Entries Tagged 'Social Media' ↓

Boomers are an interesting lot - and there’s a hell of a lot of them. A good combination for employers, marketers, politicians, and web 2.0 startup companies looking to build vast piles of money from them, win their favor, or harness their expertise in the work place. There’s a post from yesterday on the New York Times titled “New Social Sites Cater to People of a Certain Age” and it’s a good read for anyone wanting to get a 50,000 foot view of newer social sites like eons, and multiply.

“…there are 78 million boomers — roughly three times the number of teenagers — and most of them are Internet users who learned computer skills in the workplace. Indeed, the number of Internet users who are older than 55 is roughly the same as those who are aged 18 to 34, according to Nielsen/NetRatings, a market research firm.” - sourced NYT

So what’s going on with online social networking tools in this crown jewel of market segments? In a word - lots.

“The older demographic has a bunch of interesting characteristics,” Mr. Kedrosky added, “not the least of which is that they hang around.” - Paul Kedrosky, a venture capitalist and author of the blog Infectious Greed

Said another way, online Boomers don’t suffer from shiny object syndrome (ohhhh, that’s pretty, let’s try that!) like younger generations are famous for. Even as an entrenched Gen X’er at 38 I no longer look at a BMW without having the accompanying thought that you give up a lot of hard earned cash (see: freedom) to drive around in a pretty car. I sure as hell didn’t do that when I was in my 20’s.  Web companies, employers, investors and venture capitalists are all seeing the direct benefits of catering to Boomers and for good reason.

There’s anecdotal evidence now with early web companies in the space that their instincts on Boomer’s stickiness is well founded.

“Peter Pezaris, president and chief executive of Multiply.com Inc., based in Boca Raton, Fla., said he believed that older customers were stickier than younger ones, but said the evidence so far was anecdotal. He said 96 percent of the company’s active users returned each month, a statistic that he said impressed the venture capitalists who considered investing in the site.” - Peter Pezaris CEO Multiply

In the job search engine space we have the boomer focused RetirementJobs.com, a niche Boomer version of CareerBuilder or Monster.  RetirementJobs.com published some interesting research last year that corroborates some of the news featured in the New York Times piece.

“RetirementJobs.com research shows that on top of experience, workers over 50 stay in jobs longer, waste less time at work, and relate better to companies’ older customer base. Employers are increasingly luring 50+ workers given that half the U.S. workforce of 130 million people is scheduled to retire, or take a retirement job, in the next 15 years.”

RetirementJobs.com polled their users and pulled out some interesting charactertistics.

Right at the top is flexibility and lifestyle integration. Freedom.  From looking at these numbers you’d have to conclude that Boomers no longer agree with their youthful battlecry so perfectly echoed in Kris Kristofferson’s Me and Bobby McGee - “Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.”

Like any other generation Boomers have their own unique needs and desires and they need their own kind of pad to hang out in online. I believe that the only thing holding them back from being just as addicted to social networking sites as our younger generations is a relevant hang out. Get relevant and people will get connected.

Technorati Tags: Boomers, Baby Boomers

Shannon and I have been microblogging for some time now on Twitter. Shannon is also addicted to Facebook and thanks to her I’ve also been known to show up there. Come be our friends and share our life, we need all the help we can get!

The point is that we’re always publishing - just not necessarily on exceler8ion.

We have lots of blogs as you might know and we even update them once in a while. Taken alone, they can be all together too quiet - aggregate them and you can see that we’re always online doing something.

That’s the point of a lifestream - you use RSS feeds to get everything into ONE portal page. ONE ring to rule them all. We’re using a hosted service called tumblr to publish our lifestreams and we’re both very happy with tumblr’s servic now that Shannon hacked tumblr to include comments.

Come along for the ride and start a lifestream of your own. It was our friend Ami Givertz who inspired me to get off my duff and create a lifestream. I was lamenting on a phone call with Ami that I often grew discouraged by the difficulty of keeping up with so many blogs and yet still wanted to have them be separate and distinct based on content focus and reader interest. So after I finished bitching Ami said that he felt the same way and had done something about it. You can always count on Ami to be an action oriented cheeky monkey!

You’ll find our last 8 posts from each of our lifestreams right here on the right rail of exceler8ion or you can go to Shannon’s directly by pinging shannonseery.com or aka thegeekmarketer or mine here on Julians.name. If you start your own tumblr then make sure to add Shannon and I as friends so we can keep track of each other.

I recommend tumblr because it’s super simple to use, not the slightest bit technical, you can use your own url (or not) and you can post ALL types of content, including text, video, pictures, and many more. It does all this with a very inviting interface that encourages you to post. Yes, and there’s the aforementioned ability to aggregate all your RSS feeds at the same time. If you’ve thought of blogging but haven’t because you don’t have the time then a tumblelog on tumblr could be just what the doctor ordered.

Technorati Tags: lifestream, lifestreaming, tumblr, tumblelog

River of Reputation

Blogs. Tumblr. Twitter. Vlogs. Google. FaceBook. Syndication. Jaiku. Pownce. YouTube. Myspace. User-Generated Content. Indigenous Content. Del.icio.us. Online Community…. Data streams flowing via RSS, ATOM and furiously converging to create a River of Reputation…. a River of Relevance.

I started playing with Slideroll yesterday and ended up creating this slide show regarding how Employer Brands are affected by ‘Rivers of Reputation’.

This is a work in progress meant to get across the concept of the decentralization of the Employer Brand via the flow of easily accessible information regarding your brand that is being generated by individuals everyday. Let me know your thoughts.

Hat tip to a twitter mention of a conversation between Scoble and Anil Dash. I was also influenced by Brian Solis’s post Lifestreams Channel Online Activity, Creating Rivers of Relevance, discussing data streams and one’s personal brand.

When asking employees why they like working for a company, one of the most common refrains is “because of the people, my co-workers, we are like a family”. Any recruitment advertising copywriter can attest to this and, after reading such feedback in the creative brief, will promptly roll their eyes and then try to find a new way to “spin” this age-old sentiment.

“Join Company X, and you not only get a great job, but you also gain a family”

Trite as it may be, employees are expressing a sentiment that is widespread and based in truth. The workplace is a community. A community made up of people that you often see more than your own family. There is an undeniable group cohesion that resembles “family” that the work company-employee work contract generates.

When making a career choice, candidates are searching for information about a potential employer and if they will spend time to look for it. Use your career site as a venue to publicly display your community of passionate employees. Lead the search results by authentically communicating your employer brand and providing a window into the “employee-experience” on your career web site. Openly illuminate your employee-experience by incorporating social features into your corporate career web site and encouraging employees to participate in online communities where your candidates are spending their time. Don’t fight the decentralization of your employer brand… *enable it*.

Controlling the flow of information to employees, customers, partners etc, used to be easy with newspapers, TV, radio, print, email, and the like. Today, your brand is being watched, augmented, and de-located. People are writing their own stories, thoughts, ideas, and developing new products and services using social media technologies. These simple technologies and services: Blogs, Wikis, Forums, Tagging, Podcasts, and RSS are connecting people and information in new ways, conversations, faster than you can say oh shit. (via Advancing Insights).

Companies try to hide what it is *really* like to work for them like they are a secret society that you get to have no real knowledge of until you are accepted and initiated. There is the reality of a group being its own worst enemy, and a need exists to balance the idealistic view that companies will suddenly open up and allow completely public free speech, with the freedom and open spirit needed to create a thriving online community.

Effectively communicating what your company’s community believes in, and what it is driven by, will determine the kinds of people you attract and keep. When it comes to communicating what the real employee experience is and helping to foster a public online community that potential candidates can explore when researching your company - do not put your head in the ground and fear your employee experience being public - embrace it and handle it with grace.

Watch the video.

Great creative, great concept, great content. Love it! But, where are the viral hooks for people to share the video? No email to a friend, no embed code for a blog, Facebook, or MySpace, no nada. WTF? From a social media perspective this is like calling a Quarter Pounder with Cheese a Royale with Cheese.

Shannon, thanks for showing this to me luv - it made my day!