Yeah, sounds silly that I would even say this doesn’t it? But a million times a day older generations continue to try to communicate with younger generations on channels they feel comfortable with and wonder why they don’t get a response in a timely manner, if ever. Let’s take a look at some recent channel shifts in the past couple of decades:
- Teletype messages to Fax messages
- Fax messages to email messages
- Phone messages (on paper) to Voicemail
- Email messages to IM
- IM to IM within Facebook or Gmail
- Phone calls to Cell Phone calls
- Cell phone calls to Text Messaging
- Text Messaging to Twitter
- Letters to Emails
- Emails to Status updates
- In person communications to Online communications
- In person friendships to Online friendships
- Real-time communications to non-real-time communications
- One week response time to Same Day response time
- Same Day response time to Instant Response Time
- Respond during work hours to respond 24-7
If you are part of the GenX generation like me think of your grandmother and look at this list. Chances are most grandmothers are still writing letters, prefer in-person visits and get togethers and have somewhat embraced the phone for special occasions. They are stuck in the 50’s-60’s and darn happy to stay there. Your parents would be the influencers to drive them to embrace new communications channels. Chances are they are definitely not interested in any of the stuff you use or your kids use.
Look at your parents and this list. Chances are they are they have a cell phone for safety reasons only, have email (finally), like weekly phone calls at least for news about your life, like to have visits once and awhile, and have a fax machine at home if they run a small business. They are happy to be in the late 80’s to mid 90’s. We were the ones who got them set up on a computer, email, and probably even Facebook (so they could see what’s up with the grandkids.) We probably even got them a cell phone. We drove their new channel adoption.
How about you and your spouse? I’m sure you are starting to see the trend. Each younger generation tries to get their previous generation to adopt some of the channels they use. Extrapolate that to each generation away from you and the number of channels you have to communicate on diminishes. And with each restriction on channels the younger generation spends less time communicating with the older generations. And with this lack of communication the older generation gets frustrated and wonders why the younger generation “never calls or writes”. Ah, you know the drill.
So what to do about it. Well, I think the first thing is embracing this fact and getting it out in the open. Landing on communications channels that work requires regular, you guessed it, communications but on channel selection.
I know that if I want to reach the kids I need to embrace texting and Facebook. Forget the phone, voicemail, email, in-person communications, etc… Yes, it’s possible to reach them on the older channels but if you want instant response and regular communications you better adopt it. Think about it, don’t you wish you parents checked emails hourly?
At the same time it’s not just a one way street either where the older generations must adapt or whither. The younger generations must explain the options available to reach them and leave in a few of the familiar ones. And they should explain the priority and urgency settings on each one of those channels. Send me a letter and give me no phone number or email in it communicate back to you on then don’t expect a reply any time soon.
And lastly the younger generation needs to explain that mixed channel communications is also preferred as a alternative. Both generations can express themselves in the channel they feel comfortable in but they need to provide alternative channel options for replies and be cool getting responses that way. Yeah, it’s not what either party wants but it keeps things at least moving and it’s better than no communications at all.
What other advice would you give for bridging the channel divide?
Tags: communications, socialmedia, youth
