Social Media has been a big topic in marketing for a while now. Last month, Forrester released a report showing that more than 50 percent of marketers planned to increase their investment in social media and predictions place this area as the strongest for growth in 2009.

With conversations coming online through networks like Facebook and Twitter, marketers need to move to take advantage of these new communications channels to reach both existing and prospective customers. To date, the traditional online methods of advertising to this audience have not been successful, but this is because they have not been able to engage with the user. Solving this is a big challenge for marketing today.

This is not something that can wait either.

Rebecca Jennings at Forrester Research posted some statistics earlier this month on how the Baby Boomer generation (43-63 year olds) in Europe are actively using Social Media today.

The research shows that almost half of the younger baby boomers (43-52 year olds) are participating in Social Media today compared to approximately 40% of older baby boomers (53-63 year olds). This is not something that is restricted to Generation X or Y. You can see the country breakdown below.

Twitter (which has seen phenomenal growth last quarter) and Facebook (which is also growing in Europe) are focussed on generating conversations online and continuously trying to reduce the barriers to creating content. Over time, this will reduce the number of spectators and force marketers to become more actively involved and closer to their audience.