To kick off Global Entrepreneurship Week, I spent the morning at the New York Stock Exchange at an event called “Mentoring Madness,” sponsored by NYSE Euronext and the Kauffman Foundation. A roomful of eager, aspiring college entrepreneurs soaked up advice from a panel of inspiring veterans, including Blake Mycoskie, founder of TOMS Shoes, Barry Sternlicht, chairman of Starwood Hotels and Resorts Worldwide, Stephen Hanson, founder of B.R. Guest Restaurants, and rapper/entrepreneur Snoop Dogg (no wonder every seat was filled!). CNBC’s Maria Bartiromo interviewed the group and extracted some pearls of wisdom, relevant to all entrepreneurs, young and not so young alike:

1. Some Rules Are Not Meant To Be Broken. Blake Mycoskie talked about how thrilled he was when Nordstrom’s first started carrying TOMS Shoes. He stubbornly refused the retail giant’s request for the shoes to be packaged in traditional shoeboxes rather than the environmentally friendly canvas bags that Mycoskie was so proud of. Nordstrom relented, but the bags were a stockroom disaster: they couldn’t be properly stacked, their drawstrings became tangled, and they caused frustration among the sales staff. The result: “We got kicked out of Nordstrom and it almost put us out of business,” Mycoskie says. “Now we put our shoes in boxes.” Lesson: choose your battles wisely; compromise isn't a dirty word.

2. Admit That You Don’t Know It All. Stephen Hanson grew his restaurant empire from one location in New York (Coconut Grill) to 15 locations in three cities. But he didn’t do it alone. Hanson relied heavily on experienced mentors in the industry. “I used to pick up Michael Weinstein every day at his home and drive him to work so that I could talk to him about the restaurant business,” says Hanson. Weinstein is the founder and CEO of Ark Restaurants, which owns and operates fifty food-related businesses. Hanson’s advice: seek out successful people who you admire and respect and don’t be shy about asking for their advice.

3. Customer Research Is Overrated. According to Barry Sternlicht, when hotel guests were asked to name the ten most important factors to consider when choosing a hotel, bed comfort didn’t show up on the list. “But when we asked them how much extra they would pay for a great bed, the answer was $20 a night,” he said. And so began Starwood’s successful campaign to differentiate itself to consumers through the quality of its beds. “Sometimes people don’t know what they want until you offer it to them,” says Sternlicht. He also offered the audience my favorite piece of advice of the morning: “People lose their fortunes when they lose their humility.” Hear that, Wall Street?

4. “It Ain’t Nothin’ Y’all Can’t Do.” Those are direct words of encouragement from Snoop Dogg, who made my day when I got a great profile shot of him on my iPhone on the floor of the NYSE right after the opening bell. You can see it here. Snoop’s advice: be original and creative and don’t let lack of money discourage you. “I had to hustle from the ground up. I had no money, so I went to DJs and to parties until I met Dr. Dre,” he says. And learn from failure, he adds, because “it teaches you what you shouldn’t do.” What did he learn? “I didn’t understand when I first started out that I had to be a role model. I brought everyone up with me – the homies from the neighborhood and the criminals. But then I realized I had to change my whole environment.” Now, he says, his most important project is The Snoop Youth Football League, which he founded to help keep inner city youth off the street. “It teaches them how to win,” he says, “and how to lose.” Biggest surprise about Snoop: he took calculus because “if you stop at general math, you’re only going to make a general math salary.”

So what's your advice to aspiring young entrepreneurs? What do you know now that you wish someone had told you when you were first starting your business?

When I talk about my new book, Upstarts: How GenY Entrepreneurs are Rocking the World of Business, which is out next month, people tend to assume that the bulk of the companies I cover are in the tech industry. And while it’s true that I do profile many awesome companies in that space (like Loopt, Xobni, Mint.com, Aviary, Quirky, and many more), I’ve got to confess that I’m always a little more drawn to companies that have become wildly successful in industries that are a bit more mundane. That was the idea behind my first book, Alpha Dogs, which showcased eight amazing businesses in relatively ordinary industries.

So in Upstarts, I continued to seek out those kinds of companies. Among them is College Hunks Hauling Junk, which made an impressive debut on our Inc. 500 list this year at #156. You don’t get much more low-tech than this – basically, these guys make a living hauling the junk in your basement to the dump. I’ve been talking to co-founders Omar Soliman and Nick Friedman for a couple of years now and have had the pleasure of watching College Hunks grow into a multi-million dollar franchise operation. It didn’t happen by accident. Here’s what I think are the biggest factors in their success:

1. They entered a fragmented industry with a low barrier to entry but differentiated themselves through branding and top-notch service. Hunks are clean cut, wear khakis and collared shirts and drive snappy new trucks. And they know that their real business isn’t just hauling junk, but making their customers’ lives tidier and more organized. They professionalized and classed-up what we typically think of as a “dirty” business.

2. They looked to an existing successful business – Vancouver-based 1-800- Junk – for guidance and ideas. There’s no shame in taking a peak at someone else’s playbook and adopting their best practices!

3. They put a green spin on their operation by pledging to recycle approximately 60% of the items they collect. They also donate a percentage of revenues to College Bound, college scholarship and mentorship program. That kind of commitment to social causes means more and more to customers these days.

4. When they decided to expand their original Washington, DC operation to include franchisees, they didn’t waste time hiring someone who knew the ins and outs franchising – industry veteran George Palmer. Kudos to Friedman and Soliman for knowing what they didn’t know.

5. Even though this isn't a tech company per se, Soliman and Friedman have made significant investments in information systems that help the business run smoothly as it grows. Lesson: every company needs to be a tech company at some level.

Both Friedman and Soliman will be joining me at a special program for young entrepreneurs at this year’s Inc. 500/5000 conference in Washington, D.C. The good news is that whether or not you made the list, you can join us, too. If you’re under the age of 32 and would like to attend, drop me a line at donna@donnafenn.com for more information, but keep in mind that seating is limited. See you there!

Now that unemployment is at 8.5% and no one is really talking about a labor shortage any longer, can you forget all that nonsense about how you need to pay special attention to training, motivating, and engaging your Generation Y employees? They ought to be happy just to have a job, right? Not so fast, says Bruce Tulgan, author of Not Everyone Gets a Trophy (Jossey-Bass, March 2009). “The downturn in the economy will cause them to keep quiet for a while,” says Tulgan, “but by and large the essential equation remains the same. This generation is being shaped by a lot of forces that cause them to arrive in the workplace with thoughts, words, and actions that are out of sync with the needs of their employers.” Among those forces: over-indulgent parents; growing distrust of corporations; increasing integration of work and non-work time.

Believe it or not, Tulgan (like me) is a big fan of GenY. With their confidence, energy, and enthusiasm, they’re likely to be "the most high performing workforce in history,” he says. “But I have no doubt that they’re also the most high maintenance workforce in history.” Knowing how to manage them is to your great advantage. So I asked Tulgan how employers should deal with three common complaints about GenY employees.

1. “They don’t show up on time.” You’ve got to spell out your expectations clearly, says Tulgan. But at the same time, ask yourself if there’s really a business reason for, say, a 9 am start time. Does the employee need to open a store or answer the phone? If coming in late is a deal-breaker, say so. If it’s not, consider making the accommodation but, says Tulgan, “make the quid pro quo explicit,” (i.e. they’ll work later, take a shorter lunch, etc.).

2. “They want to change everything on day one.” GenY employees want to know how your company works and why it works that way. Right now, please. “The conventional wisdom is ‘stick around a while and get a feel for the place; no one’s going to take you seriously until you’ve been a while,’” says Tulgan. But what GenY needs, he says, is “a high-intensity orientation” right off the bat – something that gives them organizational context and a gut-level understanding of their role, its relationship to the company’s mission, and who all the players are.

3. “They don’t know how to manage themselves.” Here, says Tulgan, you might need to do some remedial work. GenY often comes to work with knowledge and impressive technical skills, but falls short when it comes to managing the day to day work flow. Teach them how to make lists, set priorities, live by a schedule, and set long-term goals. “They want you to set them up for success,” says Tulgan. “Then, they will dazzle you.”

Footnote: If you really want to understand how GenY employees view themselves in the larger context of the workplace, take a look at Dan Schawbel’s new book, Me 2.0: Build a Powerful Brand to Achieve Career Success (Kaplan, March 2009). Schawbel is the “personal branding” voice of his generation, and his advice to his peers will give you insight into how to make your own company more GenY friendly.

Jake Kloberdanz, the 25-year-old CEO of Hope Wine, doesn’t think the holidays are a particularly great time to engage in cause branding. For Kloberdanz and his team of seven GenY partners, cause branding is a 24/7, 365-day proposition: the Newport Beach, California company gives away half its profits to charitable organizations associated with breast cancer, autism, AIDS, serving the families of fallen troops, and green causes. “We’re the perfect balance between hard core capitalism and democratic socialism,” says Kloberdanz. (BTW, Kloberdanz incorporated Hope Wine long before President-elect Obama gave the word new meaning, but what a happy coincidence, eh?)

It’s not at all unusual for GenY entrepreneurs to embrace social missions when they start their companies, but Hope Wine takes the practice to an extreme. Can a start-up that gives so much away really hope to become a sustainable company in this economy? Kloberdanz thinks so. He and his seven pals were working for Gallo when Kloberdanz got the idea for Hope back in 2005. He was stocking grocery shelves with wine eight hours a day and noticed that consumer products with cause branding campaigns were given premium shelf space and enjoyed tremendous sell-though. Charities benefited and companies sold more products, he reasoned, so why limit cause branding to a time-sensitive campaign? Why not create a “cause brand”? It worked for Paul Newman, after all.

Hope Wine, which is blended and bottled at Sonoma Wine Co., made its debut on store shelves in June of 2007; each of the five varietals is labeled with a circle ribbon that tells consumers what cause they’re supporting with their purchase. This year, the company did $1 million in sales, gave away $150,000 in cash and in-kind donations to 20 not-for-profit organizations, and donated 3,400 volunteer hours at 200 charity events. At this point, Hope is “giving away our profit margin”, but Kloberdanz says the company will be in the black in 2009. He’s hired an executive from a major spirit company, and is negotiating with a big distributor to take the brand national (it’s now sold in ten states and on the company’s website).

I’m wondering if a tough economy actually increases the appeal of cause branding to consumers. They may not be able to write a big check to charities, but they can still feel good about contributing a little something through their everyday purchases. What do you think? Are you more likely to buy goods and services associated with a good cause? Does your company engage in cause branding and, if so, has it had a positive impact on sales, your company culture, your brand image?

I’ve been interviewing young entrepreneurs for almost two years now and one of the re-emerging themes in the businesses they start is dissatisfaction with the status quo. Sure, that’s pretty much true for all entrepreneurs, but this generation of upstarts has its own way of looking at existing products and services and judging them not quite up to snuff for their own needs. Their response: I can do better. The result: businesses like Mint.com, Unigo, and Ignighter.

Mint.com, which was featured on our Inc.com 30 Under 30 Coolest Entrepreneurs list, and in our magazine feature, Cool, Determined and Under 30, was started by Aaron Patzer, who was frustrated with personal finance software like Quicken and Microsoft Money. They were “tedious and boring and failed my basic needs,” he says. For instance, they took too long to set up and didn’t categorize his expense accurately enough. So he built something more to his own liking. Mint.com is an online personal finance tool that tells you exactly how you’re spending your money, how you can save, when your credit card payment is due, and when your bank balance is low. Sounds like mom, but without the nagging. Mint.com now has 600,000 registered users and half of them are under age 30.

Unigo is a website that contains free student-generated information on over 300 colleges and universities. It’s CEO Jordan Goldman’s response to what he believes is the failure of traditional publishing companies to adequately serve the needs of prospective college students. The big guides put out by Fiske and Princeton Review have a few pages on each college and are typically light on substantive student comment. “We’re not interested in white-washing the college experience,” says Goldman. “If part of going to a particular college is going to keggers every week, it’s better that you know that ahead of time.” Amen to that. The company launched last September with 15,000 student comments, pictures and videos. In its first week, it racked up 1.5 million page views and Goldman had a long list of potential advertisers knocking at his door.

Ignighter.com is a GenY spin on Match.com. Co-founded by Adam Sachs, Dan Osit, Kevin Owocki, the site allows young singles to register in groups and arrange group dates with other groups. Did you get that the key word here is “group"? “We had friends who were beginning to explore the online dating world and they’d come back to us with horror stories,” says Sachs. “So we thought, this wouldn’t be so awkward if you could just be with your friends and still be able to meet new people.” The founders spent the summer in Boulder at a highly selective incubator/mentoring/funding program called TechStars, where they refined their website, which now has 6,000 registered groups world-wide.

By the way, all of these companies are either venture or angel-backed, so the founders aren’t the only ones who think they’re on to something by starting companies that specifically serve the needs of their generation. Do you know of other start-up companies like this, or do you have examples of established companies that are tweaking their products or services to entice GenY consumers?

I read a blog post by Chris Brogan this morning that I think everyone using social media for business should take to heart. Here’s part of the post:

“Twitter isn’t amazing. The ability to connect to many voices in a collaborative way is amazing. Facebook isn’t the future. Having mutual social environments that permit deeper understanding of each other’s interest is the future. It’s important that we learn how to talk in terms of benefits and not the features.”

The simple message here is “it’s not just the medium, stupid, it’s the message.” And that’s exactly were Johnson & Johnson went horribly wrong last week. The company launched a viral advertising campaign for Motrin targeted to new moms who may experience neck and back pain from carrying their babies in slings (you can check it out here). Sounds innocent enough, eh? But the video that J &J produced and posted on You Tube incited an online mommy revolt ("Motringate") because of its flip tone and language: “wearing your baby seems to be in fashion”; “supposedly it’s a real bonding experience”; “it totally makes me look like an official mom.” Social media moms went crazy with blog posts and Twitter tweets; some were out for blood and called for a boycott of Motrin. To its credit, J &J/Motrin axed the campaign and apologized on its website.

So what happened here? I asked a few GenY entrepreneurs in the mom space to weigh in. “A perfect example of a company getting it all wrong,” said Bunmi Zalob, who writes a blog called One Crazy Mother. “The ad is SO annoying. All they had to do was show it to one focus group of a broad cross-section of moms.” Rachel Herrscher, the CEO of Today’s Mama, which publishes city guides for moms, says, “in my opinion the danger for large companies targeting this particular demographic online is that they have to be absolutely genuine. They are better off getting a grass roots marketing panel of moms and mom bloggers to weigh in on campaigns like this. But they definitely need the most "plugged in" moms to voice their opinion because they are the ones who can and will make the most noise.”

It’s pretty clear to me that J&J got so caught up in what it thought was a clever use of social media that it forgot the first commandment of successful marketing: know your audience. Social media corollary: reach out to the handful of individuals within that audience who will certainly scrutinize your message and who, by their very nature, will pass judgment quickly and loudly. That’s particularly important with GenY consumers, who won’t tolerate companies that make assumptions about who they are, and then throw an inauthentic message back at them via an advertising/marketing campaign. J & J learned that the hard way. What lessons have you learned about using social media for marketing?

Last week, Brett Jackson, the 22-year-old CEO of a Boulder, CO company called Generation Think Tank, got a call out of the blue from an organization called Protect Colorado’s Future. Would he be interested in a five-day, get out the vote project to convince young Coloradans to vote no on three business and labor-related amendments? The concern was that young people would go to the polls to cast their votes for the next president, but would ignore the amendments. A “hefty” fee was proffered, says Jackson, whose company specializes in non-traditional marketing and advertising. He singed on and got to work immediately, GenY style.

“We did four things,” says Jackson. “We had a Facebook strategy which allowed people to update their status to say ‘vote no on amendments 47, 49, and 54’; we had a Twitter strategy; we had street teams handing out fliers on twelve college campuses in Colorado; and we dressed up on Halloween as politicians carrying picket signs that said ‘Vote No on Amendments 47, 49, and 54.’ We had pictures taken of us with people dressed up as nurses, police officers and firefighters. The idea was that people would share them online and tag them.” Jackson, who is now tempted to start a political consulting practice, reports that Protect Colorado's Future saw an exponential increase in web traffic over the past few days. Will that translate into votes? We'll know tomorrow.

The strategy wasn’t just about delivering a message using social media, says Jackson. “It was about shaping the message and then letting other people determine how they wanted to talk about it. Then it’s their message and it tends to have a stronger impact on their friends than if it were delivered by some politician in Washington,” he says. It’s a strategy I’m betting we’ll see a lot more of -- from politicians, special interest groups, and businesses large and small.

Just a few days ago, those of us who attended the Inc. 500/5000 Conference heard the late Paul Newman’s long-time friend and business partner, A.E. Hotchner, tell the story of how Newman’s Own got started. I’ve heard it often enough, but it never fails to move me and to evoke vivid images: Newman stirring a vat of salad dressing with a canoe paddle in his garage; Newman rejecting the advice of traditional marketers who told him he’d need to spend a boat-load of money on market research and opting instead to simply test his salad dressing on his pals; Newman ignoring the warning that celebrity foods almost always fail; Newman balking at the idea of putting his picture on the packaging and agreeing to do so only after Hotchner agreed that they’d give away every dime of profit. (Hotchner capitulated, assuming that the venture would never make money.) The company’s success is now the stuff of entrepreneurial legends and there are lessons here for all business owners, young and not-so-young alike:

Branding: A striking package may make an initial splash in the marketplace but what drives sustained success is a quality product. Newman never compromised; he used fresh and natural ingredients long before it was fashionable. So yes, we all loved Newman’s picture on the bottle, but we loved the dressing even more.

Innovation: It pays to challenge the status quo. Newman and Hotchner made pasta sauce with chunks of vegetables and meat back when sauce that you could pour through a sieve was the industry standard. They followed their gut instincts (and their taste buds) and created a new industry standard. Newman also started an organic division, Newman’s Own Organics, at the urging of his daughter, Nell, who runs the company.

Social Mission: All things being equal, most consumers will choose to do business with a company that has an authentic social mission. Newman’s Own gives away all its profits ($250 million so far), most notably to Hole in Wall Camps which Newman founded to give children with serious and terminal medical conditions a free summer camp experience. Who wouldn’t want to be part of such a noble cause?

I’ve been wowed over the past few months at the number of young entrepreneurs I’ve
interviewed who seem to know and apply these lessons intuitively. That’s no accident. They know what they know partly because of the high profile entrepreneurs like who came before them, and whose stories have consciously or subconsciously impacted the way they think about business. And for me, that entrepreneurial inspiration is the most important part of Newman’s legacy.

How do you motivate, engage, and inspire young employees? If you are public relations firm Porter Novelli, you give them their own division and set them loose. Last summer, the firm created a “pop up” agency called Jack & Bill (named after the firm's founders, Jack Porter and Bill Novelli) and staffed it with eight young employees. “We have an agency filled with millennials, with a need to feel empowered,” Porter Novelli managing partner Lisa Rosenberg told Stuart Elliott of The New York Times, who wrote about Jack & Bill in his Advertising column today. You can read the full story here. The Gen Y PR execs had their own micro site, a blog, a Facebook page, and a YouTube channel that chronicled Jack & Bill’s “casting call” for fledgling fashion industry clients, five of whom would get free PR services for several weeks leading up to Fashion Week, which was held in Manhattan last week.

A bit gimmicky? Well, sure. This is a PR firm we’re talking about after all. But it also seems to me that it was a potentially brilliant strategy to not only give young employees responsibility and freedom, but to showcase for Porter Novelli’s more traditional clients exactly how those employees use tools such as blogging, micro blogging, viral video creation and social network branding to create PR buzz. It made me wonder if other companies out there have found creative ways to tap into the new skill sets of young talent and to use those skills to land new clients or enter new markets. If so, let's hear about it.

In last Sunday’s New York Times Magazine, Clive Thompson wrote a really interesting story called “I’m So Totally, Digitally Close To You”, which explores the impact that social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter have on the number and quality of relationships that humans can possibly manage.

Thompson cites research by anthropologist Robin Dunbar, who studied social bonding in humans and apes and came to the conclusion that both species can handle a finite number of relationships: for apes, the number was 55; for humans, it was 150. Thompson wondered if Facebook and Twitter could actually increase the so-called “Dunbar number” (for humans, not apes!). Take a casual look at any young person’s Facebook page and the answer is obvious. Or is it?

Thompson suggests that the social networking sites really don’t increase the number of people with whom we’re authentically intimate, although they may make those relationships richer. The real impact of Facebook, Twitter, and the like, he says, is that they vastly increase our number of “weak ties” – casual acquaintances, friends of friends, people we meet at business events, etc. – and that, moreover, it’s these weak ties that are more effective in helping us solve problems (in my case, like finding a source for a story, teaching my Border Collie how to catch a Frisbee, or giving me a heads up on the new Sarah Palin action figure).

So I’m wondering how many people out there have found that the contacts they’ve made on social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, and even LinkedIn, have helped solve business problems. Have you leveraged these sites to help you grow your business, or are they simply entertaining distractions?