Reaching Today’s Wired Teen

April 3rd, 2007 by Brooke

Mary Madden published a fascinating report for Pew Internet & American Life Project on “Social Media and Libraries.” What struck me the most is the portrait of today’s “wired” teen.

Consider the life of the teenager born in 1990 - the year that Tim Berners-Lee wrote the World Wide Web program and the PC was 15 years old:

- First Grade - Palm Pilot hit the market
- Fourth Grade - Sean Fanning created Napster
- Middle School - Wikipedia, iPods and Skype are introduced (can you imagine having Wikipedia in middle school?)
- High School - Podcasts, YouTube and MySpace arrive on the scene

Today’s teen grew up in a truly wired world, and they don’t know anything different. They get their information from many different non-traditional sources, and marketers must be comfortable with these channels to engage them in a relevant way. For example, the same report finds that more than half (55%) of online American youth ages 12-17 use online social networking sites. We’re talking to several clients right now about the right way to have a presence there.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 3rd, 2007 at 11:25 am and is filed under Marketing, Social Networking, Youth. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

One Response to “Reaching Today’s Wired Teen”

  1. Jon Says:
    April 3rd, 2007 at 4:22 pm

    It makes me old to think about all the things the kids of the today grow up with - us 30-somethings can remember their first computer. Heck - we thought Intellivision and Atari were the greatest video games system of all time. Scary to think about what our grandkids will have in their lifetimes.

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