Social Media Now: Will the Me Generation Go Social?
Eons, Jeff Taylor’s social network for aging boomers, raised $22 million yesterday. The second round investment was led by Charles River Ventures joined by Intel and Humana–one of the company’s initial sponsors. Eons’ original investors, General Catalyst Partners and Sequoia Capital, participated as well.
For the traditional media business, boomers remain a cash cow. Aging boomers are the last record buyers standing, the final group to get its news from papers
and the most likely group to fill movie theaters as younger viewers turn to DVD. In other words boomers haven’t yet adapted to Web 1.0, never mind to social media. This is a generation that still reaches for yellow pages before it does Google. Boomers online represent either an enormous opportunity or an enormous black hole.
Will the “Me Generation” go social? For Eons that question represents the first hurdle. Will the generation whose media habits were formed by the heyday of network TV, change its behavior and begin doing the things social media
participants do: contribute, participate, and tag?
I haven’t seen any recent research comparing the online social behavior of boomers to that of their children, but I’d like to? (Can anybody post a link?)
I suspect that few boomers post pictures to Flickr, keep blogs, or tag links with del.icio.us. Partially that illustrates a technology gap. But more importantly it highlights the gulf that exists between the way boomers and their kids think
of personal messages.
Boomers send private messages in emails, maybe IMs. Private communication remains a one-to-one experience. Their kids use public Facebook walls for the most personal and individual of messages. The new generation gap revolves not around technology–boomers are comfortable with the Internet–but around message privacy. Their net native kids make public things that boomers would be aghast to share.
A company can sell boomers services that make them feel safe online (they have no idea when they’re getting a phishing e-mail). A company can facilitate access to information about heath, finance, travel. A company can even get boomers to feel comfortable with Web bulletin boards. But will boomers become fully engaged participants in a social network?
Some of them, I guess, which may be business enough for Eons and a health care company like Humana. But why do boomers need a social networking hub all their own? With the relaunch of Ning as just the highest profile
company to offer bespoke social networking and with the growing adoption of OpenID it feels like we’re moving away from the era of social networking hubs. After all, Internet industries aways develop from less open to more open.
These are the questions at the heart of yesterday’s $22 million bet.
Recent Comments