It appears to be good practice at webby conferences like last week’s Next08 in Hamburg to have keynote speakers share their views of the future and how all this 2.0-stuff will shape media, consumers, companies and brands and how all of these interact. Edelman’s Steve Rubel opened his files (also here in more detail) and Stowe Boyd talked about “Why The Next Web Matters“.
What struck me in this debate is the fact that all the industry luminaries tend to focus on the young, digital natives or “Generation Y”. These, I hear, are the future and embracing more interactive, more mobile, more social applications faster than you can spell Facebook. It’s them we should watch and listen to in order to know what these young “edgelings” (Boyd, speaking about everything on the Web being the “edge” of the web as there is no more hub or center) are up to. If we don’t we’ll only see the tail lights in no-time.
This is all good and important for communications pros when it comes to staying on top of things and adressing the young demographic with all the brands, toys, tools, food, fashion, mobiles and what not our companies or clients have on offer. But is it true for other demographics as well? I don’t think so.
I have the feeling that our grey-headed visionaries of the new Web tend to neglect that they are an absolute minority in the sea of older and much less connected people (not necessarily the same!) who don’t just jump on every new toy the Web offers to them. They might not even know this new tool exists (my father doesn’t get Twitter so far, but I’m trying!), nor are they willing to dedicate time and effort to learn all these new cool things – let alone strip bare in front of a crowd of strangers on a social network. This generation of web users is perfectly happy with a DSL 1.000 connection that helps them read news, order books, book their holiday travel and stay in touch with their friends and family by email. That’s all very Web 1.0, but – let’s not forget that – it’s real business too!
A couple of days after my original (German) post on this topic, Steve Rubel brought a study by Nortel Networks to his readers’ attention that talks about the “Hyperconnected“, the kinda folks Steve himself and maybe even me and you are, the wired guys of this world. It reveals on the flipside that there is still a huge proportion of the population that is NOT wired at all. This is – without limiting it to a certain age group – I called “Generation Why?”, the group of users – or offliners for that matter – that asks a simple question before engaging in new technologies and new ways of communication: “Why?” Why is this important to me? Why should I have email on my mobile phone? Why should I connect with people I barely know on a website that has too much clutter to be comprehensible to me in the first place?
“Because…” is not a sufficient answer, I’m afraid. As communications professionals we have to ask ourselves if we still choose the right weapons when going to battle. Do we really answer our target groups’ needs and questions? Martin Recke, one of the Next08 organisers, commented on my German post
“All correct. But for marketing and communications it’s really not important that all people use these many new, colourful tools. It suffices if the critical number of opinion leaders do. And this has been the case for a while now. The rest of the population will be adressed indirectly.” (translated)
I think Martin is still overly optimistic here. For me the big question is, who in which demographic or target group is the actual opinion leader? And do they use all the nice webby-social-media-things? For example, for less wired senior people like my parent’s its me, their connected son. But still they keep asking me the Why? question. But what about less connected people, regardless of age, who don’t have a wired son or daughter? They might even ask the other W-question: “WHAT the hell are you talking about?”
To cut a long story short, all I’m saying in this lengthy post is, us tech-oriented PR folks tend to overestimate the impact of new technologies on the lives of others, our target groups in day-to-day business. As long as you’re planning a highly verticalised campaign for a B2B audience or a consumer campaign for Generation Y, you’d be ill advised not to leverage the powers of the social web. But bear in mind that there’s probably more to your audience than those chosen few with their eyes on Facebook and Twitter and their hands on the iPhone touchscreen.
Some Context: I’ve written about this in German last Friday after Next08 conference I attended in Hamburg. I tried to add some perspective to the, in my view, over-euphoric discussion about Generation Y’ers taking over. The post got some attention among German bloggers and now Steve Rubel, who sparked my post with his presentation at Next08, adds some insight to it. So it was time to have my English readers share their views, too. Thanks for reading, it’s become much longer than I expected!
PS: You can see Steve’s and Stowe’s presentations on the Next08 site.
Martin Weigert hat sich aus dem fernen Stockholm zu einem der meistgelesenen und meines Erachtens auch qualitativ ansprechendsten Web/Tech-Blogger in Deutschland entwickelt. Sein Blog 
Jetzt zieht Martin mit dem Blog unter das Dach von Netzwertig.com, einem weiteren, sehr profilierten Tech-Blog von Andreas Göldi, Marcel Weiß und Markus Spath. Ich finde, das ist angesichts der