Monthly Archives: July 2007

Where is Joi? Argentina, of course!

So I have been off the grid for a couple weeks now and am smack dab in the middle of a South American vacation.  So if I am not replying to your emails, SMSs, friend requests, tweets, pownces, in-network messages and other millenial means of communication, rest assured – I am not dead or wounded.  I am in Argentina, currently Salta, enjoying the cool weather, amazing mountains, delicious food and wonderful people that this counry has to offer.  Unfortunately, my Spanish has degraded this trip from lack of sleep (16 hour plane trips, 22 hour bus rides!) and I am thinking in French instead, but I am on a rather rigid tour and the tour guide is here with us at all times doing just that.  I plan to blog about the personal trip at http://joipod.tumblr.com.

Otherwise, I will be trying to pluck professional sorts of observations throughout the trip (to quote the wise Robin Johnson “You are always on”) and post them here.  I am back and blogging on 8/12 otherwise.

Take care!  Hasta!

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Marketing in virtual worlds

Best Practices Emerge- As advertisers and marketers explore virtual worlds to reach a younger demographic, best practices are emerging. “The first thing to do is spend a significant amount of time in that virtual world,” said Deep Focus’s Schafer. “Unless you understand the behavior of the people in that virtual world you are going to come across as disingenuous or inauthentic.”

Virtual Worlds Aren’t Just for Reaching Adults Anymore

This is such a great point, but on the bottom of an article that talks alot about Whyville (you guys are amazing PR machines!).

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LinkedIn etc bashing

Wow.  Us social networking early adopters are a finnicky bunch, eh?  I understand completely that you may be becoming bored or have just out-growing last week’s new social network, I feel it – I am right there in the deep end with all of you.  But I feel as if there is a lack of comprehensive thinking in some of the blog posts lately, especially in regards to LinkedIn.

I posted about LinkedIn yesterday and about how many of my old contacts are now discovering it.  SURE, it doesn’t have feeds that give you up-to-the-minute updates on what all of your contacts are doing.  SURE, I can’t waste an hour playing with silly games and add-ons while navigating through it.  SURE, it seems to be a bit more buttoned-up in tone.  But I think that’s fine for LinkedIn.  It kinda works for them.

After the early adopters, there is the rest of the internet population to think about.  And I am not referring to the dinosaurs who still brag about not knowing how to make their VCR stop blinking 12:00.  I am talking about late 20-somethings and ealry 30-somethings who have JUST assimmilated into myspace.  These are the bulk of the population online now, outside of kids, and they are not tired of LinkedIn.  They are just getting introduced to it.

Our job as early adopters, imho, is to fix the networks for the masses.  So LinkedIn doesn’t work for your hourly updatable workflow.  Fine, use Facebook and Twitter/Pownce, but don’t openly bash another network as useless because you have a mild form of ADHD.  Rather, a more constructive approach would be to recommend changes and improvements.  And not ones that make it more like Facebook.  Facebook is more like Facebook.  There are tons of ways to leverage the communty and tone that LinkedIn has created.  Adding more usability and community functions would behoove that network much more that opening it’s API to random time wasting widgets. 

We are entering the next wave and it’s exciting!  The second shift of the population is now comfortable with the general audience social networks and are starting to explore the niche social networks.  This is what we all predicted and it’s happening.  Yay us!  Using the analogy of a party – we have been setting up the party decorations for a year now, the guests are finally arriving.  Try to sober up a bit so you don’t scare the guests away.

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Social Networking On and Offline

I had a wonderful coffee with a new colleague this morning, Chris Rollyson. We talked about SO many wonderful things that have been on my mind, and my blog, for sometime now. We covered topics including the importance of content AND management in online community strategy, integrating customers and their experiences into the product development process, cultural divides that are forming in this new digital age and methods to bridge those divides among other things. It is always great to talk shop with someone in the field, especially when there is no project attached and it’s just philosophizing.

One of the great things about social networking online is all of the new OFFLINE contacts you can translate that into. I met Chris through another colleague, Steven Jones from CapableNetworks, who I met at the Online Community unconference last month. We reconnected at the recent Chicago TechCocktail, where he introduced me to Chris. I am now, of course, connected to both of them on various online social networks, but have also had the opportunity to have great talks with them both offline. In both cases, we all were able to read up on each other’s professional interests and background so that we could jump right into conversations form the material we read and connections we saw online.

Basically I just wanted to post about the power of networking on and offline and how, if you set your goal as establishing relationships with people, rather than collecting business cards you will never use, it is so rewarding to get out there, virtually and not.

On a similar note… I recently resynced my gmail address book to LinkedIn to check if any of my new contacts were already on the LinkedIn network and saw an interesting trend. Many friends who were already in my address book last time I synced now popped up with new LinkedIn accounts. When I sent them emails saying as much and requesting to connect, more than a few said that they had just signed up and weren’t clear on the value of LinkedIn. This is reminiscent of early 2006 when people were joining MySpace without really understanding why.

I told my newly LinkedIn friends stories of finding jobs for friends by leveraging my network and my friends network. I also told them to hang in there, as I felt that site was going to get better as more and more people join. Chris Rollyson has written an unofficial guide to LinkedIn for executives for those of you fielding similar questions form your friends/colleagues.

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Tons afoot in kids virtual world new

Virtual Worlds News: Habbo Partners with MTV’s AddictiveGames

Virtual Worlds News: Disney’s Toontown Switching to Ad-Based Model

Virtual Worlds News: Barbie Girls Growing with 50,000 Members per Day

I am watching all this kids virtual worlds stuff quite a bit lately and thought I would share my sources.

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The Legalities and Ethics of U13 Community Hurdles

Been busy the last week helping build a great, new community with a cool group of people. I’m very excited about it, but everytime I do this, I am reminded about what a tough job it is.

I will start by saying that I preach the gospel of COPPA (Children’s Online Privacy and Protection Act), almost to the point of evangelism. I believe and care deeply about protecting and educating kids online as to the parameters of privacy and protecting their personal information. But, oy god, is it hard to strategize and design an online community for kids (or one that may attract kids)!

There are 2 main areas that I often see glazed over when designing communities that may be used by (or attract) people under 13 years old (U13), specifically in the US:

Legal Concerns

  • COPPA legislation is about access to private info for a specific population (U13′s). It is not about the content on your site (unless of course that content is the personal info of U13′s). The heart behind it is protecting kids, but the actual items on the checklist you need to verify that exist on your site are about limiting the access to those under 13.
  • Because of this, in order to stay on the right side of the law, site operators need only to put the minimum barriers to entry they can and still stay in the right according to the law.
  • This usually means a check box certifying that you are over 13, a message that says you have to be over 13 to join or a limited drop down menu for only ages above 13. By doing this, you are “restricting access” to only those people above the age of 13.

Yet, this does nothing to deter lying and it certainly does little for an explanation as to why you are putting this hurdle up in the first place. Which leads me to the other area that is often simply forgotten in the design process:

Ethical Concerns

  • The other side of this is to really believe in the heart behind the legislation and make up for where it is lacking.
  • If you are not able to manage an audience of under 13 year olds, this means putting the same barriers to entry up mentioned before, but explaining WHY they are there, urging the users not lie about their ages, detailing what will happen if they do and then actually caring out those consequences when needed.
  • If you are targeting under 13 year olds, you need to decide whether you have everything as canned communication, whether you have the ability to monitor all the content before it goes live, whether you have the ability to obtain verifiable parental consent and the ability to keep a staff managed and up to date on how to best manage and help your community.

If you tell a kid to not do something without explaining why you are telling them, you are basically inviting them to develop their own conclusions as to why that rule exists. Sometimes they will guess correct, sometimes they won’t. Kids online know they have to be over 13 to go on many site, but many of them are not aware of why.

It doesn’t take much more effort when you are designing your site to put a bit of info, even a sentence, that explains the reasoning behind it. Even if you aren’t clear on why, a simple “hey, we will get in trouble if we have people under 13 and if we find out you lied, we will have to kick you out” will suffice. Honesty works, at least that’s what we tell kids, right?

If you can’t go the extra mile to make sure you are right by the law and by the ethics of communities, take a second to think about whether the community aspect is one you need to implement. Sure, community is the hot, new marketing buzz word of the moment. But if you cannot dedicate the necessary resources needed to start one and then maintain one, you shouldn’t start one at all.

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How to approach youth social networks theorectically

There are many different perspectives to put on online social networking and it is important to know where one is coming from when talking about social networking and youth. The perspective(s) one has will be very different whether one is a parent with a teenage daughter on MySpace, a marketing executive interested in the target group “14 to 20,” a journalist looking for the next big news story on young people and new media, a youngster using a social networking site as part of everyday life or a researcher investigating how young people are using social networking sites.

35 Perspectives on Online Social Networking (SocialComputingMagazine.com)

This is a great article that details the 35 perspectives from which one can approach a youth oriented (12-18) social network.  These include from learning, social, democratic, love or surveillance perspectives and many more.  It is quite thorough, yet there is a bit of overlap in some of them.  She also goes onto describe the 6 different categories these perspectives fall into. 

I am really happy that this sort of research and theoretical thinking is being done now on an academic level.  I contemplated a few years ago whether to go the academic or business route with online communities.  I chose business with twinges of regret, born primarily from the lack of academic research in the area.  The more articles like this and danah boyd’s work, the better I feel about my decision.  I’ve always been more of a practical approach person who dabbles in theory, though. 

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"Kids” influence over parent’s buying

Now, a study conducted by Burson-Marsteller in partnership with Penn, Schoen & Berland has released a study called “The Youth-fluentials,” detailing characteristics of persuasive youth ages 10 to 18.

Nearly 100% of the group said they influenced their friends’ decisions about clothes and music, and over 80% carried weight with their parents’ purchasing decisions.

Kids and Teens Influencing Purchases - eMarketer
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Kids and Teens Influencing Purchases – eMarketer

I love this article. I am not complaining. The more data that can be recieved from these populations the better. It helps the marketers AND the content makers.

BUT… Please Stop combining 10 year olds with 18 year olds!

I totally buy the assertion that a 10-13 year old can influence their parents food and clothing choices. I even buy that a 15 or 16 year old can influence their parent’s car purchases. But I want to meet the parent of a 10 or 11 year old that actualy listens to their kid in their car purchase. MAYBE there is a especially cunning automobile afficianado developing in your 4th grade son or daughter. But if there is, I highly doubt they have the comprehensive lay of the land knowledge to understand all the variables that go into a car purchase. If they do, they are an anomoly and large scale marketing campaigns should not be designed around their existence, imho. 

I focus on small age ranges of “kids” in the various projects I do – 10-12, 6-9, 3-6, etc.  Each of these age groups has widely varying characteristics from the next, as well as within the range. To lump 10-12 with the 15-18 demo seems similar to me as combining goth and preppy demos.  SURE there are a couple similarities, but they are more differences.  Lumping the age groups together also leads to false inferences.  I would be fascinated to know the more targeted demo numbers – do the %s change when you look at 10-13 vs 14-18?

And for those cases where that 11 year old is a wiz kid in a certain area, take advantage of the opportunity to help them out.  If your kid knows a ton about technology and you want to involve them in the purchase for your family’s new computer or family cell phone plan, make it a group learning project.  See it as an opportunity for you to learn more about that subject, and also for you to get to know your kid more.  Sure they learn a lesson from making the decision on their own and “just doing it” for their parent, but they learn a more powerful one if it’s a group effort.

(Wow, that was quite the high horse post – eek  :) )

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