Adventures In Digital Marketing

Both Clickz and SearchRank (amongst others at technorati and the BBC) are talking at the moment about the recent passing in the USA last week of the Deleting Online Predators Act (DOPA) H. R. 5319 and the fact that with it they have taken a step towards trying to control and protect kids from the growing number of online predators who use unfortunately frequent social networking sites such as Bebo and MySpace.

I’ve not fully attempted to digest the contents of this bill yet, and to be honest I doubt I will except from a potential marketing point of view, but I wanted to comment not on the bill mainly, but on something I experienced over the weekend which made me feel like a complete amateur in terms of using the web and a PC/Mac.

That thing was sitting in front of the computer on Saturday night with several of my neices and nephews at a family party.  With ages ranging from between 12 and 16 they were prime MySpace/Bebo users and it was only a matter of time before they loaded up firefox and logged into their account and MSN messenger.

The way these kids were using technology was in many ways completely and utterly alien to me.  In terms of MSN messenger the main things I noticed were:

Long User Names

These kids have MASSIVE names on MSN.  Not necessarily their login names, i guess that’s not possible, but the name that you can choose to display (which in my case is normally Howard Scott).  The names choosen were absolutely huge, containing not just a name, or even words, but multiple emoticons, slang and “txt spk” style phrases. The names were so long in places that even in a screen res of 1024×768 with the MSN window maximised, the names were wider than the screen.  For me this would make it impossible to tell who was who, and easily scan the display to find the person I want, but they seemed to have no problem doing that.

So Many WIndows!

Another thing that I noticed was the sheer volume of windows that they had open at any one time.  Not just three or four different chat windows, but easily six or seven of them at once.  Quite how they concentrate on what exactly is going on is beyond me.

Picture very important

Obviously the picture displayed on the MSN window is very important to these kids.  So much so that the default one that MSN put in for them (the horses for those familiar) was greeted with sheer disgust and forced them to go off in search of their own Bebo home page and download an image which could then be uploaded back to MSN.  The speed with which the kids did the whole “right click, save as, etc.etc.” technique was astounding and I don’t think i could have done it any faster.

My other thoughts are to do with the way they were using Bebo:

Page Content

Page content was very important.  All of the kids (five in all) had at least one YouTube style video linked into their page, such as Angry Kid, and when I asked them why they choose that video I got the default answer of “because it’s cool”.  Other things were images, lot of flickr style thumbnail galleries, and blog style comment boards.  Lots of comments too!

“Adult” Themed names

So what I mean by this is that the names that were choosen to represent themselves online seemed to mainly revolve around an adolescent sense of what is “adult” and, by association, “sexy”.  All of the names, particularly the girls in the group, were of the theme “XXx_SEXY_SARAH_xXX” and so on.  I guess this is in a way just normal kids behaviour, making themselves appear more “in the know” and experienced than their peers. It’s quite worrying in a way though, especially when you take DOPA into account!

Photos

As mentioned, photos are a big part of this as well, and almost all of them were done in the “angles” way, that is to make the user look as cool and “sexy” (I use that with great caution) as possible.  Again, if you think about DOPA it’s a worrying thing.  It’s fine for kids to do this to show off and look cool in front of their mates, but it’s so easy for people with dangerous interests to get online and find these youngsters that it becomes very worrying. In some ways you can see why Schools in the US are going so far as banning the use of social network sites to stop this.

Quite simply I found the whole experience of watching them use the PC and MSN/Bebo in this way completely alien - i just didn’t understand what on earth they were doing half of the time (I guess that (a) I am getting old! and (b) maybe that is how people my own age feel when i am using a PC in front of them?) but it was an interesting way to pass five mins.

I was hoping to get some insight into how marketing might use this audience in the Bebo type environment, but to be honest I didn’t have a chance to even this about that and the above “observations” were all I could gather.

Certainly I think something does need to be done to help protect kids like these from being abused on social networking sites, but whether this needs to be government, or a private organisation like MySpace/News Corp. I guess remains to be seen.  So far though it looks like the USA and Australia isn’t going to wait for that decision to be made for them and are putting their own measures in place already.

Howard

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technorati tags:bebo, myspace, dopa, 5319, online+safety, MSN+Messenger, kids, protection, social+networking

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