Baby Boomers blogging?
In Inman News Bernice Ross wrote of blog resistance:
"The challenge may be insurmountable for many agents. According to Ann Randolph of Lore Magazine, when baby boomers purchase technology they have an expectation that you plug it in and it's supposed to work. Until the advent of computers, every electronic gadget we owned worked simply by plugging it in and turning it on. No manual required. This expectation is part of boomer DNA just as much as computers and social networks are part of the Gen X and Gen Y culture. User manuals are typically incomprehensible and offshore customer support is usually abysmal. It comes as no surprise that so many older agents are completely overwhelmed. The process is so frustrating that it's easier to give up and say, "I'm sticking with what has worked for me in the past."
Plugged in and turned on... Baby Boomers blogging?
...maybe I thought about this before when I wondered about why so many real estate agents are blog resistant, website resistant, technology resistant... but not in that detail. Not that we baby boomers are used to being able to just put the plug into the wall and it works.
You put the LP on the turntable and turned it on and there was music.
Plug the radio in the wall and it works.
Put a 9 volt battery in the transistor radio and it works. Listen to tunes or the ballgame, that's all there was to it!
Plug the TV in... adjust those rabbit ears... voila sound and picture....
1960s? You got the latest and greatest way to listen to music.... an 8 Track player you shoved that big ole' thing in "poooshed the button" and it worked.
VCRs got a bit complex for some of us.... I admit I can find my way around a computer easier than I ever could tape a TV show.
Hmmmmm... The challenge of blogging and why some baby boomers (and older) are so..... flummoxed by computers, websites, blogging and more....
We did a website contest in our office last year to update and get some personalization on the websites (webpages) that Real Living HER provides each and every agent in the company. In the contest we had 4 teams made up of office members. I was a team co-captain with Patty Abass. It was like pulling teeth to get some of our team members to open up their website and make any changes, add any content, personalize it. It is really a very easy website to work on. Plug it in and it works.
I've invited a lot of people from the office and from the Columbus Board of REALTORS® to ActiveRain. Some have joined and not done much in the way of a profile. Others did a profile and nothing more... and ActiveRain is so easy compared to other blogs.
From now on I am just going to wrap ActiveRain up like a toaster and tell them to plug it in.
Pictures: Transistor Radio is from Wikipedia the page says: Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 only as published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant Sections, no Front-Cover Texts, and no Back-Cover Texts. A copy of the license is included in the section entitled "Text of the GNU Free Documentation License."
9 Volt Battery is from Wikipedia the page says: This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 2.5 License. In short: you are free to share and make derivative works of the file under the conditions that you appropriately attribute it, and that you distribute it only under a license identical to this one. Official license.
Toaster compliments of the kitchen counter. It's just there.
Comments(48)