By David Stillman
True story:
A Boomer colleague had an opportunity to pitch a new business but was on a very tight timeline. With the economy hurting his own business, there was no way he was about to blow off this opportunity.
It was a new industry he was pitching, so he needed as much background data as possible. Who better to call than his resourceful new Millennial hire? This woman was the best at getting her hands on information in record time.
Sure enough, within hours of his request, she had facts, best and next practices, top trends, and even quotes from industry leaders.
The Boomer put it all together in a jazzy looking document and e-mailed it off to the potential new client. Fingers were crossed that he would land the new business!
The next day, he received an e-mail from the potential new business asking where he had found a statistic because it was one that they hadn’t seen before. When the Boomer asked the new Millennial, she said, “Oh, I got it from one of my friends on Facebook. I’ll have to ask her where she found it.”
A few minutes later, the Millennial reported back that her friend wasn’t sure where she had found the statistic either. It didn’t look like she would be able to find out.
What was the Boomer to do? He couldn’t exactly write back saying, “We got the stat from a friend on Facebook,” and, obviously, ignoring the e-mail wouldn’t exactly help land the new business.
• • •
It’s a new trend we often come across that is causing a lot of generational collisions. We call it “the end of the expert as we know it.”
When Traditionalists, Boomers, and even Gen Xers entered the work world, they had fewer resources at their fingertips. It was quite clear who were the credible sources when gathering information. If they weren’t clear, it was never a question whether or not you could use the source. In fact, it was pretty black and white.
Enter Millennials, who have always had any and every bit of information hurled at them from all directions. Since birth, the number of sources at their fingertips has been endless. Add in the fact that its an era where anyone can put up a Web page or blog on a topic and grant themselves the title “expert.” Surprise, surprise . . . the credibility factor becomes quite grey.
How do you teach Millennials which sources of information are truly credible? Who is an expert? Who isn’t? Do we even know anymore?
I would suggest when anyone is looking for information or need research, they contact a Librarian. Doesn't matter what "generation" he or she is from, because they know how to recognize credible sources and could save you a lot of time and headaches.
Posted by: Doris Dingley | Nov 03, 2009 at 03:09 PM
David,
I'm glad you posted this entry. I totally agree with you. No internet source can be trusted. Even the big popular sites that you'd think would screen the information they provide are bad. With me, I am mostly talking about the technical information available online for software developers. Although looking up health info is bad too. There are thousands of sites that tell you how to do something. Although what they show as an example works-- it is usually completely wrong or even bad for you. And learning from a bad example can really hurt you in the long run.
The other point I would add is with the internet being so big-- spanning different countries, it still surprises me when I search in say Google, I get over a million results but most of the pages returned have exactly (word for word) the same content as the other page. Even though they’re completely different websites with different domains. So what is the point of all this replication of information?!? Just a waste of time.
Thanks,
Julian Reytel
SuddenDeals.com
Twin Cities SMS text message entertainment/discount network connecting shoppers with merchants in real-time.
Posted by: Julian Reytel | Nov 03, 2009 at 01:54 PM