After being out on maternity leave for the past 12 weeks, I am officially back in the office and jumping into some great new projects. One of the projects I’m most excited about is our annual online youth survey for our Technographics product. Each year, we survey online respondents ages 12 to 17 to get their take on everything from their mobile usage to how they want to interact with companies. Recently, Pew Research Center put out a report on its youth studythat had some interesting points around mobile usage. Most of its findings were in line with our own data. For example, we’ve found that:

  • Seventy-nine percent of youth ages 12 to 17 have a cell phone, up from 73% in 2008. So when your kid comes home and says, “Mom, I need a cell phone. EVERYONE has one!” he’s not that far off from the truth!
  • It’s all about texting. While only a quarter of teens are browsing the mobile Internet, 84% are texting at least monthly.

 

These are only some of the interesting points we have nestled in our data. I personally love working with this age group and examining how they feel about the world around them. Which technologies can’t they live without and which ones do they ignore and why? How do they expect the companies they love to engage them via social media? How do they want to receive advertising? The list goes on and on (in fact, you can search our survey topics here) . . .

 What other things are you dying to know about this age group? Let me know what topics are keeping you up, and I’ll try to fit some of them into our upcoming survey.