The Age of the Digital Native

Sooner or later, the financial services representative has to deal with this coming generation of consumers, the tech savvy generation.

Actually, there are about 200 million reasons to believe it. That's the rough number of kids around the world that currently have Internet access. Marc Prensky, a writer and video-game developer, coined the term "digital native" to describe the cohorts that are coming of age in the Internet era. The rest of us he aptly identifies as “digital immigrants." Like most immigrants, we often struggle to understand the incomprehensible customs of the natives.

Reared on social media, always on Internet connections, cell-phone cameras, Facebook, and YouTube, digital natives live on the same planet as digital immigrants, but inhabit a very different universe. They can concentrate on multiple projects simultaneously, they collaborate seamlessly and spontaneously with people they've never met, and most important, they create media with the same avidity that previous generations consumed it. This is the net generation, a demographic perfectly adapted to a future in which online communities will supplant the conventional corporation.

How do you, the financial services representative, relate to this group of people, how do you communicate and collaborate with them will be the new challenge for prospecting in the digital age.