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Digital Natives (people in their 20s who grew up with the Internet and mobile devices) switch media, devices, and platforms about 27 times (!) per nonworking hour. This one statistic — the key takeaway from a new study entitled “A Biometric Day in the Life“, commissioned by Time, Inc. and conducted by Innerscope Research ­— is no doubt the most terrifying to content purveyors and advertisers. It brings to light their greatest fear and confronts them with their greatest challenge: how to cope with the ever-dwindling attention spans and ever-more distractions that are the norm for Digital Natives in the developed world.

While the study only surveyed 30 participants, it highlights the serious concerns faced by those seeking to engage, market and sell to this always-on generation. Anecdotally, other reports — and the observations my fellow contributors and I captured in the book Dancing With Digital Natives — suggest that generation lacks focus and suffers from information overload and an inability to filter quality from the quantity.

Fortunately, this new research does more than diagnose the problem. It is laudable that this research was undertaken in an effort to provide a rational foundation to develop engaging content for younger consumers. To accomplish this the researchers employed some impressive methods as well: Participants wore biometric belts that monitored their physical responses and glasses with embedded cameras that tracked which platforms they used and for how long.

Advertising To Address Digital Natives

Digital Natives are distracted by a dizzying array of media choices. Is this a problem or opportunity?

Ad Age looks at a few advertising approaches that seek to address this emerging propensity among Digital Natives to info-snack. (In my recent article for Social Media Marketing Magazine I also offer five key insights to help companies understand Digital Natives and ways they can leverage this generation’s connectedness to achieve their business objectives.)

Ad Age suggests marketers should use ads that follow consumers as they migrate from one channel to the next, migrating the marketing across all the screens people interact with (TV, PC, mobile) to reinforce the brand message. In line with this the article recommends the advertising messaging should take on a ‘snack-sized’ form as well.

Put another way, if this study’s results are even close to representative of the information consumption tendencies of this generation, hearty fare in bite-sized packages must be on the menu.

Consumability and Connectedness

The study also compared the habits of Digital Natives with those of Digital Immigrants and found that the later group are intuitively linear: They expect to see a beginning, middle, and end to stories. Digital Natives like the whole story, but they prefer to multi-task to get it.

According to the study, “Digital Natives are subconsciously switching between platforms and can pick up different pieces of a story from different mediums in any order.”

Read between the lines, and companies will have to accept that Digital Natives are comfortable switching across channels and get on with their business. As Dr. Carl Marci, CEO and Chief Scientist of Innerscope Research puts it: “Storytellers and marketers in this digital age will continue to face an increasingly complex environment with a higher bar for engaging an audience of consumers.”

This is certainly true. If your opportunity for engagement is brief, and content may be consumed in an unpredictable non-linear way, it is essential to rethink what and how you communicate. Your approach should focus on delivering high quality information in independent, yet interrelated chunks.

Size does matter, but so does quality, consumability and connectedness.

The takeaway:

Content creators, marketers and companies that want to connect with Digital Natives need to rebuild their content construction strategy from the ground up. The days when content or advertising –  audible, narrative, visual – could be delivered pre-packaged to a mass market audience are gone. The good news is this is a generation of voracious information consumers. Like stones skipping on the water and the potentially infinite ripple effect they produce, these consumers come at information from every angle and wants to follow it anywhere. The challenge, however, is to deliver Digital Natives bite-size content that is appealing and engaging (and importantly achieves the business objectives of the company offering it in the first place), while acknowledging their requirement for multi-screen multi-tasking. Content and advertising doesn’t exist in isolation; it must be interconnected and interrelated with the devices, platforms and contexts that now define our digital lives.

Related articles

• Dancing With Digital Natives Helps Brands Keep In Step(mobilegroove.com)

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Businesses need to stay in step with Digital Natives. Yet it can be a struggle to choreograph an elegant dance when Millennials don’t lead or follow in the “traditional” way.

A poll of American workers, conducted by Workplace Options, shows a shared sentiment across age groups that Millennials have a lackadaisical attitude toward workplace responsibility. Sixty-eight percent of respondents feel that Millennials are less motivated to take on responsibility and produce quality work.

Interestingly, among the Millennial respondents themselves, 59 percent agreed they have a different attitude toward workplace responsibility than their peers and more than half acknowledged that workers of their generation are generally less motivated to take on more responsibility.

But is this observation on the mark?  Not if we consider that it’s our definition of work (and its value) that could be out of sync with the reality of what work has become. In his post Leading the “Lazy” Generation Ty Kissel makes some excellent counter points to the perception that young people entering the workforce today are unilaterally lazy. In Kissel’s view, “it’s easy for us grey-hairs to misinterpret their desire to avoid what they consider ‘busy work’ as being lazy, but I’m convinced this is not the case.”

He attributes this, in part, to the fact that this is a generation taught not to accept everything they are told simply because it comes from someone in authority. He also points out how highly collaborative this generation is.

Climbing a flat ladder

Certainly, a generation reared in crowdsourced, socially networked environments will have a much flatter view of corporate culture than those steeped in hierarchies and corporate ladder climbing.

This not only affects their relationship with authority figures, which they will freely question. It also impacts the ways in which they will be motivated to achieve. So while some employers might write younger workers off as “lazy” because they aren’t living for a paycheck, effective managers will tap into what does motivate them to get the most out of them as employees and to take advantage of what their open, crowdsourcing mentality can offer organizations.

Millennials are anytime, anyplace workers. However the fact that they aren’t at their desks 9-5 could easily be misconstrued by more traditional supervisors. Yet flexibility is key not only to attracting and retaining younger workers, but to getting the most out of them.

While workers of all ages increasingly seek workplace flexibility, the 18-34 age group is up to three times more likely than older workers to give up more than 10 percent of their salary for more flexibility at work according to a Harris Interactive survey undertaken on behalf of Mom Corps.

Connect them to connect with them

Organizations that recognize and accept the time-shifted nature of younger workers will certainly do better in retaining them. Beyond that, those that enable and empower this tendency through cloud based collaboration environments, for example, will also get much more out of them in terms of productivity – any place and any time inspiration strikes.

Certainly, the socially-mediated, open, collaborative work style of this generation will make some managers uncomfortable, particularly those who’ve put in hard years climbing the rungs of the corporate ladder the old fashioned way.

Interestingly, though, another thing younger workers seek out in their work and esteem even more than money is mentorship.

According to PricewaterhouseCoopers’ 14th Annual Global CEO Survey , 98 percent of Millennials believe that working with a mentor is a necessary component in their professional development. In fact, they rank training and development three times higher than cash bonuses as their first choice in benefits.

So while this may not be a generation willing to blindly follow a boss’ lead in pursuit of a paycheck, this is certainly one that values wise leadership. And if they are empowered to engage collaboratively by enlightened managers, a mutual mentorship may unfold that will enable both to better achieve.

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Since you’re a reader of MobileGroove, odds are you have one or more mobile devices within arms reach right now. You are pretty likely to fall into the early adopter category as well. However unless you were born since 1980 or so, you are what is known as a digital immigrant. Face it: No matter how techno-hip you are, you find yourself at the precipice of one hell of a generation gap.

The generation that is entering the workforce and increasingly dominating the consumer base is one of digital natives: those who have grown up immersed in digital technologies. So while you may consider your mobile phone an appendage, it’s an artificial limb when compared with a native’s attachment to it.

The fierce desire of digital natives to have what they want the way they want it (and delivered to the device of their choice) changes all the rules. What’s more, digital natives want to share their experiences. They gravitate to companies that allow them this flexibility, and flock to the ones that listen back.

As our employees, our customers and our community members, digital natives are moving our businesses in new directions. Based upon my work co-editing and contributing to the book Dancing With Digital Natives, I’d like to offer you three insights that will help you navigate this new territory and find your way to successful interactions with digital natives.

Privacy has evolved – and so must your approach: Consider a quote from one of the most famous digital native entrepreneurs, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg: “Privacy is no longer a social norm.” At first glance, this may seem like a self-serving comment from someone who profits from extreme openness. But the phenomenal success of Facebook tells a different story.

People once kept their dirty laundry tucked away in their own hampers; this gave way to a generation that would share with a therapist behind closed doors… but over time, we have seen an increasing willingness to flaunt soiled linens on national television. Today, we see a generation sharing information about every aspect of their lives in social networks.

Once we recognize the native’s natural inclination to live publicly, we can participate in ways that are consistent with our business objectives. We can also build models that leverage this openness, both in the way we structure our internal interactions and, of course, interactions with our customers.

Share the wealth: Digital natives don’t only live publically; they are passionate about knowledge sharing, not knowledge hording. Don’t think you have tackled digital collaboration just because you product development wiki, a company Facebook page or a massive Twitter following. We are still taking baby steps when it comes to understanding the knowledge sharing mentality of the digital native. A huge reason why companies that routinely restrict employees’ social media activities and businesses that resist digital natives urge to share knowledge (and add their own) are overdue for a rethink.

If you doubt this, I encourage you to consider the Haul Video phenomenon, in which consumers produce videos demonstrating products, modeling, discussing prices, trends and much more–which they freely share with anyone who’d care to watch on YouTube. Or take a look at Quirky, a place for social product development that was founded by a digital native. The shift to a knowledge sharing mentality is one of the greatest advantages to organizations. Tapping into this cultural phenomenon allows companies and brands to develop and market products digital natives will appreciate.

No hard sell: The final insight I’ll offer here (and the book offers many more, as well as examples of these traits at work): digital natives are interested in interactions, not transactions. Today, we see the rise of a customer base with a very different notion of currency from those before them. Kids today would gladly collect their allowance on PayPal, in the form iTunes gift cards or mobile money.

But it’s not about technology; it’s about communication. Digital natives are excited to do business with organizations that connect with them. This goes beyond marketing, though; we must make it possible for these natives to provide input into the products and services we offer them.

The early leader in this business model was a company called Threadless, whose community creates and helps select t-shirt designs. We can also see this style of interactive business model making inroads into automotive design at Local Motors, and in journalism as community centric media outlets leverage pervasive mobile technologies and encourage their audiences to submit their views, videos, and images from anywhere at anytime.

In summary, the rise of digital natives turns up the pressure on companies, brands and marketers to change how they do business. But don’t assume technology is the answer. Clearly, we must adapt to use the channels (mobile, interactive, social) that natives prefer. But first we have to learn to think like the native and understand that conversation and collaboration come first.