"You're about to be playing in an entirely new ballgame if you've been marketing exclusively to baby boomers – unless you have a timeless product or service," writes syndicated columnist Mildred Culp in a June 29 article, "Expand Your Marketing from Boomers to Gen Y."

The piece ran in the Dallas Morning News, among other papers, and Culp interviewed Social Technologies' futurist Andy Hines about how to connect with Millennials via their interest in environmentalism and sustainability, community, social responsibility (including humanitarian issues), and the Internet.

Appealing to those things is essential, said Andy Hines, a futurist in the Houston office of Social Technologies LLC. Mr. Hines said that Gen Y's questions are geared toward obtaining tangible results, such as "How do we make the community a better place, the environment safer? What do we do to translate into people getting more food?"

His advice to business leaders: "Bring in a Gen Y intern to mentor you."

For more information on what appeals to Millennials, read a study that Hines and his team at Social Techonologies conducted last year for MTV on the "Future of Youth Happiness: What makes 12-24-year-olds happy?" Or, view the entire presentation.

Color me old--though I get made fun of here at Social Technologies because I’m the youngest employee--but I was shocked to see this recent Pew Internet and American Life survey that shows Internet-speak is creeping into teens’ school assignments.

The survey revealed that in school assignments:

• 64% of teens have used “informal” chat-style writing
• 50% of teens don’t use proper capitalization and punctuation
• 38% use common Internet-speak abbreviations such as “LOL” and “OMG”
• 25% have used emoticons--yes, emoticons, those annoying symbols to denote mood :(
  

What?! In school assignments? These statistics do seem ridiculous. But, assuming they’re relatively accurate, imagine what the future of writing, grammar, and communication will be. What scares me is that the majority of my generation seem to find it acceptable to write "formally" in this manner. Will correct spelling and grammar vanish, replaced by LOLCat speak?

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I really noticed the potential for "old people" to invade what I thought should be my generation's domain of social networking this summer when my mom (prompted by a Newsweek piece on Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg) asked me if I use Facebook or MySpace. Without Newsweek, I doubt she'd even know what they were.

But the fact is a lot of adults are on Facebook and MySpace and increasingly want virtual contact with family members, creating some intergenerational clashes, as this MSNBC article discusses:

Nowhere are the technological turf wars more apparent than on social networking sites, such as MySpace and Facebook, which went from being student-oriented to allowing adults outside the college ranks to join.

Gary Rudman, a California-based youth market researcher, has heard the complaints. He regularly interviews young people who think it's ``creepy'' when an older person -- we're talking someone they know -- asks to join their social network as a ``friend.'' It means, among other things, that they can view each others' profiles and what they and their friends post.

``It would be like a 40-year-old attending the prom or a frat party,'' Rudman says. ``It just doesn't work.''

The social acceptability, or awkwardness, issue stems mostly from lack of clear etiquette guidelines on these sites (college students aren't immune: many people choose to "friend" everyone they've ever met). For instance, I didn't think it was awkward to friend my aunt after we discussed the different demographic appeal of Facebook and MySpace, but I would have thought it was really weird if she'd friended me out of the blue. I still try to limit our Facebook interaction to messaging, although she seems to be fairly active based on her profile and the number of wall posts.

It seems that navigating the frontiers of social networking will take some time and adjustment from both generations.  I may be Facebook friends with my aunt, who seems fairly adept online, but I won't be showing my mom how to set up a profile anytime soon.

Image: cambodia4kidsorg (Flickr) 

College students are constantly connected. Image: Nic McPhee (Flickr) I recently spoke with a reporter about how technology has changed the lives of college students over the past fifteen years. As a recent college grad, I knew about the present, but I needed something with which to compare my own experience, so I asked my Gen X and Baby Boomer colleagues. A lively email discussion ensued and it was interesting to see what my colleagues had to say:

• There was the obvious: as little as 15 years ago, mobile phones, Internet access, and laptops were rare, and therefore phenomena such as social networking sites, instant messaging services, and text messages—which college students today can't live without—didn’t exist.
• The more subtle: technology has changed the way information is conveyed and how relationships are formed and maintained. Back in the day, college students went to dining centers and the quad to make friends. It seems as though college students were a lot more friendly too; I can't imagine this happening on the campus of my alma mater, George Washington. Also, information about who was dating whom was spread through word of mouth, not text messages or Facebook.
• Tech was communal: When technologies were first developed (and much more expensive), they weren't individually owned, but shared: telephones, computers, printers, boom boxes, etc. were communally owned by students, or the university itself. Now a college student owns their own tech devices: mobile phones, laptops, iPods, etc., all of which make them more mobile and independent of those around them. In decades past, it seems like the lack of individual tech devices fostered a stronger sense of community.
• Nerds were nerds: And, for some, perhaps a bit of nostaligia for a time when everyone at college knew the pecking order: "Dorks were dorks. Now, they can be online celebrities and geniuses" (a quote from one of my 30-something colleagues).

So after this discussion, the question begs to be asked: what about the future?

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