Web-weary Millennials opting out of social media

This short take is on what's happening in the world of the Millennials, which some call Gen-Y. I get these feeds from Iconoculture every week. Iconoculture claims to be tracking and reporting on the trends that it can see in th elives of various identifiable generational groups, from Matures (pre-Boomers) through Boomers, Gen-X and the Millennials. Below is their report for this week.

WHAT'S HAPPENING

•While more than 400 million consumers are active online social network users, a growing subset are getting off the social media carousel. Many consumers are quitting online soc nets over concerns they worsen their offline lives.

•Consumers are weaning themselves off of sites like Facebook and Twitter, some even quitting cold turkey. Free services like Web 2.0 Suicide and Seppukoo (Japanese word for "suicide") have helped tens of thousands of social network users completely erase their online profiles (USAToday.com 2.10.10).

•Facebook isn't having it. The largest online social network has blocked the servers of both Web 2.0 Suicide and Seppukoo — and sent cease-and-desist letters.

WHAT THIS MEANS TO BUSINESS

•Consumers aren't ditching digital friendship in droves, but they are getting back to the root of BeehivingSM — good 'ol fashioned face-to-face interaction. (Thus the popularity of the morning Starbucks gatherings that I’ve opined about in the past as being the original “Snail” version of Facebook)

•As online social networks proliferate to the point of bewilderment, consumers are pushing back and reclaiming some of their personal lives from the Web's entanglements.

I tried to go to the Web 2.0 Suicide site, but got a firewall alert that the site has a worm that it's trying to spread, so I did not visit.

This was an almost predictable thing, since the younger generations seem to always rebel against whatever the older generations embrace. Facebook has been largely taken over my Boomers and Gen-X, so the younger Millennials were bound to recoil at having to share stuff in a virtual room that also includes their parents and grandparents. They still have control over things like texting, which continues to be one of the most popular pastimes and teen chat rooms are still huge, even with all of the predator warnings.

So what does this mean for business users, who also flocked to Facebook and other social media sites. There have been many articles written and even books published about how to leverage the various social sites for business gain. I suspect that this too has caused an overload in the minds of user audience and will precipitate more fallout as users tire of having to put up with the ubiquitous Google ads around the borders of their favorite sites and the blatant advertising going on in many so-called posts to these sites.