Today's incoming college freshmen were only seven years old during the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001. While Millennials are old enough to remember a time when "money was no object" and the threat of war was limited to nightly spots on the news, this generation has been profoundly impacted by world events, and their personal values reflect the "new normal" we have all been experiencing for some time. Why does this matter to brand marketers? Our success in bonding with today's youth begins by understanding what motivates them at the deepest level.

Teens are natural marketers: they are extremely enthusiastic about the things they love, and they want to share the newest and coolest things in their life with their friends. This is why many teens often make up the lion's share of brands' "superfans" -- people who will aggressively share your message with their network of friends.

What can young people do to help their chances of getting a gig? And what should marketers and advertisers promoting open spots keep an eye out for? Here's a few pointers.

While enjoying a bit of sound, summer slumber the other night, I had an extraordinarily lucid dream that ended abruptly when my dream-self fell into a river. My heart was sent racing -- not due to a fear of drowning, but rather a fear that my iPhone had been in my pocket when I went under.

Many people develop long-term attachments to brands during their teens. As technology and social behaviors evolve, brands need to create new models to define themselves and find their cool factor. Every brand has the opportunity to do something cool as long as they remember that cool is not a cut-and-paste job.

The key to reaching today's American teen effectively is to reach them on multiple channels, marrying both their online and offline worlds. Clearly the importance of the brick-and-mortar experience still remains. But a strategic integration with mobile and social is a recipe for sales success.

If we empower our teens, recognize them, reward them and show them that you don't need to be a "celebrity" by being on a reality television show, but rather make a contribution to your real life, the world would grow better teens and thus a better world.

Even though teens played a key role in the rise in popularity of Napster, they are now helping to bridge the gap between the entertainment/music and technology industries.

Laura Deming is not your ordinary teen. At the tender age of 12, she began working in a biogerontology lab. At 14, she headed off to MIT for college. Today, at 17 years old, when most of her peers are only beginning to look at colleges, she's leaving MIT to join the inaugural class of Thiel Fellows -- a group of 20 teens hand-picked by The Thiel Foundation to pursue innovative scientific and technical projects, learn entrepreneurship, and begin building the technology companies of tomorrow.

Twitter has a big opportunity to grow its teen audience if it finds ways to make these new features relevant to their needs -- especially now that teens are starting to experience social media fatigue with other platforms that are becoming more complicated and less personal. For now we'll have to wait and see the new features are rolled out and what's coming next.