Online Communities are Getting Old
Posted by Jeffrey Henning on Mon, Jan 18, 2010
Often, when I present an overview of
Market Research Online Communities, especially
the top 10 reasons for building an MROC, attendees will say, "Well, that's interesting, but it really doesn't apply to us. Our market is seniors (65 years old and older), and they are not on the Internet much yet."
Actually, nearly half of U.S. seniors are on the Internet. The most recent U.S. Census figures by age (dated July 2008) estimated that 13% of the population, 39 million people then, were 65 years old or older. Nielsen calculated in November that 17.5 million seniors were online, or about 45% of seniors.
Not only are more senior citizens using the Internet, more seniors are using online communities. Last March, Nielsen released a study "Global Faces and Networked_Places", which reported that communities had more members than ever before and that those members were spending more time on the community sites. Nielsen recorded a definite shift to older participation, as "member communities" (a category that includes both social networking and blogging websites) became more mainstream. The biggest growth by age was indeed in the 65+ category:
Will your MROC underrepresent 65+ year olds compared to the national population? Most definitely. Will your MROC members who are 65+ be significantly different from seniors who aren't members? Most definitely. Should you skip MROCs for seniors for now? Most definitely not.
Embrace the caveats. Qualify your findings based on the seniors that are online now. If you are building a standing MROC for your brand, better to begin recruiting now than later, when there will be much more competition for this segment. Moreover, there are some advantages to this online group's current composition. As Dan Zarrella, social marketing scientist at Hubspot, likes to point out, those seniors who are online are influencers who share what they learn online and offline: as a result, they are a key segment for any brand that cares about researching 65+ year olds.
Yep. Making excuses for not researching seniors online is getting old.