I'll write a bit about Ze Frank and Marshal Cohen's talks at the end, but the bulk of this post will focus on danah boyd's talk from yesterday. What I love about danah is that she is a straight shooter. She basically told this room full of marketers desperate to get on teens' friends lists, that those teens think that's creepy and invasive. Why? Because it's THEIR Space -- even if it's public (which most teen profiles aren't anymore). She had a great analogy of teens telling their parents, "It's MY ROOM." And the parents telling teens "It's MY HOUSE." Just as teens put "keep out" signs on their bedroom doors, teens have created "structural walls" to keep everyone but their friends out on social networking sites. What are these walls? Lying about their age (though putting in real birthdays so their friends will wish them happy birthday) and only being visible to friends and not adults.

Given that teens primarily want to socialize on these sites with friends they know IRL, danah believes that in 5 years the next big move will be to mobile (which I mentioned in my last post) and that it will be more valuable than social networks. Why mobile? It's portable, kids are getting them younger, and it's THEIRS. Despite the challenges of plans that limit text messages or phone to phone inoperability, she said teens know their friends models and limits down to times when they can and can't receive messages. In order for this space to fully take off, teens need to have all their friends and the ability to message them in one phone. She mentioned the Sidekick as having achieved this with a subgroup of urban teens.

She also pointed out that teens don't see going online as "going online." It's going to see their friends. Same with phones. It's not talking on the phone it's talking to friends. She mentioned that in her research, a third of teens were not that into social networking, but are on because their friends created a profile for them (which is also why they forget their passwords). She also didn't buy vitual worlds as reaching mass adoption by teens because in her opinion, teens think avatars are too babyish or something they did when they were younger online.

In terms of what has worked with marketing on social networking sites, danah mentioned stuff that naturally goes viral like the Dove campaign, and the entertainment oriented marketing, which makes sense -- XMen, music and takeovers. Having a fan page is great so people can find you and get in touch...but if you want to track and see what teens are saying about you on social networking sites, you'll have to get that data from the company (since most profiles are now set to private). And...in case you didn't realize it, most middle schoolers have MySpace or Facebook accounts -- they're aspirational and lying about their age is NBD.

Marshal Cohen - he was a very dynamic speaker who is not a consultant but a "growth coach" (wink wink). Most of what he talked about and something I haven't heard presented before was how products must now be marketed to youth and their parents and sometimes even their grandparents (think Wii). You can read about this in the TIME.com piece focusing on how we're all sharing fashion, tech/electronics and more across different ages now so each product must have multiple messages.

Ze Frank - very funny as always. Shared his experience with his own website and spun this into a theory about community engagement -- most user generated content is crap. So you have two choices: the content forward model or the content experience model. Basically content forward requires tons of work sifting through all the crap to find the good stuff. Content experience is all about engaging your users at different levels, celebrating their embrace of web authorship tools and the experience of creating content....even if it's crap.

Posted by anastasia