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Coming of Age: Event Report
StumbleUponTuesday 27th saw the fifteenth of our successful panel events in the 'Beers & Innovation' series. 'Coming of Age' discussed the burgeoning 50+ market and how media and social network owners could make their sites more appealing to this sector. Ian Delaney reports.
Tuesday 27th saw the fifteenth of our successful panel events in the 'Beers & Innovation' series. 'Coming of Age' discussed the burgeoning 50+ market and how media and social network owners could make their sites more appealing to this sector. Ian Delaney reports.
The Panel
David Noble, MD of age-positive social networking site Wanobe.
Dick Stroud of 50+ marketing consultancy 20Plus30 and author of the 50-Plus Market
Stephen Morgan, MD of dev agency Squiz who worked on the new 50Connect site
Sarah Robson, Research & Planning Director at Millennium, a marketing agency focusing on the mature market.
Ian Delaney (Chair) NMK editor/publisher
The Debate
Dick Stroud began by asserting that there is no correlation between age and behaviour. Just because you are over 50, it does not mean that you will automatically be interested in golf, caravanning, crochet work and similar activities. The demographic description 'over 50' is, in many ways, as unhelpful a tag as 'under 30'. You cannot automatically assume that people who fit that description will be attracted by skateboarding, grime music and alco-pops. People will congregate around interests, not their membership of market sectors. It may well be the case that a golf site (for example) attracts large numbers of older people, though, and that this might affect the sorts of advertisers you approach and the way in which you present material.
Physiologically, one of the first things to be affected by age is the ability to cope with complexity. Therefore, if you're hoping to attract and keep older people, then making pages and processes on your site reasonably simple would be an intelligent thing to do. On the other hand, older people - born in an age of print - are far more able to cope with long copy than younger audiences. Their expectation is full articles, not just 'tid-bits'.
Above: Older, faster, smarter. (flickr credit: MarkHaertl)
Steve Morgan has recently completed sites for 50Connect and also David Urquart Travel, a company which organises coach trips that tend to be popular with older people. A significant problem he noted is that nobody Googles for '50-plus social network' or 'tours for olders people'. The 'older' or 'over 50' element of the equation isn't what people are particularly concerned about. It may be the case that these people do have concerns that are age-relevant - Morgan gave the example of people wanting to be assured that they didn't have to share a hotel room, for example - but they do not themselves view that as age-related.
Morgan noted that Stroud's point about simplicity was true. The typical 'page furniture' of modern sites - with badges, links, widgets and gizmos surrounding the main content - isn't necessarily a very good idea. One difficulty he found was finding appropriate images for the sites - one initial thought was to use nostalgic images, but it turns out that older people don't want to see that. They've already been there! Similarly, older people don't want to see pictures of older people on marketing materials - they don't identify themselves as old or want to be addressed as belonging to that category.
David Noble talked about his experience launching the Wanobe site. The name is apparently a contraction of Obi Wan Kenobi of the Star Wars film series: unashamedly old, but also wise and strong. Originally, it was envisaged as a destination for older people. However, as time went by, it became clear that Dick's initial comments were at least somewhat correct. The site then evolved to become a destination designed for people who feel that they've grown out of the likes of Facebook. Mentions of fifty-plus were replaced with the idea of being 'age positive'. Similarly, interest areas around topics like health, personal finance and travel proved a much stronger pull than topics about 'being old'.
Perhaps surprisingly, the one of the busiest new areas of the Wanobe site is its video-sharing gallery. The front page of YouTube might give the impression that video-sharing is a young person's activity, but it emerges that even that site's most active users are over 40. Stroud interjected that video is the number one 'area to watch' when it comes to the development of content for older users.
David also made the point that community sites are, in many ways, owned by their members. One way to quickly kill a community site is to suddenly change the rules without discussion. He cited the US site Eons, a social network originally aimed at over-50s. In response to a decline in numbers, the site suddenly announced that it would henceforth be open to anyone over 13. Huge numbers of its remaining users promptly left the community. The site has subsequently reversed the decision.
Above: David Noble; glad to be grey
Our final panellist, Sarah Robson, concurred with much of the preceding discussion - one disadvantage of going last is that many of one's points might have been pre-empted. One area she sought to expand upon was the way in which older users identify themselves. Typically, they want to have the impression that the site is aimed at people ten years younger than themselves - a mirror image of the way in which teens will flock to destinations that are ostensibly designed for people in their twenties. On the subject of imagery, she cited catalogue sites such as Littlewoods aimed at people in their fifties and sixties. The clothes are worn by models in their forties. One assumes that this gives the impression that these aren't 'old people's clothes'. Robson commented that one interesting thing she'd found about older people is that their attention spans are often a lot longer than those of younger users. She remarked that usability and accessibility issues are actually far more critical for younger users, who skim-read or don't read at all, and simply click on whatever the next thing might be.
Interestingly, our audience had members representing a large number of sites intended for older users, such as mychumsclub and 50Connect. There was thus some understandable resistance to the idea that the 50-plus market was (a) extremely fragmented and (b) not willing to identify themselves as 'older'. However, the point was made that if sites geared towards over-50s actually presented themselves as interest hubs, contained strong editorial content, good hosting for user-created discussions and other content, and perhaps identified themselves as aimed at over-40s instead, then they stood a reasonable chance.
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