Two weeks ago, I took my oldest son Nick (12 years old in the 7th grade) to the Wizard’s game. We grabbed dinner at District Taco before walking over to the Verizon Center. At the time we were in the midst of Mobile World Congress. Two days earlier (February 21st), Samsung had released a dongle that would give your car an LTE connection and the Samsung’s Galaxy S7 (among other things). I mentioned the dongle to my son. Reflecting on our long road trip last summer, I thought an Internet hotspot for the car would be something he would find appealing. He replied with, “and they also released the Galaxy S7.” He didn’t know that it happened at MWC, but just that it happened earlier in the week. I preceded to ask him how he heard the news. He said he saw it in ads on Snapchat and Instagram and said there were also trending hashtags on Instagram.
The dichotomy between Twitter and other platforms is a real one. Fred Wilson blogged a few days ago about what he referred to as the “Twitter Contradiction.” While many of us kept abreast of MWC news on Twitter, the cohorts following us are leaning (and learning) on other platforms. That doesn’t mean they will always use these other platforms. Or that they will also use them in the ways in which they use them now. It also doesn’t mean that they won’t “grow into” Twitter. But they don’t appear to be “turning” to Twitter when news breaks like older cohorts currently seem to doinh – whether it be geopolitical events or basketball games.
Platforms face three great challenges – (1) staying relevant to current users, (2) being relevant to future users (especially younger cohorts), and (3) maintaining some lock-in over other platforms. The third point is related to switching costs – what burden is borne by users should they decide to switch to a different platform? Staying power – especially on the Internet – is extremely difficult. When audiences start to move, they tend to not come back.
A week later I was at an Oscar’s party where I watched as an 11 year-old girl (6th grade) saw the Samsung Galaxy S7 commercial. She doesn’t have a cellphone of her own and seeing the commercial during the Oscar’s marked her first exposure to the new model of Samsung’s flagship phone. I watched as she used the marketing copy of the commercial to try to convince her mom to get it for her: “Expandable memory….” “faster wireless charging…” The more she read aloud the marketing copy, the more she wanted the Galaxy S7.
Both her mom and her dad have iPhones, but she wants the Samsung phone. When I inquired why she wanted the Galaxy S7 instead of an iPhone she didn’t have a list of reasons, or even a single reason. She just wants the Samsung phone. Obviously this is just a single observation, but it’s an interesting one.
At the Wizard’s game, Nick and I also talked about generational definitions. It seems like everything I read these days is cast within generational definitions, but it wasn’t something he was familiar with. He asked what his generation was named. While there’s not officially agreed upon definition for his cohort (yet), I gave him some of the ones being used. I included “Homeland Generation.” The homeland generation is so named because these are the kids born after 9/11. While I don’t like it, the world is a very different place since 9/11. He asked me if we had to go through metal detectors at the airport before 9/11 and I couldn’t even remember. The world we live in as in many ways become the only world we can remember.
52 minutes
