DISQUS

Hi Nick

It's encouraging that you are seeing this demographic starting to explore the social web. My own experience of trying to get older family members I am connected with to use even Facebook has been mixed. They often give it a try and then lose interest which suggests they are not finding anything of value or that meets a need in their lives right now.

Their absence on the wider social web is a loss, particularly for businesses, because they are often the people with the most carefully thought out opinions and insights based on a lot of experience.

I wrote a post on how I am trying to encourage boomers to use a social network (http://tinyurl.com/3c2zue) although my advice probably applies to any age of person. Did the people at the Summit describe how they got started using online social tools?

Good post! I haven't read Jeremiah's full report but based on the excerpt and diagram I have seen, I agree with you.

From my experiences building online communities, they follow the normal lifecycle and you expect a peak of member activity (Jeremiah's vertical axis) but then a steady decline. I find that is because the people who just browse a community will over time drift away leaving a baseline of core participants who use and are active.

There are some good rules that a community can utilize to prolong the period of maximum activity and keep the level of enthusiasm up (but at best I think they maintain member activity rather than perpetually increase it). I find that maintaining a clear community purpose that resonates with the members, archiving old content so that new material is easy to reach, committing time to sustain and encourage members (isn't it always the case?) and keeping track of what is happening in the community (so you can react and adapt) are essentials.

Maybe Jeremiah or other people have ways to continually improve a community that I'm not familiar with? I'd be really interested to know what they were!

Cheers, Steve.