In today’s technology-driven society, traditional demographics are irrelevant. Old-school segmentation based on objective criteria like age, sex, and income yields statistics that make nice charts – but are often useless. Using flat metrics to assess today’s audiences is like trying to measure the changing direction and speed of the wind with a yardstick.

Today, audiences blend together online; cutting across generations and traditional demographic lines to create a complex blur that defies simplistic labeling. With that, technology has enabled explosive growth in access to information and content across all segments so that a 59 year old female from the Bronx can share preferences, behaviors, and choices with an 18 year old male in London. Around us, the demographics cement is crumbling into dust.

Identifying and correlating broad-sweeping trends to overall societal metrics is no longer reasonable. The prevalence of digital information is causing audience groups to segregate themselves into smaller and smaller niches in society – let’s call them micro-communities.

These micro-communities aggregate online in ways that defy traditional demographics and cannot be defined by age, gender, social class, or geography. Instead, we should be looking closely at how these micro-communities discover information, build knowledge, and share insights in a digital world.

As marketers we need to step out of the dark ages of traditional demographics and start shining the light on micro-communities to help our clients create more precise, targeted messaging for small but influential audience segments, fragments, even splinters. If we do our jobs, these micro-communities connect online with opinion-shapers, thought-leaders, and trend-drivers and multiply their impact using social media.