Monday, March 23, 2009

Boomers and Social Media (Yawn…)



If you are bored of reading about Boomers and social media then skip this post and spend a few more minutes of the day worrying about the recession.

At the beginning of March I wrote that Forrester (the much acclaimed research company) had discovered that not all Boomers were luddites. A fact that appeared to surprise the report’s author.

After publishing the blog I thought that maybe I was being a bit hard on the guy. The thought passed, sooner than it should.

The above shows the analysis that caused the realisation that technology and Boomers might get on better than a herd of AIG executives with a bunch of drunken rednecks. Actually, the charts are very interesting and are taken from the report author’s blog.

The comments that appeared on his blog, about the the analysis, reassured me that I am not alone in my views. Here is a sample:
My perception is that your perception is limited……

This week I have had a number of incidents in which I bumped into a very frustrating assumption about baby boomers and their lack of use/understanding/curiosity and very professional use of social media…..

To assume that my peers are by-in-large clueless ignores the fact that my generation invented all this stuff and we’ve been embracing it all along….

We noted 18 months ago that the usage of social media was not just The Yoof and are bemused that all the marketeering was aimed at the young, of whom there are fewer with less money, than on the baby boomers who are both numerous ….

And so on and so on… Dick Stroud

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Dick, what have I been doing missing so much good stuff on your blog.

You know what I wish, I wish someone with some common sense and an interest in people, society and how human interactions work and how and what we need from each other and how technology might help, and challenge, those things ... would do some research.

Social media and adoption of it, by people of any age, will be driven in the first instance by their needs and desires as human beings. And their familiarity and comfort with the medium or vehicle second.

Evidence on Does Not Compute blog on http://digitalunite.com