70 Millions Blogs and Growing.. Influencing The New Generation

I used to wonder if i had Attention Deficit Disorder, now i know.. the markerters have given me a label. I'm part of Generation Y (Why?)

I'll be blogging in direct response to this post:

Great, I now have a label to explain everything that's wrong about me, we're Generation Y with short attention spans, we want a balance in life. Work and our careers are everything to us (in that we want to be successful), but it's not everything (in that we want a social life, friends and all the trimmings that life has to offer.)

Great by-product of the generation that grew up on Cable, Video on Demand, Broadband Internet, MTV, Mega Malls, K-Mart, Wal-Mart, Designer labels, Ecstacy, Blogs, Review Sites, Amazon, EBay and heaven knows what else.

Can you really blame us for not giving your brand the time of day when you try to reach out to us with your ads, pamphlets, sales promises and emotional brand experience?

How then is the best way to get your message to the people that matter?

I've probably already failed to influence in the length of this particular post. If you've given me the time of day to read this far, then maybe we've arrived at something.

connection
if for some reason, you feel that what i have to say is important, it might be because of a mixture of knowing me, we've interacted in some way, and your life somehow benefited after coming in contact with me.

attention
i still read yongfook.com to this day. his blog has evolved into a well designed lifestream.

he captures my attention with great content, short blurbs and funny videos & monologues. meaning i don't have to spend more than 5 mins on his site to hear what he has to say, and decide for myself if it's important or not.

too many times, important things are lost in a sea of noise, or they're not very popular things to begin with. (take a look at ping.sg and hazard a guess at what the average pingster finds important in the "top 10 posts for the last 24 hours".)

now of course, all great brands want to be popular, and they'd like to be in that top 10 posts of pingsters.

community
but we have to remember that ping.sg is not the only community group there is. it's a sizable community, and they've done some really great things, built on uzyn's API platform to aggregate the most popular posts in their community.

but what about social networks and forums that house already existing brand advocates? how about other separate undiscovered blogs that might serve, 20 - 50 committed readers daily? what can we do as brands to help their lives and connect connect with them?

merely reading information online rarely influences a reader. Gen Y is a bit more savvy to believe everything they read. but i think we will consider the expert opinion of someone we know, close to us or at least in our social circle.

fragments
with this amount of choice and clutter, is it in fact possible to have your message carried by every single one of these different voices? let's remember that when someone tries to tell us something in a language we don't understand, it's garble, noise, meaningless and ultimately spam.

is that how you want Gen Y to remember your brand?