The Millennial Generation, Generation Y, Echo Boomers, or the Hip-Hop Generation; call them what you will, but the question is – are you actively targeting them or at least accounting for them in your marketing strategy?  And, do you know how to effectively reach them?

The Millennial Generation is defined as those born between 1977 and 1996 and they represent something that we haven’t seen in a long time – a dominant generation on par with the Baby Boomer Generation. By many definitions, the size of the Millennial Generation is approximately 79 Million people, making it larger than the Baby Boomers. 

While generations are grouped primarily by trends in birth rates, their actions are defined by their shared experiences and in the case of the Millennials, those shared experiences start with the internet, and include social networks, cell phones, laptops and text messaging. They have very different habits relating to television, network news and the media world, in general. Typically, Millennials are watching less television, and less network news. They don’t use the yellow pages, and aren’t swayed by blatant advertising. They get a lot of their information and perspective from their social networks, they look for authenticity, they multitask, they Google, they IM (instant message), and they blog. In short, Millennials are much different than Generation X, the Baby Boomers or The Silent Generation.

So, what does this have to do with being an attorney? Well – by the year 2010, 50% of people within the United States between ages 18 and 49 will be Millennials. At some point, it will be in every law firm’s best interest to account for Millennials, and identify the different ways to reach them in your business strategy and marketing plan, if you are not yet doing so. While I’m not suggesting that you jump online and build a MySpace page, most likely you are not accounting for this audience today, so it’s time to begin the research and planning process.