Baby Boomers: Social Media is just the new Fax Machine

Did your business career pre-date the rapifax machine?

I’m old enough to remember when the fax machine surfaced in the 7th floor Mail Room at New York’s Chemical Bank, at the time the 7th largest bank in the United States and now part of what has become JP Morgan Chase.

Fresh off the Corporate Lending Training Floor, I wasn’t allowed to touch that first machine — you had to have special Mail Room training. To send a fax required a new form with a VP signature, an elevator ride, and a receipt for the files.

Even now, I wonder about the senior manager meetings that led to those decisions: Was it the dollars invested in equipment, fear that the rest of us might break the machine, use it for personal reasons, or maybe rack up related telephone toll charges? Or were they concerned about confidential information, that maybe it would be viewed by too many eyes?

No matter. It didn’t take long for senior management to relax the rapifax leash, buy more machines accessible by all, and tell us to fax when we could instead of spending so much on Fed Ex.

In a land of increasingly rapid client communication expectations, the rapifax had become the best thing… until it was quickly replaced by email, the next great new cost-efficient communication tool in what has become a long list of new tools.

We baby boomers are a generation who have spent our entire career taking leaps of faith into new communication technologies.

Remember… we started from zero. Most of us began our career with pen and paper, a Selectric on the secretary’s desk and maybe an adding machine in the drawer.

I still remember the day my boss spent his lunch break buying a stack of HP12C calculators, saying he didn’t care if his senior manager hassled him on the expense report. We were doing more time-sensitive deals, and we needed the HP12C  to do our jobs better, quicker, more accurately. Or risk losing business to our competition.

Last week, baby boomers in suits sitting in First Class as I passed to my coach seat on the Virgin America flight to Dulles had iPads. Never mind the gray hair.

So here’s what I don’t get: Why have so many of us Baby Boomers drawn a line in the technology sand when it comes to testing the business applications for new online communication tools. Proof, we say. Where’s the proof?

During an online marketing webinar last week, a non-Boomer asked, “Can people in their 50s and 60s get ‘this”?”

As if ‘this’ were something new.

Facebook and Twitter and Linkedin. Website best practices like more calls to action, better landing pages and trading e-books for emails to add to our lists. Using “remarkable content” to draw traffic to websites to create, qualify and nurture leads. Collectively, strategies for pulling prospects to our website and store fronts might be called “Inbound Marketing,” but they’re really just today’s version of the rapifax machine: Something we might be able to use to achieve our particular business goals.

And — yes — likely these new online tools will one day be replaced by other new things. Isn’t that what we’ve come to expect?

Technology might change, but what hasn’t changed since our early pen and paper days is that business success has always been about reaching the right audience with the right message at the right time.

What’s the message? Who needs to hear it? What benefits does our brand of solution really offer?  How does your company define and measure success?

That’s always been about business strategy, not choice of communication platforms.

The people most likely to understand that business strategy? Baby Boomers in Senior Management. They might not know Facebook settings but they know about industry, product, customers and competition. They know strategy. And its that strategy that needs to inform the tactics or that ROI Proof everyone wants will never be fully realized. Yes — that’s right. Baby Boomer Managers need to get involved pre-ROI, at least sharing knowledge and experience.

“Where’s the proof?” Think back. We lived it. The proof is in the rapifax machine.

The Rapifax passed its early tests. Not just at Chemical Bank but across a variety of different businesses and industries. And the rapifax was worth fully embracing for a period of time. We didn’t throw out all the stamps then, and we won’t throw out all the communication tools we use now, not even the rapifax machine which is sometimes still the right choice.

Bottom Line: That rapifax helped us close a lot of deals in its day.

Are you sure you want to ignore the potential of today’s tools?