Yesterday I attended Jeff Pulver’s Social Media Jungle. With only a total of 50 people in attendance, SMJ08 quickly became the #1 trending topic on twitter. It was amazing to be in a room full of such influential people in our industry. Chris Brogan, Jeremy Epstein, Leslie Poston, Howard Greenstein, Dean Landsman, Jeffrey Sass, Nelly Yusupova, Brett Petersel, Oz Sultan, Steve Lubetkin, Jonathan Yarmis, Ben Grossman, Jamie Thompson, and Justin Oberman were the discussion leaders who talked about many different topics.
However one thing I noticed was that the term “Gen-Y” or “Millennials” came up a lot. This term of course refers to my generation, people who were born between 1982–2001. They are sometimes described as an “overachieving, over scheduled” generation. Many people will also sub-define this generation into the “MTV-generation” born from 1985-1990.
One of the reasons that these terms are used so much in social media is because of all the stats associated with this generation.
- 97% own a computer
- 97% have downloaded music and other media using peer-to-peer file sharing
- 94% own a cell phone
- 76% use instant messaging and social networking sites
- 75% of college students have a Facebook profile and most of them check it daily.
- 60% own some type of portable music and/or video device such as an iPod
- 49% regularly download music and other media using peer-to-peer file sharing
- 34% use websites as their primary source of news
- 28% author a blog and 44% read blogs
- 15% of IM users are logged on 24 hours a day/7 days a week
- 8% have confessed to having an online gaming addiction at some point in their life
While I am sure all of this is true, I feel that as an industry we really need to stop categorizing our users into stereotypes. I am not a big person on terms and studies so the idea of categorizing all people born from one year to another as having the same habits, behaviors, etc, really upset me. Of course this is my personal belief and I’m am sure someone can argue the other side just as well, but I for one am so tired of hearing the “don’t put up drunk pictures on facebook” speech. (we know already, we aren’t stupid…well some of us are)
When I first started making videos and blogging a lot of my friends seemed worried. “What happens when you want to find a job, your employers are going to see this!” I answered, “I SURE HOPE SO!” What I do online speaks for me, but it speaks in a good way! I know that I have managed my digital life well and in a way that will only work to my advantage when I am being interviewed for a job.
I think in social media we should try and consider everything on a user-to-user basis, while you might not think that someone who is 50 wants to twitter, they might! What surprised me the most about all the talk of Gen-Yers yesterday was that I know so few people my age who are anxious to try new digital tools. The masses are happy with facebook and myspace! (I have no idea why) But maybe we should start to figure out a new term for people who use the tools that we use, cause I don’t think it has anything to do with age!
Yesterday one of the presenters was saying how he always says he is the oldest guy in social media and then he made a joke about how he still remembers his CompuServe ID. HELLO….I STILL REMEMBER MY COMPUSERVE ID! I have been using the internet for just as long, heck I still remember DOS prompts! We need to stop talking about age and start talking about the level of the user! Age is just a number.
That’s just my 2 cents!