Is Your Brand Ready For Digital Natives?

Written by Matthijs Roumen on May 23rd, 2009 | 2 comments

At Thursday the 14th of May I attented the CSN Conference in Amsterdam as a judge member of the CSN awards. At this conference, Urs Gasser gave a great talk about digital natives, the upcoming generation that was born with digital media. In this post I’d like to share the insights I gained from his talk.

Urs Gasser dedicated his entire talk to the upcoming generation, in his talk referred to as digital natives. I’d like to highlight some of his findings in this blogpost.

But what are the properties of this generation? According to Urs Gasser, there are some characterizations from this generation:

• Always online
• Multiple identities
• Sharing lots of personal information online
• Part of a culture where sharing is the standard
• Natural online content creators
• Highly co-operative online
• Natural multitaskers

The slides from Urs Gasser:

Mind the new generation
Make sure your brand keeps this generation in mind. A thing I already told the ViralBlog audience in the post on Five Essential Social Media Tips For Non-Profits. These kids are growing up with digital media. In the future, they wouldn’t know how to search for info except when it comes to Googling or searching it on Wikipedia. These kids have spend 20.000 hours online. The same amount a professional piano player has practiced playing the piano before becoming a professional.

Learn how to use their platforms
If your brand starts now with social media, it isn’t to late. Even Pope Benedict XVI is learning the power of social media in order to engage with the new generation. Brands should start with their social communication strategy as soon as possible, in order to keep up with the youth of today which might become their target group of tomorrow.

Share your opinion and leave your comment below. Subscribe to our rss feed, connect to Twitter, get and spread our Viral Friday widget or sign up for our monthly e-mail newsletter.

2 Comments

• lentebriesje says:

  May 23, 2009 at 23:33

  Sounds like nothing new. I like the talk of Don Tapscott about the net generation more.

  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qujFJuj1S6I

  And as being part of it, I can confirm the story he is telling. An other thing about the net generation is a lack of ready knowledge (parate kennis?) I think. Because they have always acces to google/wikipedia, it’s not longer necessary to have knowledge but necessary to find the knowledge when needed. That doesn’t mean they can’t pass tests, but they have a hard time answering who made the first step on the moon without acces to internet. It isn’t needed to know in day-to-day life so they don’t restrain it.

  I apologize for my dreadful english it isn’t my native language.

  Reply
• Matthijs Roumen says:

  May 24, 2009 at 14:35

  @lentebriesje: Thanks for the comment and the video link!

  You’re right about the fact that this phenomenon isn’t something new. It’s an ongoing trend that started several years ago. But its a fact that this trend is growing stronger and stronger. Not by the decades, maybe not even by the years, but there are differences noticeable by the months!

  Some marketeers take action upon it. But most still don’t. Thats why I felt the need to highlight it even more

  Reply