when you get around to it!
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Matt Reply:
May 29th, 2009 at 9:39 pm
Thanks Alex. Like you, I had a great mentor as a teenager but we focused mainly on the financial education & investing 101 thing.
I’ll try to keep up from old man land in my early 30s over here! ; )
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