I created my account on Facebook about a year ago. I joined because I had a curiosity as a marketer. I’m in there to play around and experience the environment, and to contrast it to the opportunities with MySpace.
Lately, I’ve gotten more into testing the applications on Facebook with an eye towards conceiving some of my own, and with the avalanche of colleagues joining, it’s become a good place to network.
Recently, I read an article on the Huffington Post, “When Worlds Collide: Facebook in Business,” that got me thinking about the generational clash going on at Facebook.
Author Megan Berry, a 20-year-old junior at Stanford, laments…
As a 20-year-old junior at Stanford I am both an everyday Facebook user and a summer intern at a software company. What I didn’t realize is how Facebook and my work would collide. Facebook seems to be the current obsession of the business world with thirty-something business users joining all the time.
It seems these business users are joining Facebook not because everyone is on it, but because the cool people are on it. For these older users having a Facebook account actually has little to do with convenience, but instead it is a symbol, communicating to others that you keep up with the latest Internet trends. Yet the “cool people” on Facebook are, for the most part, college students. Why are these thirty-something web users rushing to keep up with college students?
Perhaps that’s the intention of some of my old people peers, but I don’t think that’s the case for my Facebook “friends”. We’re all just looking to get different things out of it, including networking, research, re-connecting, discovering ways to monetize it, etc.
Jared Sandberg of the Wall Street Journal discusses the generational divide within Facebook in his article, “OMG — My Boss Wants to ‘Friend’ Me On My Online Profile.”
So the college students don’t like us old interlopers coming around where they hang out.
Deal with it. You’re not that cool, and we’re not going anywhere.