Know Your Audience Is Still the Best Advice

Can anyone say “Second Life?”

Sorry for the digression: I couldn’t resist. The first of these pieces of intelligence was Mark Hurst’s Good Experience email newsletter, which reported about how the team at Grandparents.com went about finding out whether they could leverage Web 2.0 tools with the wrinkled set. How could these perhaps not overly computer-savvy customers benefit from Web 2.0? Would it be worth the investment?

Hurst writes:

Within one day of listening labs, we found that grandparents do want certain features in the website, and Grandparents.com can have a viable business in the Web 2.0 world. The grandparents we talked to didn’t say, “I want this particular feature,” but their descriptions of how they relate to their grandkids, and their demonstrations of how they use the Internet, revealed what sort of site Grandparents.com should be.

Perhaps more importantly, we learned what the customers do not want, saving the company from making needless investments of time and money in the wrong features. For example, I won’t give the store away by revealing that grandparents are not sprinting to set up blogs. Nor are they prone to tag photos and bookmarks.

There’s more here. How about their grandchildren?

There was a report in the Chronicle of Higher Ed of a panel at the College Board Forum at which Rick Hesel of the Art & Science Group and John H. Pryor of UCLA presented data that debunked some of the accepted wisdom about millennials as they have been presented in the work of William Strauss and Neil Howe, authors of Millennials Rising (Vintage Books, 2000).

Today’s teen applicants are a lot more complex than Howe and Strauss made them out to be, Pryor and Hesel argued. Here’s Hesel’s advice to admissions officers who are marketing to teens:

What should admissions officials think about as they ponder the complexity of Millennials? “Sincerity,” Mr. Hesel said. Many prospective students, he continued, are cynical about colleges’ marketing efforts. Given that, he urged deans to avoid hyperbole, clichs, and meaningless tag lines in their recruitment materialsanything that might make them look like “another high-priced commodity.”

Mr. Hesel also advised colleges to demonstrate and encourage a sense of humor in the admissions process; to involve parents of prospective students in constructive ways; not to dwell on their campus history and traditions; to express progressive views on social and racial equality; and to simplify information about paying for college.

All comes back to know your audience, doesn’t it?

Let me end with a recommendation for Mark Hurst’s email newsletter. Good Experience is consistently one of the most thoughtful emails that crosses my desktop. Hurst has been a tireless advocate for great customer experience for more than ten years. Not only does it have great content, but Hurst offers his text-only subscribers a readable text-only option and doesn’t force on us to receive a poorly formatted HTML alternative. Get your own subscription here]http://goodexperience.com/signup.php]here[/url].