The New Digital Divide

OK, so there's still a digital divide between rich and poor. But there's clearly an additional digital divide emerging between old and young. And boy are magazines commenting on it. In the last few weeks there have been articles in both Business Week and Fortune discussing the generation of wired, wireless, iPoding, blogging, vlogging, texting, pixing and multi-tasking workers that will be coming soon to a place of employment near you.

The Fortune article paints a somewhat scary version of Generation Y -- a group of people who are "ambitious, demanding and question everything . . . when it comes to loyalty, the companies they work for are last on their list." As Bruce Tulgan of RainmakerThinking puts it "[t]his is the most high-maintenance workforce in the history of the world."

According to Tuglan, the good news is that it will also be a highly productive workforce -- but only for those entities that can demonstrate why a 20-something with a million options (and a million great ideas) should commit to their organization. And that won't be easy, considering the fact that many of these organizations are led by people that are scared of blogs, have no idea what user generated content is, and have never been on a social network to save their life.

In many ways, the Business Week article paints an even scarier picture -- not of the members of this Generation, but of our inability to interact with them. Marketing and branding campaigns have become "leaps of faith" because the industry lacks the ability to measure what REALLY captures the fickle attention of the young, digital elite. As noted in the article "addressing this vast market of globally dispersed young people will force companies to become new kinds of multinations -- plugged into the digital grid and quick to respond to shifts in demand that begin as tremors halfway around the world."

Is your organization ready to identify new trends that begin as "tremors" halfway around the world? You're not alone. But we all better figure out how to get ready -- and fast!