No longer can we expect, as business owners, that by sending out a single message to the masses that we are going to capture the attention of everyone. To be effective in our advertising and our branding, we’re going to have to look deeper and learn more about the various generations that are appearing on the human landscape if we are ever going to become effective communicators.
We now live amongst a diverse arrangement of new and different generations where change is happening by the second. And in order to be on the cutting edge of all things marketing, small business owners will need to be more and more aware of the changing demographics and learn how to best communicate with the ever growing field of different buyers who are joining the market place every single hour.
So let’s take a brief look at Generation Y. After the Generation X’s came the Generation Y’s. They were born between 1980 to 1994 inclusive.
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The Web Design industry is still an extremely random and fragmented industry – full of industry mavericks. And unfortunately, for the unsuspecting small business owner, they usually don’t find out that they’re dealing with one until they have paid all their money and been given a website that is not up to their expectations. Or they find themselves becoming the owner of a website that will actually turn potential clients away from their business rather than creating for them potential business opportunities.
One of the worst scenarios that I have noticed is when a small business owner discovers that their web designer has disappeared, even possibly with the ownership of their domain name, or that they are stuck with a design company that has a central Content Management System in place that makes for impossible transfer of a website to a new web host. And the list goes on and on.
Unfortunately for the small business owner, in the web design industry we have seen graphic designers, technicians, university students, school students and even the occasional brother-in-law dabbling in web design. At times this has caused grave problems for the uninitiated.
Hence the rise of the web design franchise model.
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Ben Shepherd of Talking Digital has recently reported that ‘Facebook has hit five million users in Australia. According to Nielsen Netview they hit 5.07 million users during the month of January.
These figures show Facebook is continuing to enjoy phenomenal growth in Australia – with over 300,000 new users in January alone. Users are returning over 12 times a month, spending over 3 hours a week on the site. Such engagement is astounding and would be seen as extremely positive to Facebook despite their mixed success in monetising the property.
To put this in perspective, according to Netview the average Internet user spends 15 hours online per month. Facebook users spend 3 hours. So the average Facebook user is spending 20% of their total Internet time on the site. It also means Facebook as a site has more users than the entire Yahoo!7 network, entire Fairfax Digital network, entire News Digital Media network, eBay, entire Bigpond/Sensis network, YouTube, Wikipedia and Fox Interactive Media.’ http://talkingdigital.wordpress.com/2009/02/17/facebook-tops-5m-users/
With that many people on Facebook – how do we make sure that as small business owners – that we project a professional image while using that media at all times?
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Caroline McCarthy, a CNET News staff writer wrote this week that ‘Every once in a while, you read something on Twitter that’s just pitch-perfect, despite (or maybe because of) the microblogging service’s 140-character limit. Today’s honour is bestowed upon numbers guru and “Web Analytics: An Hour A Day” author Avinash Kaushik, currently employed as Google’s analytics evangelist.
On Monday, he posted a total zinger, framing it as an ‘OH’, or overheard, indicating that he wasn’t the one who actually came up with the contents of the Twitter message (or “tweet”) but didn’t want to openly quote the person who actually said it. ‘Social media is like teen sex,’ Kaushik tweeted. ‘Everyone wants to do it. No one actually knows how. When finally done, there is surprise it’s not better.’
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You may have heard of the Baby Boomers, Generation X and Generation Y, but look out – for here comes Generation Z.
So who is Generation Z?
As reported by www.generationz.com.au – ‘Generation Z comprises of those born from 1995 to the end of 2009. They are the Generation Media and they are today’s emerging generation who resemble children of any era past, yet they personify the future.’
Social demographer Mark McCrindle has completed a study on Generation Z and says they are distinct from those that have come before them. He says, ‘They are the up-ageing generation that are expected to be more educated, more socially aware, technology savvy and generally more adult in many ways.’
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