We recently conducted research for a client who wanted to better understand how their customers prefer to access and consume technical information. The respondents were a mix of software developers and IT staff and management. The project produced many interesting insights including one chart that speaks to preferences by age.

What I take away from this chart is a trend we have been seeing for some time: younger technology workers are gravitating toward a “push” model to access information. They prefer to have information pushed to their email inbox, their RSS feed, their Twitter stream, and their Facebook news feed. They are more likely to invite colleagues, friends and peers to push information to them by sharing content and links. They are less likely than their older counterparts to loyally read a publication or regularly visit a particular website and “pull” information.

So what does this mean for B2B technology marketers?

First, reports of email’s death as an effective B2B marketing tool are exaggerated. That said, we all know our target audiences are being bombarded with email so the more you can segment your list and offer differentiated, targeted information to each of those segments, the better. Second, at least some of your information should be highly “shareable.” Placing a white paper behind a registration form can be an effective lead generation tactic, but very few people will share a link to a registration form.

Having highly shareable content also makes it easier for search engines to find it and rank it.  Search is used less by younger respondents in our survey, but not surprisingly it is the one “pull” method that is very popular among all age groups.

Will these trends continue? Stay tuned.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 9th, 2011 at 11:59 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.