The Generational Divide in Social

JiveWorld11 had a number of interesting speakers and round table discussions. One subject that came up in various forms was the generational divide with social. It seemed there were two main contexts within which this issue arose. One was that people at the conference in charge of their companies social marketing sometimes would say that their senior executives didn't understand it and therefore weren't as enthusiastic in supporting it as they'd like. The second context was if social marketing was actually reaching decision makers as they generally tend to be older.

The default assumption that a lot of people at the conference, and the population in general have was that older adults weren't as tech savvy as the younger generation. Being older myself,this seemed to be an unflattering stereotype. Then, in one of the roundtables, the head of social efforts of Cisco said that their CEO,so far as I know its John Chamber, initially wasn't very enthusiastic about the social efforts and tolerated them more then anything else.

Well it was hard for me to confront the stereotype and announce that actually I am tech savvy, I always thought I was, but I was confident that John Chambers is tech savvy.

Although I don't accept the stereotype I do accept that there is a generational divide in social. Why?

My new hypothesis, after thinking about this question for some time, is that the way my life is organized and that of other people my age is simply different then the lives of those that participate in the social cloud. For me I would have to change my whole routine, basically live like a fish out of water to engage in the social cloud. Contrary to the stereotype, people in my generation are actually tech savvy, they just have a different life style and work differently; actually better.