I have had a bad days on Twitter.

First, I tweeted way too often – nearly 50 posts, a record. This is a clear sign that I was either working on an article or speech or avoiding working on an article or speech or both. The answer is the latter. I actually lost followers yesterday and my blog traffic was pretty low.  I apologize to those of you who stuck with me. It was an instructive experiment.

Second of all, I learned how far I have come in my thinking about Millennials.  I am actually embarrassed by some of my earliest posts and especially by an article I wrote about Millennials for Advertising Age, “Millennials: Clued In or Clueless: The Ten Things Millennials Don’t Know About Marketing”. By my more enlightened standards three years later, it was condescending and negative. My  defense is that three years ago there wasn’t much research or writing about Millennials, in fact I had barely heard the term.  Several of my Twitter followers called me out on it and they were right.

Even today after hundreds of research reports and blog posts by marketers, HR folks, educators and parents, it remains a tricky business to write or speak about Millennials.

I have given several speeches over the past few years and am in the process of writing a few more.  I always agonize, am I too general? Too specific? How to condense such a complex and fascinating cohort into 20 minutes or even an hour. Or as another speaker I know, 6 minutes? The Millennials in the audience are generally complimentary, but what are they really thinking?

Here’s my advice to those of you who will find yourselves trying to describe this group for the purposes of illuminating them to another.

• Stick to the positive. There’s so much good to say, why dwell on the negative? They may even turn out to be positives in the end. It’s all a matter of perspective.
• Use their words.  There’s a lot of great material out there to draw on. Start with TheNextGreatGeneration blog, it’s a great resource.
• Focus on one aspect: Painting a portrait of an entire generation is just too hard to do in a few brushstrokes. Know what point you want to make, make it and get out.
• Avoid talking about it 3 years later. The world will have changed.

I’ll be pretty silent on Twitter today.  I have speeches to write.