- Fashionspace (social networking for fashionistas last year is evidently doing pretty well. And check out Coolspotters where you can find out how to dress like your favorite celeb. Plus Stardoll launches an app for girls to design their own virtual clothes) (Reuters) (Media Post, reg. required)
Yesterday I had the privilege to speak at the national Boys & Girls Clubs conference here in San Francisco. I gave my Totally Wired talk twice -- once in the morning and once in the afternoon. I had one hour for each session and quickly realized my talk ended up filling the entire hour -- it's like every time I give it there is more to talk about. One bit of information that surprised me and saddened me a bit was that many of the clubs block access to sites like MySpace and Facebook. In reality it shouldn't have surprised me. The fears and concerns were the same fears and concerns I've heard from parents and teachers across the country. I was told the challenge is that they are not staffed well enough to monitor each teen's computer use.
What bums me out about this is that these clubs often serve low income youth who may not have a laptop or PC at home. So it's essentially one less place they can go to experience the social media their middle class peers are using all the time. It's also a missed opportunity to offer these teens real guidance on using these sites. I was also told the Boys & Girls Clubs have an amazing internet safety program -- and I'm sure it is very comprehensive....in its coverage of safety. My guess is that it doesn't really cover ethics or information literacy. The other concern they have is that if something happens from one of their computers, they'll have angry parents to answer to.
I understand the need to limit access to these sites at school when teens are supposed to be focused on learning. Though I would argue that this, too, can happen without actually blocking. But Boys & Girls Clubs are spaces to hang out in, just as MySpace and Facebook are virtual spaces to hang out and connect in.
Hopefully, I was able to persuade at least some of the people listening (ok, not the guy who told me I talked too much, that he dozed off a few times and wished I would have taught them all how to create MySpace profiles), but some of the people there to think about unblocking these sites.
I don't think it's enough for me to just say, "unblock." So here is what I would propose after school programs like the Boys & Girls Clubs should do. Invite parents to a talk similar to what I do -- emphasizing the positives along with the challenges, and the reality that these kids need to have access to these sites to be competitive in the future. The idea is to get them more comfortable and less afraid. Develop a mandatory workshop for any Boys & Girls Club teens who want to log on from the Club -- BUT have it taught by teens aka their peers. The workshop should be fun, engaging and cover privacy, ethics and some information literacy. Youth workers can identify the teens who are really into the computers and train them to be peer educators. Then create a contract/agreement between the teens and the Club around using the internet. If they mess up, they lose access for a period of time. If this is all done in a way that treats these teens as if they won't mess up, they probably won't.
We have to educate, not legislate (the latest attempt) and block -- and not deny access to teens who will otherwise be left behind.
I wanted to let Ypulse readers know about a couple of great events happening -- one IRL (in real life) in the Bay Area and another streamed live online. First up is an event put on by SDForum, the leading Silicon Valley not-for-profit organization providing an unbiased source of information and insight to the technology community for the past 23 years. The SDForum has also been a valued partner of Ypulse in helping us promote our annual Mashup event. Next week (May 13) they will be hosting Teens Plugged In! Their Second Annual Teens in Technology Conference in San Jose. This conference really focuses on supporting teen entrepreneurs and seems incredibly cool. Highlights include:
- Profile in Entrepreneurship: Anshul Samar, Alchemist Empire, Inc.
- High School Panel
- Marketing to Teens: A View from the Tech Community
- What will Happen? Teens in the Workforce
- Profile in Entrepreneurship: Salina Truong, Gumball Capital
- Investing in Teens and Teen Products: What Does it Take to Succeed?
- What's Happening with Teen Entrepreneurs?
- Inspiring Teens in Technology and Entrepreneurship: What Non-Profits are Doing
Ypulse publisher Charles Pelton will be at the SDForum event -- silver hair, black Converse high tops. If you see him, say hello.
The other event is the live webcasttomorrow of the Joan Ganz Cooney Center Inaugural Symposium, Logging Into the Playground: How Digital Media Are Shaping Children's Learning. I was invited to attend, but am speaking at another event in San Jose on May 13th (which is why I won't be at the SDForum event) and then catching a Red Eye to Toronto (I'm tired just thinking about this). Didn't want to zig zag across the country. This event is packed with heavy hitters from industry, academia and the non-profit/foundation space. It is literally the embodiment of what I wrote about needing to happen in my BusinessWeek Online column a few months back. Check out their full agenda here (.pdf). Of course it starts streaming at 6 a.m. for us west coast folks (ouch). I hope they will put video up on YouTube later as well.
Today's Ypulse Guest Post is from Ryan Okum, president of StreetWise Concepts + Culture, a social media agency focused on the youth market. If you work in youth media or marketing and have an idea for a guest post, just email me.
The Golden Rules for Engaging Youth Online: Keeping your brand fresh and building connections to create a base of youth advocates
Today the biggest challenge in marketing to youth is the rapid pace with which trends emerge, creating a need for brands to stay fresh and relevant. This challenge is compounded by a youth market that is increasingly product-savvy and informed on the many choices available to them; which means that brands must establish authentic connections to best engage these young, intelligent consumers.
Having spent more than 10 years working closely with the youth market, I have gained crucial insight into what strategies are most successful in mobilizing young people and generating buzz for brands. The most important principle to follow when marketing to young people is to never pretend to be something you're not online, as youth are the first to see past quick sales attempts.
Here are four golden rules for keeping your brands fresh and building long-lasting connections with youth:
Get personal
Involve your customers in your campaigns and create a community of advocates - who better to learn from than your peers? It's a noisy, often impersonal world: On average consumers are hit with two marketing messages a minute. Nothing helps break through all of that like engaging your audience in a relevant way.
Experiment with unconventional platforms
An element of entertainment is key to engaging with youth, as they are constantly bombarded with information, communication and entertainment. You need to create an interactive environment with breakthrough creative that actually engages. Take Amazon's Mechanical Turk tool: It creates a dialogue and surrounding community by allowing people to post problems for others to solve in a compelling way. Imagine building audience loyalty with a similar tool that enables fans to provide feedback directly on a movie script or video game plot.
Integrate your online with off-line campaigns and go mobile
Create ongoing connections wherever and whenever young people are engaging. According to a recent OTX Research study, anywhere from a third to half of teens say mediums such as TV, magazines and advertising in general are still among their most important influences. Additionally, young people are exposed to images daily just by utilizing public transportation and traveling around their city or town. This understanding of the ebb and flow of humans on a given day was behind the Halo 3 viral campaign that included a group called "The Society for the Ancients" handing out seemingly innocuous flyers on city streets. But Halo-savvy passersby picked up on some visual clues and ended up a website that took the story deeper.
People don't exist in a vacuum or rely on a single medium. The power of an impression builds with the number of different ways your message is disseminated. Repetition, in a variety of media, can be your best friend.
Kids are increasingly communicating on mobile devices, whether it be through IM or Twitter. Smart campaigns leverage the communities and immediacy that those mediums offer.
Leverage new social networking tools
As the Web becomes modularized through the use of widgets and gadgets, there's an opportunity to use those technologies to spread a community virally in the social-networking world. A band's latest songs, for example, can be packaged in a widget and spread to many different audiences. A clip from a new movie, made portable through YouTube embed codes, moves quickly among the youth market and can become fodder for additional mash-up content.
Building a social-networking environment can be a very important technique, not only to build community but enable a new type of connection that leads to increased word of mouth (WOM), better products and services, and a more engaged customer base.
- Location-based social networking (Google Maps meets Facebook with Socialight opening up its tools to mobile developers - Michael Sharon, Socialight's CEO, will be a speaker at the Ypulse Mashup in July!) (Mashable)
- Aniboom goes mobile (the ugc animation site also happens to be a Mashup speaker) (Media Post, reg. required)
- Rapping about 'The Economist' (the song, along with a new "Economist" Facebook group, is bringing an unexpected young surge of readers to the periodical) (Guardian)
- 'Truth' ads are a tad out of touch (claims AdRants citing ancient quotes from now-deceased tobacco bigwigs has little sway with teens)
Yesterday I posted about an event called "Movement" and linked to everyone except the event itself. Here is the link to the Movement site. Also, Ypulse reader Ryan wrote to tell me about another "trend" in the Christian youth space, which I found fascinating. He said:
BTW, relating back to the same section that was speaking about youth ministers reaching out into youth culture one of the trends that's recently become a discussion point for youth that are both liberal and religious is deciding whether to call themselves Christian or not, they like the socially active and positive sides of Christianity (actively trying to make their neighborhoods and cities better, helping the homeless and troubled, etc) but don't want the stigma of fundamentalism that the word implies.
Every young person knows someone who has lost an interview, a job, or some sort of professional opportunity because of scandalous activity posted on their public social networking profiles. An article in today's Washington Post (reg. required) reported a recent increase in the use of aliases on websites like MySpace and Facebook. More and more people are creating alter-egos to keep strangers out and and unfiltered information intact. Resorting to a fictional name sounds a bit extreme, especially with the prevalence of privacy controls and ease of "untagging" unflattering photographs. It also defeats the purpose of utilizing the "networking" aspect of these networking sites. It is awfully tough to climb the proverbial ladder under someone else's name.
Deleting an existing account and creating an alter ego is, in most cases, unnecessary. Say you just graduated from college and snagged your first "grown up" job. After your first day of work, you receive a friend request from your boss on Facebook. What are your options?
1) Decline friend request. After all, this is your boss, not your buddy.
2) Accept friendship, but only allow limited profile viewing.
3) Delete your hard-partying pictures. You're a professional now, welcome to the real world.
Recent grads might miss those photos, but there are certainly benefits to keeping a profile with your actual name. Online networking can be endlessly beneficial, especially for young professionals who are moving to new cities and starting new jobs. And for those still on the job hunt, social networking sites can also help uncover the perfect job - though preferably not under that fake name. The New York Times (reg. required) recently reported a rise in utilizing Facebook for the sole purpose of business networking. New applications from CareerBuilder.com and Jobster.com even help people kick off the job search from the comfort of their own personal profiles.
While Facebook can be a daily reminder of what college life was like, it also has the potential to be a shiny free resume for everyone to see. In the end, it comes down to deciding whether snapshots of beer bongs and keg stands or business contacts and career options mean more to young people leaving college. No one said it was going to be an easy decision.
- Do Hard Things (Twin brothers Alex and Brett Harris write about what they call the Rebelution...the notion that teens should reject the low-expectations of youth culture.)
- 'Patterson Aplenty' (Interesting background story to the YA and adult marketing approach with the Maximum Drive series...I guess a fan is a fan.) (Publisher's Weekly)
- The Host (By Stephenie Meyer, author of Twilight is the talk of the town. We're often talking about children's author's trying their hands at writing for adults here at Ypulse Books, so this is an interesting change. I'm curious to see how she fares.) (Omnivoracious)
- More about Stephenie Meyer (This is a great article, and I'm sorry but what stood out to me as though it were in bold faced type was that she wrote TwilightWHILE HOME WITH THREE CHILDREN UNDER 5 !!!!!!!!!!! She is supernatural!) (TIME.com)
- Good food for thought (For librarians, sometimes parents' and kid patrons' needs don't match. What do you do?) (Read Roger)
Check out Entertainment Weekly's "Read the Book: 23 Disappointing Movie Adaptations." It definitely brought back some very painful memories like Mike Myers' "Cat and the Hat," but I found it interesting. There are so many films that are adapted from books these days -- more than you realize, too many to even try and list. Are these truly the worst or simply the most recognizable? The books/film on this list are among some of our most popular (The DaVinci Code) and classic texts (The Scarlet Letter). That's what made me start to opine that perhaps this list has more to do with how high our expectations are. If you didn't read Vanity Fair would you like the film? I did.
Does the quality of the book have anything to do with these expectations? The Golden Compass was the first among the photos and I don't know if that means it 's #1 on the list, but that seems a little harsh. Yeah, I agree it was a little bit of a let-down, but I was prepared. On the contrary, I didn't expect anything nearly as wonderful as the book. I knew it couldn't be done. I think that allowed me to enjoy the movie for what it was: one version of the story -- a different illustration, if you will. I also wonder if it had been so long since I'd read the books, that I wasn't as committed to my own mental impressions?
In the case of Twilight, I don't even want to see the trailer. (I linked to it, but I didn't watch.) It's too soon. I'm just finishing New Moon and I am savoring every minute. I want Bella and Edward exactly as I've created them in my mind before giving into someone else's vision. (My Edward is a handsome cross between Bright Eyes' Conor Oberst and the guy who played Mark in Showtime's 'Meadowlands'. My Bella is more Ellen Page (Juno) than Kristen Stewart.) I'll come around, I know, but for now I'm not ready.
1. The keynotes: MTV's Ian Rowe on how they are rocking the vote 2.0 style, Antti Ohrling, Co-Founder of Blyk, the first free mobile service in the world for youth 16-24, award-winning director Michael Franzini presenting photos and video of over "100 Young Americans" and Damon Whiteside, SVP of marketing at Walt Disney Records (just confirmed!)
2. The conversations: I'll be interviewing the creators of the popular and hilarious Midwest Teen Sex Show about using humor to reach teens while Mortified founder Dave Nadelberg will be interviewing a special guest (tba) about how teens have changed and what essentially remains the same throughout time (mortifying angst!)
3. The panels: So many good ones: Girls are the new geeks, Totally wired hip hop, How teen sites can prevent cyberbullying, Totally wired teen superstars, mobile, social networking, widgets and apps, user generated content....see the full agenda for panels and panelists here. (um, MC Hammer, founder of DanceJam.com, is a panelist!)
4. The attendees: Last year we had over 350 on site -- people kept telling me how impressed they were...with each other! Ypulse readers are a special breed - smart, passionate about youth and very connected. I continue to hear about friendships formed and business partnerships forged.
5. Lunch: I'm not talking chow, but our "user generated" lunchtime roundtables suggested and moderated by our attendees. We make our lunch long enough for you all to eat and talk shop.
7. Exclusive screening: "American Teen" followed by a panel featuring three of the teens from the film. Check out their Facebook page here.
8. Case studies: You'll hear best practices throughout panels and from our sponsors: Fuse, Alcatel Lucent, Premise, Mr. Youth and MyYearbook. There are only two sponsored case study slots left! Email us for more info...
9. Research: Our research sponsor C&R Research will be sharing their latest findings from their TeensEyes panel of teens and tweens.
10. Price: Compared to other youth marketing conferences, Ypulse is a steal. If you register before our early adopter deadline May 30, it's even cheaper. And we are one of the only marketing conferences offering an affordable non-profit rate. Don't wait -- register now and I'll see you in July!
'Deathbowl to Downtown' (cool looking doc about the New York City skateboarding scene from the 70s 'till now - thanks Bill!)
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