Image via CrunchBase
Young adults these days seem like they were born with an iPhone in one hand and a Web-surfing laptop in the other, constantly Facebooking and texting. Just idle time-wasters, or tech-savvy business resources? The Harvard Business blog’s post, Let Gen Y Teach You Tech, stands solidly on the latter side:
Once derided as sandboxes for Gen Y slackers, messaging and social networking sites are the new soapboxes, organizing centers, town halls and… an increasingly powerful news source….
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Gen Y (the 70 million-strong demographic dynamo born between 1979 and 1994) is a connected, tech-savvy tribe, comfortable with state-of-the-art communication technology…. 88% [of Baby Boomers] see the Ys as tech-savvy and 40% say they have already asked their younger co-workers to teach them about iTunes, text-messaging and social networks.Time Warner formalized this information exchange with an unusual version of a mentoring program in which the traditional roles of older mentor and younger mentee are reversed. The Digital Reverse Mentoring program [link added] matches college students from outside the company with senior executives for one-on-one meetings about Web 2.0 applications and the many emerging — and mutating — technologies changing the media industry.
- Image by Getty Images via @daylife
As you’ve probably seen, this has huge implications for the business world. Should your company get a fan page on Facebook? Will Twitter be a viable lead-generation system? What social networking sites will be flashes in the pan, and which will endure and/or change the face of the entire Internet? Bring aboard a smart kid from the younger generation to help with all these newfangled Web gadgets. Don’t just pawn it off on the intern, either; embrace all of this throughout your company.
I was born at the front end of Gen Y. Working and consulting now with older businesspeople daily, I can see the generational gap in tech-savviness. I’m also fascinated with the innovations of my contemporaries: companies such as Brandswag are building businesses entirely upon social media services, when the industry didn’t even exist a handful of years ago. Now it’s a wide-reaching revolution comparable to the advent of the first business websites. Hop on board to reap the benefits of this exciting medium — and make sure you take a Gen-Y’er along for the ride as an advisor.
