Archive for November 17th, 2008
Older Boomers into Social Networks
Fellow tweeter Des Walsh alerted me to a post by Forrester’s Stephen Noble where their consumer technographics data is used as the basis of several reports. Stephen has extracted the Australian data and published it as another expensive Forrester report. However his post gives us a few of the surprising findings. The one which might be useful to me is:
Well, I was expecting use of social technologies to drop off with age. And it does drop off with age, but not uniformly. Some social activities — such as creating content or joining social networks — fall away dramatically. However, others are common in all age groups. In particular, 46% of online adults in the Older Boomers and Seniors cohort consume some form of social media, whether it’s watching other peoples’ videos, reading other peoples’ blogs, or looking at other people’s photos. For many marketers chasing this demographic, that’s an audience too large to ignore.
I am becoming involved in a wellness project looking at the effectiveness of social networks for distributing preventative healthcare information to older member so society. From the above finding it looks like social networks might work for getting the message out to the older boomers and seniors. Getting them to interact and then contribute looks like a harder task.
