The Medium is Young; the Participants are Not

Picking up from my teenage parent analogy, the communication mode is valid -- the sometimes angry talking back through message boards, blogs and direct emails -- but the image is far from correct.

Yes, the new Web 2.0 world is driven by a young generation that has a completely different sense of what privacy means. They expose far more about their lives than previous generations. At times, they seem to lack any governor on telling you -- and the WWW -- what happened at the party last night. That comes from a conscious belief by some that with the intrusions of technology -- from CCD cameras on light poles to TiVo records of television shows watched -- have made their lives glass houses anyway. As an aside, they may be right. The older generations may be the foolish ones believing privacy exists -- but that's for another paranoid day.

The great mistake made by decision makers regarding who's behind the new media is assuming that the people involved are:

A) Slackers with too much time on their hands and too much Cheetos dust on their keyboards
B) Proletariat who are using the free internet to espouse their ill-opinions
C) Not real fans, cause real fans would never try to tear down the team

This profile breaks down really fast when you get some demographics from major boards and blogs. First and foremost, people with time for the internet have leisure time. They have a computer. Or they work in white collar industries with computer access. In other words, they have means.

I would be willing to wage the average college sports board or blog is frequented more often by fans with incomes over $50K than below. I'd also warn that they probably are read by or participated in by the major level boosters of the school -- the folks dropping $10K donations on a regular basis and have incomes well into the six figures.

They are also older than you think. They are not college students, or recent graduates. They mirror a recent study of who creates technology start-ups. Guess what -- it's not the genius kid out of school. Those tech startups? Average age was early 40s. Both personal anecdotal information and surveys and registrations logs back this up.

If you ask a university development director, keeping recent graduates attached to the institution, then beginning to build a relationship with them as they begin to reach their peak earning years are the key to cultivation of new "friends" -- read, donors.

Guess where that target audience is hanging out in the late afternoon at work and the wee hours of the night at home?