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Lunchtime Links: A Generation Nostalgic for the ’90s

Looking to reach millennial audiences? Help generations X and Y relive their childhood, says Mashable founder Pete Cashmore. Also: Make your content more digestible. It's not dumbing things down, and your readers will appreciate it.

Floppy disks, CD players, and Tamagotchis—all are touchstones of the ’90s. And millennials love remembering them.

My fellow millennials, it seems, have developed a great fondness for sharing their favorite pastimes like arcade games, cassette tapes, and 1990s pop culture.

With the right approach, these tools can be just the way for associations to reach a younger audience.

That, and more, in today’s Lunchtime Links:

Nostalgic content creators: How do you engage with millennials in your community? Mashable founder Pete Cashmore is constantly studying the generation to better understand their interests and what they’re likely to share with their peers. One thing that always works: pulling at the strings of the past. “It’s often said that constant connectivity has created a generation that craves the ephemeral, and while timely news indexes highly among our readers, we’re often surprised to see another category that performs well: nostalgia,” Cashmore writes in Time Magazine. “My fellow millennials, it seems, have developed a great fondness for sharing their favorite pastimes like arcade games, cassette tapes, and 1990s pop culture.” Brands like Internet Explorer have also caught on to the nostalgia theme.

Clickable content: Do you produce digestible content with topical headlines? Kivi Leroux Miller highlights the value of skimmable content. It’s not dumbing it down, she says. Rather, it’s making it easier to read and more attractive to click. “Giving people a clear and concise taste of your content with an easy-to-see link to click for more says you respect their time in their inbox and trust them to decide whether your article is right for them or not,” says Leroux Miller.

Team-building experiences: Your employees might get sick of the same old team-building exercises, but finding ways to give the exercises a new spark can help. If you’re looking for new exercises to test with your team, EventChecklist’s Magnus Ward suggests, try taking your employees out of their comfort zone—or even out of the office. Physical activity or art classes can get your staff working together and give them a space to relate to one another outside the work environment. “Shaking things up by organizing a unique team-building exercise for employees can really prove effective for bringing a team together,” Ward explains.

What’s on your reading list today? Let us know in your comments below.

(iStockphoto/Thinkstock)

Anita Ferrer

By Anita Ferrer

Anita Ferrer is a contributor to Associations Now. MORE

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