She’s 72, texting her girlfriend in Florida, and dissing her Medicare Part D supplemental health plan on Facebook.

No, it’s not a scene from Freaky Friday – you might remember, the Disney movie (whether Old School with Jodie Foster or updated with Lindsay Lohan).

It’s digital age coming to communications. While we assume that younger people are “digital adults,” it could be tempting to label older consumers as “digital teens” – that is, naïve to the digital world, technologies and applications. That would be a mistake. Here’s a place where older people can be “digital adults,” too, when it comes to communication.

Wells Fargo, the second-largest bank in the U.S., conducted a study into digital age earlier this year. You can gauge your own digital age here on Wells’ Website. The bank is, of course, looking to serve its growing customer base 24×7, on-the-move.

Wells is among the most market-savvy companies, attesting to its place as one of the largest financial services companies in the world. They get market segmentation.

Digital age requires you as a marketer to stop stereotyping your audience. It requires a fine eye for market segmentation. And it’s a very important phenomenon for health and healthcare.

A few years ago, the Pew Internet and American Life Project and Manhattan Research reported that seniors had jumped online to seek health information – especially older women. That was the beginning for older people to get savvy about digital communication. Since then, older health citizens have adopted mobile phones, the mobile web, and increasingly, smartphones.

Text messaging for health has flourished in most of the world – just not in the U.S. There are many structural barriers that account for this, which I’ll postpone for a future Walking the Path post. But texting for health works. The Text4Baby program is a great example that I welcome to the U.S. mobile health scene, targeting maternal and child health. As the U.S. ranks among the lowest developed economies when it comes to infant mortality, Text4Baby promises to be an important strategy to address this public health need.

The target population for Text4Baby is clearly women of child-bearing age. But you don’t have to stretch your imagination too far to ideate a plethora of health-ful messaging programs that can be based on simple texting. Think a bit harder and you’ll come up with all kinds of health apps beyond those which you’ll find in the iTunes Store that address health citizens’ demands – whether for staying healthy, or for managing chronic conditions.

As B.J. Fogg of the Stanford Persuasive Technology Lab has written, “We don’t merely adopt mobile devices; we marry them.” Based on a recent survey of the most beloved consumer brands in the U.S., people love their phones. Health citizens of mature digital age who love their phones are a ready-market to upload engaging and useful applications that can help them bolster their health throughout the day.

Editor’s Note

For more information on older adults’ changing media consumption habits, please see the following data summaries on Living the Path, the Project’s knowledge community.

• Motorola: The Drive to Connect, Not Age Has Most Impact on Media Consumption Habits
• Study Indicates Boomers Are Actively Using the Internet and Social Media
• Adults and Social Network Websites
• Digital Divide Does Not Apply to Mobile Web

Read More from Walking the Path:

1. Mothers, Behavior Change and Mobile: Taking a Closer Look at the Text4Baby Initiative
2. Learning from Ghana: Improving Maternal Health via Mobile
3. On the Digital Divide: Why Improving Access is NOT Enough