Whenever I read articles or surveys about how older people are or are not using computers and the Internet, I think about the Elderbloggers.
Ronni Bennett, of As Time Goes By, maintains a list of “Elderbloggers” on her blog. It is a long list and getting longer. On weekends sometimes, when I’m just playing solitaire Scrabulous or wandering the Internet, I go to Ronni’s list and let my cursor drift until I land on a title. I click and maybe 30 or 40 minutes later I “wake” up after sampling the postings of a few Elderbloggers I’d never read before.
This past Sunday morning I read The Other Side of Sixty by “Wisewebwoman” in Canada. Wisewebwoman is a tax accountant who specializes in back taxes and saving her clients’ financial lives. And she blogs beautifully about living, friends, her tax work, memories and aging. Then there was an MD who wrote of having to break the news of cancer to a hearty 55 year old at The Doctor Is In. And, an ebullient blog by a happy man at Chuckography, who focuses on photography and lots of other things.
If you market to older people, you could do worse than sample a few Elderbloggers.
By the way, there are more than 20,000 bloggers on Blogger who list “retirement” as their occupation.
Resource:
Defying Stereotypes of Aging: Elderbloggers Spout Off Online
2 responses so far ↓
1 Ronni Bennett // Apr 17, 2008 at 1:32 am
After studying aging for a dozen years and blogging about getting old for nearly five, I’ve come to realize that in general, marketers don’t have the first idea about what elders are really like.
95 percent of advertising targeting elders assumes one of only two things: that we’re all sick and need many medications or we want to be 20 years old again and failing that possibility, want to pretend to be. Neither of which is at the top of most elders’ to-do lists.
Part of the problem is that most ad agency employees are under 40 and age is not something you can understand until you get there.
Another part of the problem is that there is nowhere to find out what elders lives are like…
Except - (drum roll) - elderblogs. Nothing else exists like it: real people talking about their real lives - how they live them, what their interests, passions, joys and sorrows are.
You can’t find out this stuff in surveys with limited, multiple-choice questions. It takes, as you’ve been doing, reading a variety of elderblogs on a regular basis.
Doing that, you begin to see what rich, complex and different-from-the-young lives elders lead and that pills and anti-aging potions are the least of what we want or need in life.
Thanks for the nice mention of blog. FYI, there are about 40 more elderblogs waiting to be added to the list when I find the time.
2 Joanne Fritz // Apr 17, 2008 at 7:31 am
Thanks, Ronni! Your comment is right on. I hope we can educate a least a few marketers.
Leave a Comment