A few months ago, our Silicon Valley overlords came up with a new toy to distract us: Vine. Immediately this became Very Important to marketers, and I rolled my eyes. “There they go again,” I thought. “Recommending that brands seize on some newfangled silly social tool without regard to return and at the expense of what they do best.” (I really thought this. The voice in my head is quite erudite.)

Here’s the thing. I was wrong about Vine. It’s actually pretty amazing, and it might be the coolest social tool for brands since, well, Twitter itself. Do I think it’ll make or break your next campaign? Of course not. But the limitations of the medium provide a cool platform for brands to do certain things very, very well. Below, check out our guide to the effective use of Vine.

What is Vine? Simply put, Vine is a mobile app that allows users to record very short (six seconds or less) snippets of video. When viewers go to watch the video (itself called a Vine), it loops, creating a rather mesmerizing effect. Here’s a Vine of the CEB Marketing team, hard at work.

Vine was originally a separate company, it was bought by Twitter last fall, and it launched to users in January. You mostly run into Vines via Twitter, although I’ve seen them shared elsewhere (Facebook, embedded on pages) as well.

Why is Vine cool? In general, for the same reason Twitter is cool and haikus are cool: imposing restrictions – arbitrary or otherwise – on communications often leads to lots of creativity, as users try to pack as much meaning through the channel as possible.

For marketers specifically, Vine offers the opportunity to quickly impart reasonably complex messages in a channel that seems to compel multiple viewings. In other words, it gives us the opportunity to create audiovisual memes – snippets of information that are so short and so digestible that we can’t get enough.

How should we as marketers be using Vine? Obviously, this technology has only recently reached our phones, and so this list is far from definitive. But the most interesting Vines I’ve seen from marketers and brands so far have all had to do with illustrating the characteristics or potential uses of a product, in ways that are so infectious so as to nearly compel sharing.

Here’s an example from pursemaker Monica Botkier, showing just how much you can fit in their Valentina Mini line of purses.

Here’s another great one, from Bacardi UK, illustrating how to use their rum to make a Cuba Libre (aka a rum and coke):

Here’s Gap, illustrating what kind of shoes you can wear with a new line of colorful pants: You get the idea. If you’ve got a product that lends itself to quick feature display, or, you’ve got a unique use for a product that you want people to quickly grasp, Vine is an amazing tool. For more inspiration, check out Bon Appetit’s gallery of six-second recipes.

How should I avoid using Vine? So, there’s two levels of things I think people should try to avoid when using this tool; tactical and strategic. When making Vines themselves, you should probably try and avoid using too many camera angles – that can just make the video very confusing. Don’t go in without a plan; consider doing some lightweight storyboarding – six seconds is a surprisingly long amount of time. Pay attention to sound: sound is muted by default when watching Vines, but some users turn it on.

From a strategic perspective, though, you should be thinking hard about the capabilities of the medium and how they relate to the product you’re creating. So, if you’re just taking some random video around the office to “humanize” your brand, that’s probably not the best use of Vine. If you’re using a stop-motion technique, as in this GE video, to build brand engagement, that’s a lot better. Don’t just use Vine as an excuse to put more branded content in social media feeds; explore the creative space the platform offers and create something interesting and worth sharing.

But CEB Marketing members – we want to hear from you. How have you successfully used Vine, and what kind of cool examples have you seen in the wild?

(Interested in building Challenger content? Register for our next Challenger Content Ecosystem workshop.)

If you’re a B2B marketer, chances are, you’ve heard us or our colleagues in CEB Sales talk about the Challenger Selling approach. If you haven’t, the idea behind Challenger is simple: the key way to maintain margin and preference as an individual salesperson is to actively attempt to change the mind of your customers about their business problems in ways that lead back to you as a supplier. In other words, if you sell Product X, and your customer complains that it’s not like Product Y, don’t apologize - tell them why they’re wrong for wanting Product Y. That reason why the customer is wrong is called a Commercial Insight, and it’s at the heart of successful Challenger approaches.

Most of you guys probably agree that this is important. But it opens up a second question: what happens in a world where Sales doesn’t get in until later and later in the buying process? Because that’s the world we live in today (see “Owning More of the Funnel”). In a world where customers are setting their expectations without the benefit of a Challenger salesperson to point out things they might be missing, Marketing’s role necessarily expands – and that means we must create content that embeds the Commercial Insight and performs the Challenger role in the absence of a salesperson.

That’s what our new workshop, Building a Challenger Content Ecosystem, is all about: how can Marketing engineer an entire content portfolio – from tweets to videos to whitepapers – that maximizes the chances of changing customer mindsets about their core business problems before they ever contact a salesperson?

In our workshop, we’ve designed a few key exercises that try to draw out the ingredients in a successful Challenger content portfolio. Here’s what you’ve got to know to make it work:

The discrete mental model shifts customers must make to accept your insight. Our Commercial Insight is a powerful thing: at its best, it should compel action from those who hear it. But just talking about the Insight isn’t enough: you have to think about the discrete things customers believe that supports their own model of the world, and understand how those beliefs must shift in order to ensure acceptance of the Commercial Insight.

How hard those shifts are to prove, and how you can prove them. In a world where alternate information is always at the click of a mouse, proving your claims becomes more and more important. You must have a sense of which claims are likeliest to meet skepticism, as well as what kind of data and analysis you can bring to bear to prove yourself correct.

How to create content across the attention spectrum. Thinking about the broader world in which your content lives is important. Customers are constantly bombarded with e-mails, white papers, tweets, blog posts, and the rest of the kitchen sink. Therefore, successful content has to do three things: it has to spark attention, introduce the problem in a general way, and confront the customer with what they’re personally losing as a result of the problem.

Sounds like a lot, right? Well, it is, but we can help. Consider attending the next session of Building a Challenger Content Ecosystem. It’s an all-day session, June 19 in Atlanta, and you’ll emerge from the day with a map for your Challenger content and specific to-dos to begin the process back at the office.

Remember when we used to call this little symbol, #, the “pound symbol”?  Now that term is practically obsolete and has been replaced with “hash” due to the emergence of “hashtags”.  Hashtags took the internet world by storm thanks to Twitter and then Instagram and Pinterest, but not even they could foresee how that symbol would evolve.  If we track the evolution of the hashtag, maybe we can learn a thing or two about our consumer.

When we think of Twitter, we naturally associate it with hashtags but the thing is, hashtags didn’t exist until a year after its launch and Twitter didn’t even invent them.  Hashtags were a user innovation.  In 2007, Chris Messina tweeted, “how do you feel about using # (pound) for groups?  As in #barcamp [msg]?”  This concept caught on relatively quick as people started inserting hashtags to lump conversations together by topic, thereby making it easy to see all the tweets associated with that subject.  Categorizing tweets to make conversations more searchable was a big hit so Twitter made it official by supporting hashtags on Twitter.com (Thanks, Chris!).  However, consumers took that idea and ran with it.  Creating hashtags morphed into a way to add status to your internet persona.  People use Twitter hashtags for things you would never think to search for.  To make my point, here are some hashtags I pulled from my own Instagram and Twitter accounts on May 14:

• #whatdiet: box of Krispy Kreme donuts (Instagram)
• #ohboydoilovethis: A link to Kate Spade’s 75% off surprise sale (Twitter)
• #moremorewewantmore: the trio of new Lays Potato Chips flavors available for a limited time (Instagram)

Be honest.  Would you think to categorize the products above with those hashtags?  Probably not.  Now that you know these hashtags exist, does it make sense that those are the hashtags the consumers chose?  Absolutely.  The pressure to be witty in 140 characters or less transformed the hashtag into contextual “asides” that add a certain air to the tweet.  The first example is ironic, the second is indulgent, and the third is quirky-cute.  I should note that those hashtags all came from the same person, which proves my point: Your consumers are moving, changing targets who make up new conventions and behave in new ways all the time.  Societal pressures have always existed but they happen a lot faster over the Internet.  People think it’s important to gain followers and they do that by using common hashtags.  Then, once that’s established, they need to keep those followers entertained by creating these ironic and witty categorizations.  There’s also the worry of offending people by “abusing hashtags” and creating long unnecessary lists, which cancels out whatever message the post is trying to get across. We’re in an age where no one seems to have enough time anymore and everyone is more easily distracted so this most recent hashtag evolution into “meta-commentary” makes perfect sense.  People have to cut down their ideas, their words, and their meaning in order to even get heard in the first place.  The hashtag gives audiences a filter for how to perceive a post, creating interpretation-shortcuts.  It’s a quick way to add commentary without explaining why.  Let’s hope plugging hashtags into verbal conversations won’t be the next chapter in the hashtag saga.

(The following post is by Cristina Gomez, of the Sales Leadership Council, our sister practice for Sales executives. If your company is a member of the SLC, encourage your Sales counterpart to attend this year’s Executive Retreat!)

In my last blog post, I introduced our newest research findings on sales culture, and how most sales organizations today have a sales culture or climate that is hindering their ability to build a Challenger sales force. Most sales leaders recognize that while traditional change management initiatives such as effective training, coaching, and communication campaigns are required to embed new behaviors, change is destined to fail if it’s not supported by the right sales environment.

In fact, when we asked reps what’s preventing them from adopting new sales behaviors; over half of them reported their operating environment or culture as the biggest inhibitor of behavior change. And when you look at the cartoon illustration below, it is easy to understand why.

On the left is an illustration of sales leaders’ perspective on change: a big national sales meeting with all the bells and whistles (e.g., great inspirational speaker, maybe even the author of The Challenger Sale, new materials on the sales portal, exciting breakout sessions, and great training for reps and managers to come). If this sounds familiar, it’s because it represents how most sales organizations roll-out change initiatives. And for the most part, these are essential and effective strategies for driving change. Read More »

It is officially May, which means our 2013 B2B research project is about two months from completion.  As some of our readers will know, we’re focusing on the rationality of customer decision-making in B2B purchases.  So far in recent blog posts, we’ve presented two findings: larger buying committees do not act rationally, and cognitive overload is undermining marketers’ best efforts to inform customer decisions.

As part of our research, we explored The BuyerSphere Project, which takes a fresh look at organizational buying behavior.  Based on an extensive research project, this book explores why prospects that appeared to be a sure bet to buy would suddenly disappear out of the funnel – a common experience for most B2B marketers and sales reps.  We’d like to share some of its findings and insights.

Marketers typically try to influence the purchase by targeting customer pain points with functional, educational information about their solution.  This approach isn’t wrong, but it’s not usually sufficient, because simply proving business value is no longer enough to win the purchase.  Now that “‘99% of B2B buying is about covering your butt,’” Marketing needs to place more emphasis on persuading (not just informing) the customer.  The BuyerSphere Project argues that Marketing’s new role is to “soften the soil, increasing the perception of the perceived reward or minimizing the perception of the perceived risk” for the purchase.

One big mistake that marketers make is to treat the buying organization as one individual.  As the book discusses, there are actually two main stakeholder types with whom marketers engage: Users and Decision-Makers.  Users (or “doers”) are the people that have to get things done, while Decision-Makers are the ones who attempt to impose a logical, rational buying process.

The User’s objective is more personal than organizational.  They want to fully explore a product to increase their personal value as an organizational asset before considering its improvement for the company’s overall effectiveness.  As such, they are much more interested in features and benefits, but they are also more emotional because they “might fall in love with a product… making them heroes in the process.”

This disposition gives Marketing more opportunities to engage, but unfortunately, Users are almost never in charge of the actual purchase decision (despite their opinions being sought out early in the process).  Suppliers usually do a good job building trust with Users, but at some point, the process is taken over by Decision-Makers.  The Decision-Maker’s main concern is to eliminate organizational risk from the process, and to do their job well, they have to be extremely risk averse.  They thrive in bureaucracy and regulation, and as a result are deeply intertwined in organizational politics.

So given such different stakeholder profiles, what are the implications for Marketing?

Beware of overinvesting in a User relationship.  Users’ deep interest in the product motivates them to attend webinars, download white papers, ask for demos, etc. – which means that they constitute most of the leads generated through digital/online channels.  Decision-Makers, on the other hand, don’t sign up for webinars, watch videos, or listen to podcasts.  They might download a white paper, but there’s usually never one written specifically for them.  Users will often pass along a favorite supplier, only to find that more suppliers have to be found for the Decision-Maker’s objectives.  As the purchase moves towards negotiation, the Decision-Maker relationship becomes much more important

Prepare for the User-Decision-Maker transition of power.  When buying power is transferred to the Decision-Maker, the User becomes support.  It’s quite likely that a User is on the road to being sold on a solution, but the Decision-Makers can take the process almost back to square one in order to align it with their objectives. Consequently, it’s almost certain that information will get lost along the way.  The BuyerSphere Project dives deeper into the preparation for this transition.

For more, please refer to The BuyerSphere Project.

Have thoughts or experiences about this topic?  We’d love to hear them!

Riddle me this: how can it be that consumer trust in online reviews is holding flat over the last 4 years when it is estimated that a significant chunk of online reviews are fake?

Here are the figures:

• Per Nielsen’s 2012 Consumer Trust in Advertising Survey, 70% of consumers trust completely or somewhat online reviews, the same as reported in the 2009 survey.
• Meanwhile, Professor Bing Liu of the University of Illinois at Chicago, who is an expert in online reviews, estimates up to 30% of reviews are fake (Note: small, shady outfits aren’t the only instigators of fake reviews—witness Samsung’s recent issues in Taiwan)

Maybe consumers are good at detecting fakes, so they filter out the noise.  If only.  In tests where consumers are presented with a set of reviews, some fake and some not, even the best amongst us are able to detect the fake ones about two thirds of the time.

In all likelihood, most consumers don’t realize so many reviews are fake.  I study marketing for a living, and just found out myself that a 5-star review costs about $5 in the review fabrication marketplace.

What? There’s actually a marketplace for this skullduggery?  Yep.  Many, it turns out.  Here are a few spooky anecdotes:

• Some computer science students in BRIC nations seem to make money on the side by developing review-writing algorithms that can outwit the basic safeguards most website owners put in place to prevent fake reviews.  The Guardian newspaper in the UK ran a fascinating article on this, Fake Reviews Plague Consumer Websites, in January.
• Also from the Guardian article, you can find solicitations for review writers on freelance.com.  In one case, an ad sought writers to create hundreds of fake reviews.  The post reads: “All reviews should be unique and well-crafted so that they look entirely natural. All reviews must be from unique email addresses/Facebook accounts. Reviews should be very different from each other – ie, one might say ‘Item was shipped quickly’ and another might say ‘A+ great service!!’ while another (3-star) might say ‘I was satisfied with their customer service’, etc.”
• On micro-task marketplaces like Mechanical Turk, about 40% of the task requests coming from new requesters on the site (i.e., those without an established reputation) related to some kind of digital chicanery, including writing fake reviews, downloading apps to inflate app numbers on app marketplaces, clicking on banner ads and retweeting spam on Twitter (this per a 2010 study by Professor Panos Ipeirotis at NYU-Stern).

Over time, more stories like these will come out.  As consumers get wise to the widespread deception in the online review marketplace, business stands to take yet another hit to its trust.

Brands and retailers that make and sell quality products should have a strong incentive to weed out fake reviews.  Fake reviews dull the information signal that is so critical to healthy marketplaces.

Beyond the obvious—don’t participate in fake reviews and keep pushing to detect and weed them out—here’s what marketers can do to bolster trust and maintain healthy review marketplaces that are easy for consumers to use and trust:

Don’t stop at tracking your brand’s trust.  Track how easy it is for consumers to access and trust information along the path to purchase.  See CEB Marketing’s Decision Simplicity work for more background.  Just because you have a trusted brand doesn’t mean the consumer can easily get to trusted information they need along the path to purchase—much of the information they need won’t come from your brand at all!  Don’t just be a brand steward, be a steward of the customer’s entire purchase path.

Try a little “review ethnography”.  Marketers regularly conduct ethnographic research in which they observe consumers as they use their products at home or in everyday life.  Less often do they physically observe how consumers take in reviews.  Based on an informal survey of my colleagues here at CEB, I discovered on the CEB Marketing team that we have different styles of review reading.  Some of us go straight to the one star reviews to quickly see “how bad” the product could possibly be, at its worst. Others work their way through top to bottom, and read far enough to get a rough sense of fit.  Understanding how your audience reads reviews and making it easier for them to do that is a good start.

Invest in meta-information about reviewers.  Amazon, TripAdvisor and others are putting more information about reviewers alongside the reviews, so consumers can better judge for themselves whether to trust a review.  For example, TripAdvisor indicates if the reviewer is a top, senior or average contributor (by number of reviews), and provides info on how helpful other consumers find that reviewers reviews in general.  That goes a long way to weeding out shill reviews, because it equips consumers to put more stock in the right reviews.

Consumers are awash in choice and information.  The ever-expanding internet, better search engines, social media, and advances in mobile technology mean consumers can get information from virtually any source at any time.  But is all this information and choice a good thing?  Our research suggests it might not be.

We at CEB Marketing first started probing the idea of information and choice overload in 2011 with our research on Consumer Cognitive Overload.  We found in a survey of more than 7,000 consumers that even though only a small fraction say that they have too much information and choice, they can get trapped in a spiral of research triggered by mismatched expectations.  Once consumers begin to research more, they assign more importance to the purchase, increasing their research expectations.  This ends with less confident, more anxious, and less loyal consumers. Too much information can lead to a research spiral fraught with anxiety and indecision, and anxious, indecisive consumers are definitely not a good thing for brands.

We dove deeper into this late last year and conducted another survey on consumers’ purchase journeys in five representative categories (tablets, vacuum cleaners, car insurance, athletic shoes, and credit cards).  Additional signals of information overload emerged.

First, nearly half (45%) of consumers continue to conduct product research even after the purchase.  Some of this post-purchase research is innocuous and even positive, such as trying to figure out how to best use the product or learn more about it.  Others are more indicative of buyers’ remorse – like the 20% of people who check to make sure they made the “best” choice.  Even after making a decision, these consumers still aren’t fully confident.  They are stuck in a mindset that there is always something better.

Second, when we took a closer look at the most indecisive consumers – those who went into the purchase with a frontrunner in mind but then changed their mind and switched to a different option – we found that they consume notably more information than those who stick with their originally intended purchase.  In and of itself, this isn’t indicative of a problem, but an analysis of these “switchers” also shows them to be less confident about their purchase and more apt to report feeling anxious, frustrated, and uncertain at every phase of the purchase journey.

Not surprisingly, switchers are also more likely to conduct all types of post-purchase research – 64% of them kept probing for information after they bought versus just 40% of non-switchers.  They are almost twice as likely to search for price changes, check out alternatives, and check if they made the best choice.  More information and choice seems to be making it harder for them to make a decision they are happy with.

Choice and information overload hurts consumers and it hurts brands, and the best way to help consumers feel confident about choosing you is to simplify their purchase decision.  Our 2011 research on Compressing the Decision Journey indicates that decision simplicity is the most important element driving consumer stickiness, and that brands should help consumers trust the information they receive, learn effectively without distraction, and weigh alternatives confidently to simplify their purchase decision.  Doing this will help consumers that start with you in mind remain confident about choosing you while also picking off switchers that start with another brand in mind.

Managers, do you know the critical role you play in retaining your digital marketers?  I was surprised to learn that 62% of employees in digital media–including your digital marketers–plan to leave their current employer within 2 years, despite 78% claiming they are at least satisfied with their work (20% satisfied, 51% enjoy, 7% love), according to a Digiday study commissioned by Nextmark.  Your interaction with your digital marketers will be key to keeping them onboard.

As you know, digital marketers enjoy their jobs because what they do is creative, dynamic, frequently cutting edge, and often requires innovative ways to market.  At the same time, these loves can turn into sources of frustration if taken to the extreme. The digital world never sleeps and is constantly evolving, and working in the digital world means you can always be “on” and feel that you are constantly catching up to what’s new or different.  This can lead to long hours, some tedious work, and feeling like you’re spinning your wheels, never making progress, and not helping the business.  In addition, many high-performing digital marketers can be victims of their own success and end up being pigeonholed as the “Pinterest person,” when in reality they’d like to expand into a role that’s more strategic than tactical.  Many digital marketers might be looking for a fresh start elsewhere.  This is where managers can play a huge role to retain your top digital talent.

Managers are the primary connection between digital marketers and the organization and directly shape their perception of the organization and their job. Through this influence, you magnify (or diminish) their commitment, thereby serving as a critical leverage point for maximizing the impact the organization and day-to-day work have on retention.  Research from CEB’s Corporate Leadership Council indicates that managers control a majority of the most powerful drivers of employee intent to stay.  You can increase retention most effectively by doing 3 things:

• Connect employee efforts to the organization – The manager’s role as interface between the organization and its employees requires that managers clearly demonstrate how an employee’s work objectives originate in organizational strategy.  Establishing this link has the largest possible impact on employee effort, improving it by 33%, and can improve an employee’s intent to stay by 36%.  However, the connection between work and strategy is only half of the story.  Employees need to understand how their hard work will translate into broader organizational success.  Such an understanding can have up to a 30% impact on discretionary effort and a 34% impact on intent to stay.
• Expand the employee’s network – The work of employees rarely occurs within a vacuum and is often dependent on information and guidance from a broader network.  Employees often do not have sufficient organizational knowledge and visibility to fully establish such networks on their own, so connecting employees to talented coworkers from across the organization is one of the manager’s most important roles. Doing so not only improves performance but also provides a foundation for increased engagement and retention.  Helping employees build internal, job-focused networks that enable them to successfully complete their projects, develop new ideas, stay informed about the organization, and allow them to share their expertise will increase employee engagement by up to 57%.
• Provide credible development plans and give advice – Advising on career development can increases the intent to stay by 37% if done properly. Development plans only work when they signal a “credible commitment” to reaching the goals by taking the effort to customize plans to individual employee needs and provide the necessary resources and opportunities to support the plan’s success.  The organization must make investments to demonstrate that it’s sincerely committed to cultivating the employee’s skills to foster long-term progress.  For your top digital marketers, create development plans that allow them to expand their skills; for example, if one of your top employees is really great at managing your Twitter feed, ask him whether he’d like to branch out into another area, like marketing strategy or planning.

Managers, take some time to invest in your digital marketers, give them a clear path to grow, and help them along that path.  You will have less turnover and be able to build on the collective expertise and experience of your digital marketers and waste less time and resources bringing new marketers into the fold.

You already know you’d benefit from having a mentor.  One of the easiest ways to find a mentor is to join your company’s formal mentoring program.  Ideally, you’d then be matched with someone with whom you can speak honestly about your career goals, and who will help you develop your career.  Unfortunately, these programs aren’t always perfect – you and your mentor may not click, or your company might not even have a formal mentoring program.  And even if you and your assigned mentor have cultivated a great relationship, you know that having some unofficial mentors would also help your career development.  So being able to identify possible mentors is key for career development, regardless of whether you already have a formal mentorship in place.

The first step in developing a strong, informal mentoring relationship is identifying a potential mentor.  As a marketer, your first inclination may be to look within your own small team within the larger Marketing organization.  But there are many benefits to going beyond your small team (and, in some cases, even beyond Marketing!) to find a mentor:

• You get a broader view of the organization – A mentor outside your team allows you to learn what other teams are doing, what their priorities are, and what challenges they face.  This grants you a deeper understanding of your organization, which can help you better know how your role fits in to the whole.
• You can be more honest – Depending on your organization’s culture, you might be hesitant to speak candidly with your boss (or anyone close to your boss) about your future career goals and plans.  With a mentor from a different team, you’ll have more freedom to discuss your goals frankly, and then learn how you can accomplish these goals within your organization.
• You can find new opportunities – The combination of understanding your organization more broadly and being candid about your career goals allows your mentor to connect you to new opportunities that would be a good fit.

In many organizations, Marketing’s role is expanding beyond traditional Marketing duties to cover more strategy, operations, sales, and IT.  Where to find a mentor depends on your individual career goals, the type of business you work for (e.g., a mentor in Sales might make less sense for a marketer at a CPG who is interested in becoming a brand manager; a mentor in Corporate Strategy might be more relevant for her), and your organization’s operations (e.g., if Marketing is, in fact, starting to partner with Strategy more, it’s wise to learn more strategy).

Once you’ve decided which department or team would house the best mentor for you, you need to start thinking about what qualities your ideal mentor would have.   A mentor should be three things:

• A role model – Your mentor should be a high-performer, and he should show that he has initiative and intellectual curiosity.  He should demonstrate “big picture” thinking, and understand the organization as a whole.  Above all, he should be ethical – you want to emulate those who get ahead using the morals you stand behind.
• An opportunity arranger – As someone senior to you who has been at the organization for a while, your mentor will have developed a strong internal network.  He should be willing to share this network with you, and willing to introduce you to co-workers who can also be in your mentor or peer network.  Your mentor should also know of company resources, like formal training sessions or learning lunches, that can help you improve your skills and advance your career.
• A development partner – You’re already getting feedback on your performance from your boss, but a mentor can provide broader career advice.  He can help you explore future career options, weigh further education options like business school, and act as a sounding board for your goals.  In addition, you can hear about your mentor’s career path, and learn from his experiences.

How have you picked the perfect mentor?  Share in the comment section below!