When I was at the Sex:Tech conference earlier in the week, I got one of those "how do we reach them online" questions. I've written a lot on Ypulse about the need for a dual strategy of going where they are in order to get them to come to you, how it's just as important to invest in a social networking strategy and a mobile strategy as your own microsite or landing page. We have seen this in the media space recently with Flip.com's decision to evolve into a Facebook application and the news organizations pushing out to MySpace, Facebook and YouTube with their 2008 election coverage. Derick Oien, who was on my panel at the event, also emphasized targeting your outreach, i.e. MySpace and Facebook are great because everyone is on one or the other or both, but if you're trying to reach a specific subculture or niche, you should also target there as well - i.e. urban, action sports, high school athletes.

Part of the reason I'm raising this again today is that I've been thinking about social marketing efforts that are still focused on pushing teens to their own URLs. One of the reasons I'm trying to launch this virtual peer counselor application to be named later thingee is because there are too many redundant resource sites out that not enough young people visit. Even well-financed effort like FOX's Pause campaign, that receive prime time PSA exposure (unlike most PSAs, according to this new study, Media Post, reg. required, ironically from Kaiser, a Pause partner) are still expecting teens to go to their site and read a bunch of text about wellness issues.

If we really want to reach teens with this information, we have to not only go to where they are, but create an application with them that is informative, effective and just as importantly, fun. It has to be fun in order to go viral. I'm not knocking all of the great resource sites that are out there or even the fact that there are multiple social networking sites around teen activism, I just think there has to be a way to come together and do something BIG.

On a related note, AdRants pointed out these two PSAs here and here from Michael Fanzini, who recently published 100 Young Americans, over on Think MTV (the image in this entry is from these videos). They are meant to raise awareness around the issue of genocide by asking what if the tactics used during the Holocaust were used here in the United States, today. They're quite provocative, but do you think they succeed at inspiring action?

Posted by anastasia