There is an assumption that sophistication in social media is inversely related to how old the user is. Youth is generally associated with a far higher awareness of the uses and capabilities of the medium. I’m going to question that assumption.

Young entrepreneurs and social media

Yesterday I spent an hour and a half with a high school entrepreneurs group, discussing their business concepts and how they could launch them without a budget and with limited time (high school kids these days have insanely crowded schedules!). The fifteen kids I met with were in a suburban high school in a fairly upper middle class area. Their product ideas were remarkably sophisticated and they had gone through an intense planning process, probably more than they needed.

With web 2.0 and social media you really don’t need money to start a business

After talking broadly about what makes a good product for Internet commerce (small and high value, no bags of dogfood!), I went from person to person and we did a quick marketing triage for their concept. In each case I was able to point them to a free site or resource that they could use to bring their ideas to market. The products and my resources included:

• Unique T-shirt designs. I pointed him to Threadless and Cafepress
• Interior design E-book for teenagers. Lulu, SketchUp and Amazon
• Card game with stories. Build a site in Weebly or Wetpaint where gamers can add to the stories, outsource the card printing and drop-shipping to an on-demand printing company
• Buying and selling used farm equipment. Combine Flickr with model number keyword tags and Ebay for the transaction
• Custom dress designs for teenagers. I suggested she lurk on some trend sites like coolhunting.com and add comments mentioning her designs
• Battery-powered soccer shoe dryer. Track keywords on Twitter for soccer moms and participate in soccer blogs, asking for product design input
• Jewelry from recycled materials and hemp coverings for earbuds (this one had already sold 20 pairs at $40/each!). Green blogs and Etsy

In every case no one in the room had heard of these resources or thought of them in this context. There was a lot of notetaking, and when I was leaving, the laptops were coming out.

The great thing about this for me was the understanding that these web 2.0 and social media resources are just beginning to be understood. This means that the impact of social media is just beginning to affect the way we do business. This verifies my belief that we’re on the cusp of a major revolution in marketing. Every one of these kids’ businesses could be started with virtually no cash. Market research can be done via search and social media monitoring. Crowdsourcing can be used to develop product designs and find resources for manufacturing and distribution. You don’t even need a phone number, though that is not an issue when every kid has their own phone.

Age is not an issue in social media awareness

The final takeaway for us grownups is that kids don’t have an edge on us in understanding these resources. Everyone is learning at the same time, regardless of age.