Thursday, July 02, 2009

Tweet Tweet: Kid's DON'T Twitter

The Hartman Group has published an article surrounding the misconceptions of teenage usage of technology. The article is on point and very true. Though not a teen myself (thank goodness!), coaching tweens and teens sports really gave me insight into their use of social networking.

Hartman Group discusses 5 misconceptions:
1. Teens and Millennials communicate with each other via Twitter.
2. Email plays an important role in the daily lives of teens and millennials.
3. Teens are engrossed with utilizing technology to transform their lives and create cool software tools.
4. Facebook is the new Myspace for teens.
5. We can impute important learnings about future behavior by studying attitudes and behaviors of teens and millennials in their interactions with technology.

These are all extremely true. Technology does not play as important of a role in teens/tweens (or "millennials" I guess) in the way people assume. While studying advertising in my final semesters of college, it felt like the professors always wanted "Social networking!" as an outlet to reach the target audience. As long as those two magic words were said, the student was off the hook. What my professors did not understand was the truth of the 5 misconceptions above. If only this article had been published a year ago... it would have made senior year so much easier!

Read the complete article and find out the truth behind these misconceptions: Kid's Don't Follow, Kid's Don't Twitter.

1 comment:

Emily said...

I LOVE this list! And totally agree... although I am not a teen myself, I am close enough (and have siblings) to know that this is very true. Older people (like professors, for instance) get caught up on social networking and although it is critical, there are misconceptions. The funniest part is watching people 40+ try to get with the times by joining Facebook and such. (And they get just as hooked if not more so!) How strange.
Thanks for commenting on my blog! It's nice to know someone is actually READING it out there! xo