Opinion: How will the Facebook generation grow up?

I am not talking about those of us who maybe update their status once or twice a day. I am referring to the 14 to 23 year-olds who have shared and lived every second of their lives via Facebook. There are millions and millions of them.

This is the generation that is on Facebook all day. They discuss every aspect of their waking day, their feelings, their loves, their hates and their hopes and fears. I know because I have two teenage children, 18 and 16 who frankly looked at me like I was mad when I suggested they go a week without it.

They have their own language and they flit in and out of chat and on and off the wall for reasons we would not ever comprehend.  Chat is for private one-on-one discussions, chat is to sensor, chat is to bitch, chat is to show deep emotion, but chat is also for the mundane. The day to day. The wassup? The wall is a shared moment that you want people to comment on those that you know and those that you don't. Interesting.

Especially as this is the generation that are also capable of spotting an infiltrator at 50 metres. They see the ads on the side of the screen and they filter them immediately, unless the brand is tied up in something they want, or it provides an exclusive deal or it means something for free. A now promise. It doesn’t have to be a purchase as long as it’s a benefit. But it is about the now, a quick pash, they take what they want and then they go back to their inner circle of friends to continue the 24/7 conversation. To share the video links they have found, to share the music they love and to share the television they watched liked and scraped from the internet.

So what is going to happen to these ‘now’ people? I call them ‘now’ people because as a result of having everything to hand, they want everything in the real world now. They won’t wait for something to come out in retail, they will go to the part of the world that has it now and will buy it, online sales. They wont wait to watch something at the movies, they will find it on Vuze or the likes and watch it now. They seek services that help them navigate around the traditional to get the speedy. Don’t get me wrong they want quality too and quickly filter out the dross, and if they find dross they slam it across every network they are on.

So what does a brand do? Take steroids? No they set up a fast offering a sort of transition from the old world to the new. They have two horses in the race and they see which fairs the best and they will probably discover it is a mixture of the two. Give it to me now but make sure you know what you are talking about. The banks and insurance companies are doing this well. Most now have two brands in market and one back end.

The other interesting situation that I see arising is the ability to find out anything about anyone. The Facebook generation know what is possible and they know that there is a god that looks over all and his name is Mark Zuckerberg. You say something wrong and you are identified and isolated and then you are gone. Those principals, the Facebook generation, believe should also apply to the real world. So don’t lie, be transparent and above all deliver what you promise, when you promise it or you too could be identified, isolated and gone before you even have your crisis strategy presented to the board.

Its going to be exhausting keeping up.