Digital Natives Will Impact The Business Of Marketing… We Are Not Ready

I really enjoyed reading the article, ‘Digital Natives’ Will Drive Web 2.0 Into Your Business, from ExtremeNano.

The truth is I’m completely fascinated with Digital Natives. A Digital Native is simply someone who always had interactive Internet tools in their lives. You can sniff out a Digital Native in one easy step: do they have a conversation over SMS when the person they are texting is right next to them? I’m more of a Digital Immigrant.

“As these digital natives grow up, they’re moving into the work force, taking with them blogs, wikis, mashups, RSS feeds and other so-called Web 2.0 social networking tools that will enable them to collaborate more freely in an enterprise environment, said Gartner analyst Anthony Bradley.”

When I read that part of the article it crystallized for me. As Digital Marketers struggle to push through experimental marketing budgets to try out tactics like Podcasting and virtual worlds, new employees (Digital Natives) will be joining corporations and expecting these tools to be at their disposal. Just this week I was giving my IAB Canada – Interactive Advertising Bureau – Social Media Marketing Seminar in Toronto, and a select group from Government were telling me that the medical profession will have some hard times ahead of them because it is not as technologically advanced as some other industries. Young people are being “turned off” by the lack of technology when it comes to administration and communication amongst Doctors (this included some interesting insights about how few Doctors even engage in email, let alone leveraging online tools).

“While traditional Enterprise 1.0 tools were more rigid and siloed, Gartner analyst Tom Austin said Enterprise 2.0 technologies need to be ‘free form,’ or informal, messy and participatory, to make co-workers comfortable… Austin cited Google, which uses links to tie things together and predicts what will be most valuable, therefore extracting value from complexity while making it easy for users. ‘When we think about social structures, we’re not trying to control behaviors; we’re trying to facilitate emergent behaviors,’ Bradley said. ‘It’s scary, but it works.'”

I’m further wondering after reading this article if change in the Marketing landscape will now occur from within instead of from the outside and the lunatic fringe?

You can read the fascinating article over here: Extreme Nano – ‘Digital Natives’ Will Drive Web 2.0 Into Your Business.