Luddites? Come on!
I was in a pretty good mood this morning when I popped onto TweetDeck to check the tag cloud and see what’s going on in the world… Today, Baby Boomers are booming. Curious, I found that Forrester has just released a report called How to Reach Baby Boomers with Social Technologies (hint: make it REALLY simple…) In which Jeremiah Owyang’s Abstract reads:
“Baby Boomers aren’t technology Luddites; in fact, more than 60% of them consume socially created content. You’ll also find Boomers leaving their opinions on Web sites and even joining social networks.”
Over on Read Write Web, Sara Perez wrote:
“The best bets for getting Boomers interested in your content is to create blogs or videos that relate to the life or work-style of Boomers, Forrester suggests. And if you’re looking for feedback and contributions from the Boomers themselves - like comments or criticisms - make that process dead simple. Don’t introduce overly complex sign up forms or processes. Instead, encourage low-effort contributions such as star ratings.”
Wow. I’ll tell you my dead simple response to that. And it’s a pretty low-effort sign that’s so universally recognizable, even kids get it:
Imagine my hand in a sort of fist at about shoulder length. Three of my four fingers aren’t visible…
Perhaps instead of stars you are suggesting they use digits then? Rate this content from 0 - 1.
Couldn’t agree more
Boomers - like everyone else - will be bored by what’s boring.
Reach them with juicy questions, explore what they care about, they’ll be ingenious in their responses
@stuart - hilarious. that’s really SIMPLE, too!
@marsha - no kidding. pandering to the lowest common denominator never worked with me.
I’m not sure simplicity is a prerequisite only for baby boomers, but I guess that’s a conversation for another day…or enticing them with what’s important to them is any different than you’d expect to do for any customer centric marketing effort…
There’s another interesting report just issued by Razorfish and CafeMom entitled: Digital Moms that may shed additional light if trying to reach this group.
Two things I found interesting about baby boomers:
1) they use social media in very different ways depending on who they are communicating with e.g. friends vs spouses vs children etc
2) much of baby boomers usage (at least for babyboomer moms) is influenced by their desire to keep up with their children’s use of social media, gaming, web2.0 –and further out of need to want to ‘monitor’ activities (”Of Moms with children 12 or older, about half (47%) are monitoring their child’s behavior”… )
…so what does that tell you? KISS and help them spy and they’ll love you?
BTW: If you want to read through the full digital mom study and blog http://blog.advancemarketworx.com/wwwblogadvancemarktworxcom/bid/8014/Marketing-to-Moms-Read-the-Digital-Mom-report