Web 2.Oh! Now I get it…

Go to any Group Sales convention, trade show, association meeting, or any other gathering of Group Sales folk, and you’ll hear the same question…maybe different interpretations, but the core question is the same:

“Where will the next generation of groups come from?”

We all know that, sadly, the “blue-haired ladies”, and their spouses/friends/significant others are leaving us. It’s a natural attrition that has happened for years…as the older generation passes on, another generation takes their place. Unfortunately, the new generation coming onboard is my generation — Baby Boomers. While “The Greatest Generation” has had no qualms about traveling together on motorcoaches, our generation is not interested. We are the “but we’re still young” generation, and we don’t need buses to travel. We don’t need to be stuck on a bus for that long! We can still fly or drive wherever, and we have no problem with doing that.

So how do we reach them? How do we convince these self sufficient people to hop on a bus with 50 other people and travel together? There are several approaches that are starting to work…and, of course, the price of gas is helping as well. Now it’s getting cheaper to travel on a coach than to drive by yourself.

ABA’s “Save a Penguin” campaign will help…as the word spreads, I think we’ll see an increase of Boomers going by coach, since many of us are environmentally conscious (or at least pretend to be). The more we can help get that word out, the more it’s going to help increase motorcoach business.  Carbon Footprints didn’t even exist a couple of years ago, now more and more people are checking on theirs, and trying to minimize their impact on the environment.

Then there’s “Social Networking”, or Web 2.0 as some call it. Our generation, along with the GenX and GenY generations, are getting more and more active online, and sharing with each other. It used to be that MySpace and Facebook were “just for the kids”, but more and more Boomers are getting pages, and sharing their lives with others. So I’m out there too….I have pages on MySpace, Facebook and LinkedIn, and I’m having a lot of fun with Twitter. I’m still learning how these things work, but if I can be out there in some form, I can tweak it as I find what people are looking to see. And if there’s a social site that I’m not on, post a comment below, and we’ll meet there!

Look for me out there in the Social Sphere, and let’s be friends, or follow each other, or whatever they call it. As my mother always said, “Listen…I couldn’t hurt!”.

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This entry was posted on May 15, 2008 at 12:12 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.

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