Is Baby Boomer any different?

When we talk about change in any form today most of the time we’ll also talk about the different ways how to manage change for different generation of the population. Especially, when we talk about change in relation to new technologies. We use classification like netgen, gen y, gen x, virtual aliens and baby boomers. Without much thought because of the perceived prevalent used we assume that the younger generation is the main primary users of new technology, especially internet technology, and the so called baby boomer the laggards. I also just jump into the bandwagon without much thinking about it forgetting relatively my own age. After being virtual resident for a while now I realized this is not true at all. In fact I am in virtual groups full of these baby boomers not only that, they are using social tools like Facebook, Linked, and Twitter as well. Amazingly most of them that I know have their own blogs that they update almost daily. So when I came across this new report from Forrester Research I was not surprise. It was reported that more than 60% of the baby boomers actual actively consume the social create content in 2008. Let me quote few paragraphs of the write-up of the report.

‘In 2007, the percentage of Boomers consuming social media was 46% for younger Boomers (ages 43 to 52) and 39% for older Boomers (ages 53 to 63). By 2008, those numbers increased to 67% and 62%, respectively.

The number of Boomers responding to content posted online, as opposed to just passively consuming it, is also going up. For example, the proportion of older Boomers responding to content doubled from 15% in 2007 to 34% in 2008. According to Forrester, this is now a percentage that's high enough to target this group with a social application.

Joining social networks is also becoming a widely popular among the younger Boomers. Today, almost one in four younger Boomers are active in social networks, up from 15% in 2007’

So I would not make any assumption on this again and be careful about simply ignoring them it all equation.