Millennials, Snapchat and the Like button

My childhood was largely spent playing with Lego, toy cars, being a wannabe DJ plagiarising the charts and recording songs on my twin tape deck, I was also lucky enough to have one of the first SONY Discman portable CD players.  Portable it wasn't however with it jumping every few seconds in time with my steps. This really helped grow my love of music and was the conduit to building my now defunct collection of several hundred CDs.  My first CD was “Now that's what I call music 8”. Cameo’s “Word Up” and RUN DMC “Walk this way” were on that, track 3 and 4 from memory.  The social aspect was very different to today with the regular bike race up and down the alley on BMX bikes.  We had the best up-bringing, it even involved talking to friends face to face on a regular basis, crazy thought I know by today’s standards!

Today, things are very different. I have a daughter, Ellie, who has friends around the globe that share the same love of Australian and American boy bands (unfortunately...).  Networking with similarly minded individuals using communication applications make it easy and like it or not it is hugely powerful - powerful enough to create multiple billion dollar organisations almost overnight it seems. 

Today's physical and social world is also very different. The thought or your young daughter playing outside or riding a bike at what felt like warp speed just doesn't happen any longer, or is much rarer anyway.  I am pretty relaxed but I wouldn't think of letting my daughter do what I once did.

Of course I worry as a father as to the lack of outside play time and implications of exercise.  Whilst I can see that there are a lot of perceived negatives in this but then I consider what it must be to have such a vast network of friends.  Ellie’s friendship group is literally available constantly at any time of the day from different cultures, classes and often speak many languages too.  I see this as hugely powerful.

Having access to business networks and engagement with your customers is not so different. These kids are growing up or grown up already and have access to a wealth of mediums and tools that you may not even be aware of.  The expectation is far higher on technology and flexibility to access and consume data and services. This is the new breed of consumer and employee.  They are however very productive as a result of the embedded nature of an always on networked world.

I therefore suggest that the ability to expose your traditional, legacy applications and data and bring them to a younger new generation in an engaging way is essential to the sustainability of your business. It may be complex but it is absolutely necessary.

It is time to start to re-imagine your core business services and to embrace the now mature Cloud and Mobile technology trends to provide a far more engaging set of services that are engaging to this new demographic.  These being able to perform and be available anytime from anywhere in a secure way.  By doing so, you gain a huge untapped market and can now engage with your customers in a way that they want to today, in fact, that they now expect. 

This customer engagement and people perspective is often not so obvious to a generation of professionals that grew up with tape decks, vinyl or even 8 tracks (a slight aside, to test this, ask for a description of the benefit of a like button).  That said, I like to think that I understand technology and today’s technology trends however I still don't get Snapchat!