Even if you’re not particularly interested in reaching this audience, there are four reasons you should pay close attention to this phenomenon:

1) What 18- to 24-year-olds do today, other age groups will do tomorrow. Take instant messaging, for instance. It was once the exclusive province of teenagers, with their wacky secret language (ALOL for “actually laughing out loud”) and emoticons ( : - !). But more and more companies are introducing IM as a workplace communication channel, meaning soon we’ll all be saying, “GTG!”

2) New media are communication forms of very few words. Yes, blog authors have been known to hold forth, but almost all other new media on the list require boiling messages down to their essence. New media demands you get right to the point—and it’s probably not a coincidence that 18- to 24-year-olds have almost no tolerance for long content.

3) These new communication channels are extremely customizable. For instance, instead of requiring viewers to watch an entire television show at the scheduled time, TiVo lets them choose when and how much they watch. Another example: web radio, including podcasts, allows listeners to create the equivalent of personal radio stations.

4) New media are also highly interactive. Not only are users experiencing media their way, they’re also participating and engaging with others.

It all gets back to a point I’ve made before: Expectations about internal communication are influenced by the media they use externally. So if your communication is still too word-based, static and one-way, it’s not keeping pace. And if your workforce includes a significant percentage of 20-somethings, you’ve got an even bigger problem.

For more information about the BIGresearch study, visit www.bigresearch.com click on “News” and on the 6/22/05 new media item.