Wake up to the habits of digital natives: how interaction and immersion affect your business.

• Author: Johnston, Ross
• Position: TECHNOLOGY

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

At the age of 24, Kymberly Flores is the regional sales director of the Extended Stay Hotels in Alaska. She wakes up in the morning to her iPad alarm clock and uses it to pull up her Facebook account to see what her friends are doing; then she checks for important overnight emails. This is even before she gets out of bed. As she eats her breakfast, Kym uses flip board, an application for her iPad that allows her to view and interact with several different news sources simultaneously. Sometimes, she'll read an interesting article, and "share" it with her friends on Facebook and post about how it relates to her. Kym Flores has a TV, but no cable. She watches her favorite TV shows through sites like Hulu and Netflix.

DIGITAL NATIVE

Flores is a digital native. Her growth and development coincided with the growth and development of digital communication. The term digital native typically applies to those born in the late 1980s or after. Communicating via technology has been ever present in their lives.

Flores knows the value of relationships and knowing her clients. That is why she has installed a social plug-in called "Xobni" on Outlook. As soon as she inserts an email address into the "TO:" field, that client or potential client's FB profile, Linkedin profile and Twitter account all pull up below, keeping her informed of that person's latest shared information. With that plug-in, she knows which of her clients enjoy talking about fishing, family or some other activity.

Flores has more than 800 "friends" on Facebook. As a consummate professional, Flores knows the importance of post integrity. She'll never post anything on a social media site that her grandmother wouldn't approve.

Flores uses Facebook to keep in touch, but she also realizes by writing fun, interesting posts, clients feel a greater connection with her. She realizes sales are made through strong relationships and she uses social media to strengthen those relationships. Flores has "fanned" almost all of her clients and uses social media sites to not only become better acquainted with her clients, but to stay on top of the business world and the changes occurring at each of the companies she does business with or is aiming to do business with.

Social media has transcended the sole purpose of being "social." Current events, community and world events now appear on her "wall" and appear in the order other interests. It reduces the amount of time she has to spend...