Derek E. Baird :: Barking Robot

Weekly Wrap: Microsoft Courier, Conan vs. Leno (again), Simon Fuller's Social TV Experiment, Content Strategy, Teen Brain, Cybertots, 39% in USA Don't Use Internet & More!

Microsoft's Courier 'digital journal': We're told Courier will function as a "digital journal," and it's designed to be seriously portable: it's under an inch thick, weighs a little over a pound, and isn't much bigger than a 5x7 photo when closed. [Engadget]

Conan Vs. Jay, Round Two: Hulu users tag Jay Leno’s return as “Vomit Inducing” (and worse) and Conan rallies his 'Facebook Army' for his next battle with Jay. Can't we all just get along? [Mashable] [Business Insider] [Barking Robot]

Simon Fuller Aims for Social Networking TV Reality Hit: The man behind Pop Idol, So You Think You Can Dance? and the Spice Girls is rarely wrong about trends and if this latest idea takes off it will change the way in which we watch television, paving the way for other producers to cut TV networks out of the loop altogether. [Guardian]

Twitter Safety | Keeping young people safe on Twitter: Twitter is popular with everyone but due to the very open nature of Twitter younger users should take extra caution. Remember everything you post to Twitter with an open profile can be seen by anyone in the world and is very easy to search for.  [BullyingUK]

The 10-Step Content Strategy: Embed social media into your content — even if your content is PDFs of case studies, e-books or white papers. Give readers the opportunity to engage in your content and share it with their networks. Lightweight ways to encourage reader engagement include adding a “like” button to your content, plugging in Facebook Connect and including discussion threads for blog comments. [Smart Blog on Social Media]

Study Finds 39% of Americans Don't Use the Internet: But even more to the point, in this day and age, not having internet access is almost like being illiterate. There is just so much of the world that is off limit without the ability to get online. So the fact that the majority of people who aren’t online in the US see their lack of an internet connection as not important is somewhat scary. [The Next Web]

The Teen Brain | It's Just Not Grown Up Yet: Nature made the brains of children and adolescents excitable. Their brain chemistry is tuned to be responsive to everything in their environment. After all, that's what makes kids learn so easily. But this can work in ways that are not so good. Take alcohol, for example. Or nicotine, cannabis, cocaine, ecstasy... [NPR]

Content Marketing Lessons From the 2010 Vancouver Olympics: If you want to stand out online, you need to create a plan and invest in it properly. [IdeaLab]

The Secret To A Better Social Media Strategy: By tailoring marketing strategies to account for statistics such as these, small businesses can maximize the effectiveness of their social media efforts and focus on reaching their desired audiences. [American Express OPEN]

Cybertots: Fisher-Price Targets the Preschool Set: Set aside the Lincoln Logs and Tinkertoys. Fisher-Price is cyberfying your kids. [BrandChannel]

Teachers Not Adequately Prepared for Education Reform: A report released in December by the Center for the Future of Teaching and Learning (CFTL) indicated that in California, where schools are pursuing ambitious education reform, while many teachers are well qualified to take on the demands of such an effort, many more simply are not up to the task. [THEJournal]

Call for Participation: The Shortie Awards: Student Film and News Festival

via www.shortie.org

The Shortie Awards: Film & News Festival is the premiere film festival for students ages 7 to 18 and their teachers!

Established in 2001, The Shortie Awards: Student Film and News Festival recognizes original digital media productions created by student filmmakers, ages 7-18, and their teachers. The Shortie Awards focuses on nurturing imagination and choice making in students.

The Shortie Awards is part of MHz Networks' Education Department. The event grew out of the Department's EAT (Education Arts and Technology) program for young filmmakers in the Washington D.C. area and has since blossomed into a national and even international event, featuring submissions from all over the world.

Last years competition received nearly 400 entries, created by close to 3,000 student filmmakers, from 23 states throughout the U.S. and 13 countries including: Canada, Cuba, Spain, Italy, Finland, Denmark, UK, UAE, India, Poland, France and Kenya. 

Many more of the Shortie Awards videos are also now available to view on YouTube.  You can watch past winners and finalists, filmmaking tips and tricks, the best broadcast news programs, and much more.

DML 2010: Four Things Youth Marketers Can Learn About Youth & Digital Media

Today I've published a guest post over on Ypulse and shared some of my thoughts on the 2010 Digital Media & Learning Conference (DML) which was held last week at the University of California at San Diego.

The post, Four Insights for Youth Marketers from DML 2010, highlights some of the key things I think marketers can learn from the academic community when working with youth and digital media. The post also highlights some of the most current youth media research going on around the world.

Thanks to Meredith and the rest of Team Ypulse for the opportunity to share my insights from DML with the rest of the Ypulse youth marketing community.

Trend Watch: I Kissed A Vampire, the Musical

What do you get when you take one part High School Musical, one part Twilight, throw in a dash of Dr. Horrible, mix it up and throw it on YouTube?

The first ever Vampire musical web-series: I Kissed A Vampire.

The web-only series, the brainchild of Hollywood writers Chris and Laurie Nolan, is a musical look at the torment of falling in love when you're in the middle of becoming a vampire. You know, your basic coming-of-age tween flick.

Yes, it's campy. Yes, the songs are catchy. Yes, tweens are watching it in droves. No, it's not from a big studio trying to show tweens how hip they are.

What sets IKAV apart from other youth oriented musical and or vampire movies is that it doesn't have the backing of a major studio. The entire series is done bootstrap style, relying on social networking sites YouTube, Facebook and Twitter for marketing and iTunes for distribution.

American Pop, a social media marketing firm who has worked on projects for the BBC teen series 'Skins', have also been pulled in to help market the film. 

The TV 2.0 revolution is being led by niche content producers like Chris and Laurie Nolan who are able to leverage social networking, free distribution channels, generational trends and the rise of a new participatory culture that can be utilized for increased exposure and commercial success.

New episodes of IKAV were shot in December and the next wave of IKAV hits iTunes in March 2010.

Hanging Out, Messing Around, and Geeking Out: Kids Living and Learning with New Media

Hanging Out, Messing Around, and Geeking Out was written as a collaborative effort by members of the Digital Youth Project, a three-year research effort funded by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and conducted at the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Southern California.

Conventional wisdom about young people’s use of digital technology often equates generational identity with technology identity: today’s teens seem constantly plugged in to video games, social networks sites, and text messaging. Yet there is little actual research that investigates the intricate dynamics of youth’s social and recreational use of digital media.

Hanging Out, Messing Around, and Geeking Out: Kids Living and Learning with New Media

Hanging Out, Messing Around, and Geeking Out fills this gap, reporting on an ambitious three-year ethnographic investigation into how young people are living and learning with new media in varied settings-at home, in after school programs, and in online spaces.

This project was one of many funded by the MacArthur Foundation to explore digital media and learning. New projects in this area are being aggregated through the Digital Media and Learning Hub.

Study: On the Social Web, Age is a Factor

How old is the average Twitter or Facebook user? What about all the other social network sites out there, like MySpace, LinkedIn, and so on? How is age distributed across the millions and millions of social network users out there?

So who rules the social web? Boomers? Gen X, Millennials, Gen Z?

To find out, Royal Pingdom pulled together age statistics for 19 different social network sites, and crunched the numbers.

Jamie Oliver's TED Talk: How We're Killing Our Kids With Bad Food

“I wish for everyone to help create a strong, sustainable movement to educate every child about food, inspire families to cook again and empower people everywhere to fight obesity.” -Jamie Oliver

For his contributions to better eating at school, his social enterprise restaurant Fifteen and his vision to change the way kids eat at home and at school, TED has awarded Jamie Oliver their 2010 prize.

“We’ve got to start teaching our kids about food in schools. Period.”

Please take a few minutes and listen to Jamie's TED talk about kids' health, school lunches, how you as a parent (or teacher, auntie or uncle) can take concrete actions to help your kids make better nutritional choices.

This is a powerful wake-up call for all of us. Not just kids.

If you want to join Jamie's Food Revolution USA, go sign the petition and get the word out to other parents, teachers and your family. Jamie has put together a "Food Charter" (pdf) to help you get started.

Jamie has also put together an informative handout (see below) that you can read to learn more about how obesity and diet is affecting America's health, plus food facts and information about the federal school lunch program.

Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution: Facts and Figures on Kids Health & Childhood Obesity

Get involved by seeing what food is being served to your kids at school. Talk to the lunch ladies, the principal, the PTA and the school board and tell them you want quality, fresh, healthy food served at school.

It's proven that real food promotes more effective learning. If you want better health for your kids the junk food must leave the school. And yes, that means chocolate milk too!

Weekly Wrap: Yahoo's Social Strategy, TweSMS for South Africa, Little Passports, 3D TV Hype, 25 UX Videos, Brands As Media, Power of the Social Experience, Mobile Apps & More!

Nielsen Preps TV, Online Video Report: Nielsen has set its schedule for reporting integrated TV and online audience viewing data. The initiative is called TVandPC, and the first "extended screen" estimates of the combined audiences will be available for the month of September as evaluation data, delivered to clients sometime in fourth quarter. The evaluation period will end in Feb. 2011.[Brand Week]

The 'Connect Wars': Not content to control only their own domains, social web sites are trying to conquer those of everyone else — by becoming the dominant log-in system for the web. Facebook, of course, is off to a quick and convincing start. [GigaOM] 

Yahoo's Social Strategy Takes Root in Asia: A series of deals with major social networks shows Yahoo moving away from its origins as a traditional portal, as it sets its sights on becoming a content-rich destination where people can interact with and navigate to all their favorite sites. [Asia Media Journal]

Twitter SMS Notifications for South Africa: TweSMS is a third party application that allows you to receive your twitter notifications and updates delivered straight to you phone via SMS message. [TweSMS]

Create Your Own Android or iPhone App in Minutes: Creating a self-branded iPhone or Android app just got a lot more accessible. iSites, a new service launching today, allows you to take your website’s RSS feed and data and quickly transform it into a full-fledged iPhone app. [Mashable]

Global Youth: Turn Kids Into Globetrotters: In an era dominated by electronic communication, people are embracing concepts from a slower age, like the company that transforms emails into paper letters and one that resurrected the classic telegram. Little Passports combines that nostalgia for 'real' mail and combines it with the convenience of a subscription service. [Little Passports] 

3D TV Is 'Mostly Hype': 3D has been getting boatloads of attention, especially during this week at CES where major electronics firms are unveiling their new 3D TVs, but while Sony and others would like you to believe that we'll all be playing video games and watching movies in glorious 3D this year, Forrester Research would tell you otherwise. Related: CES and Vegas 2010: Supersized Vulgarity [Industry Gamers] [Collaborative Creativity]

The Power of the Social Experience: This is why both employers and marketers interested in Generation Y need to realise that, while social technology is the new thing, just being on Facebook and Twitter won’t be as effective in attracting and retaining this cohort, as inviting Generation Y to experience the potential of what you have to offer with a friend or two. [Naked Generations] 

Social Marketing in Twenty Ten: As I believe, Social Media is not owned by any one department. The entire company will eventually socialize represented by each division that warrants an outward and participatory voice. Conversations always map to the activity that exists across multiple networks, spanning a multitude of subjects and potential outcomes. [Brian Solis]

All Brands Are Media: Why are brands choosing to become media companies? Because they can. Blogs, Web publishing, smartphones, tablets, e-book readers, netbooks and other tools providing access to the Internet allow firms to create media sites as easily as old-line publishers can. [IP Carrier]

Oprah's No Texing & Driving Campaign: It's the show that started Oprah's No Phone Zone movement. Watch a 15 minute clip or the entire episode about the dangers of distracted driving, then sign the No Phone Zone Pledge. Related: Buck Hollywood > No More Texting and Driving [Oprah Winfrey] [Buck Hollywood]

25 User Experience Videos That Are Worth Your Time: Rare are the opportunities to attend conferences or watch live shows on subjects that we’re interested in. That’s why we are presenting here phenomenal videos and related resources on the topic of user experience (UX) by different presenters at different events. [Smashing Magazine]

Barking Robot Mini: Be sure to also check out my Tumblr, Barking Robot Mini, for links, pictures and other stuff I've stumbled across during my digital walkabout!

CHART: One Third Of U.S. 11-Year-Olds Have Cellphones

via www.businessinsider.com

More kids are getting mobile phones: Last year, more than 35% of U.S. children ages 10-11 had cellphones, almost double the amount in 2005, according to Mediamark data, via eMarketer. And even more than 5% of 6-7-year-olds had cellphones last year.

Kaiser Family Foundation: Daily Entertainment Media Use Among Teens Up Dramatically From 5 Years Ago

Generation M2: Media in the Lives of 8- to 18-Year-Olds is the third in a series of large-scale, nationally representative surveys by the Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF) about young people's media use.

It includes data from all three waves of the study (1999, 2004, and 2009), and is among the largest and most comprehensive publicly available sources of information about media use among American youth.

“The amount of time young people spend with media has grown to where it’s even more than a full-time work week,” said Drew Altman, Ph.D., President and CEO of the Kaiser Family Foundation. “When children are spending this much time doing anything, we need to understand how it’s affecting them – for good and bad.”

The Kaiser Family Foundation found that with technology allowing nearly 24-hour media access as children and teens go about their daily lives, the amount of time young people spend with entertainment media has risen dramatically, especially among minority youth.

Mobile media driving increased consumption.  

• The increase in media use is driven in large part by ready access to mobile devices like cell phones and iPods.

• Over the past five years, there has been a huge increase in ownership among 8- to 18-year-olds: from 39% to 66% for cell phones, and from 18% to 76% for iPods and other MP3 players.

• During this period, cell phones and iPods have become true multi-media devices: in fact, young people now spend more time listening to music, playing games, and watching TV on their cell phones (a total of :49 daily) than they spend talking on them (:33).

Parents and media rules.  

• Only about three in ten young people say they have rules about how much time they can spend watching TV (28%) or playing video games (30%), and 36% say the same about using the computer.

• But when parents do set limits, children spend less time with media: those with any media rules consume nearly 3 hours less media per day (2:52) than those with no rules.

Heavy media users report getting lower grades. 

• While the study cannot establish a cause and effect relationship between media use and grades, there are differences between heavy and light media users in this regard.

• About half (47%) of heavy media users say they usually get fair or poor grades (mostly Cs or lower), compared to about a quarter (23%) of light users.  These differences may or may not be influenced by their media use patterns.
  

• Heavy users are the 21% of young people who consume more than 16 hours of media a day, and light users are the 17% of young people who consume less than 3 hours of media a day.

Black and Hispanic children spend far more time with media than White children do.

• There are substantial differences in children’s media use between members of various ethnic and racial groups.  Black and Hispanic children consume nearly 4½ hours more media daily (13:00 of total media exposure for Hispanics, 12:59 for Blacks, and 8:36 for Whites). 
  

• Some of the largest differences are in TV viewing: Black children spend nearly 6 hours and Hispanics just under 5½ hours, compared to roughly 3½ hours a day for White youth.  The only medium where there is no significant difference between these three groups is print.
  

• Differences by race/ethnicity remain even after controlling for other factors such as age, parents’ education, and single vs. two-parent homes. 
  

• The racial disparity in media use has grown substantially over the past five years: for example, the gap between White and Black youth was just over two hours (2:12) in 2004, and has grown to more than four hours today (4:23).

Big changes in TV. 

• For the first time over the course of the study, the amount of time spent watching regularly-scheduled TV declined, by 25 minutes a day (from 2004 to 2009).
  

• The many new ways to watch TV–on the Internet, cell phones, and iPods–actually led to an increase in total TV consumption from 3:51 to 4:29 per day, including :24 of online viewing, :16 on iPods and other MP3 players, and :15 on cell phones.  
  

• All told, 59% (2:39) of young people’s TV-viewing consists of live TV on a TV set, and 41% (1:50) is time-shifted, DVDs, online, or mobile.

• TV remains the dominant type of media content consumed, at 4:29 a day, followed by music/audio at 2:31, computers at 1:29, video games at 1:13, print at :38, and movies at :25 a day.

• About two-thirds (64%) of young people say the TV is usually on during meals, and just under half (45%) say the TV is left on “most of the time” in their home, even if no one is watching. 

• Seven in ten (71%) have a TV in their bedroom, and half (50%) have a console video game player in their room.  Again, children in these TV-centric homes spend far more time watching: 1:30 more a day in homes where the TV is left on most of the time, and an hour more among those with a TV in their room.

Popular new activities like social networking also contribute to increased media use.  

• Top online activities include social networking (:22 a day), playing games (:17), and visiting video sites such as YouTube (:15).  

• Three-quarters (74%) of all 7^th-12^th graders say they have a profile on a social networking site.

High levels of media & multitasking.

• High levels of media multitasking also contribute to the large amount of media young people consume each day.  

• About 4 in 10 7^th-12^th graders say they use another medium “most” of the time they’re listening to music (43%), using a computer (40%), or watching TV (39%).

• Time spent with every medium other than movies and print increased over the past five years: :47 a day increase for music/audio, :38 for TV content, :27 for computers, and :24 for video games.

Related: Video > Teens Share How They Consume Entertainment Media

Marketing to Millennial Moms

This Advertising Age and JWT white paper explores what multiple generations of American women want when it comes to family, work and life in the 21st century, decades after the women’s liberation movement.

It focuses in depth on Generation X (ages 30 to 44) and Gen Y (ages 18 to 29) mothers and how they differ from their older counterparts. It also examines how marketers can and should improve communications that target this demographic.

Nielsen Research: 2010 Trends & Media Outlook

Nielsen has published their 2010 Outlook Census which provides a comprehensive picture of what and how people watch across television, online, mobile, radio, books and music.

What are some of the key trends?

In 2010 Nielsen sees a continuation, if not an acceleration, of current trends with consumers watching and connecting more. Here are the top trends broken down by market segment:

• Top 5 Cross-Media Trends
• Top 5 Consumer Goods Spending Trends
• Top Five Entertainment Trends

InfoGraphic: 10 Largest Youth Populations

SHOW is an online informational tool launched in May 2008 by Mapping Worlds under the age of 15. The website offers users a new way to look at the world by resizing countries on the map according to a series of global issues.

In this interactive map SHOW breaks down the ten largest youth populations. The current crop of children is the largest in world history. However, the global baby boom is slowing, and total births are projected to begin falling in 2030.

Fertility is already falling in many developed countries, but the decline is offset somewhat by immigration. Three of every ten people in India is under 15; in Africa, four of every ten.

Weekly Wrap: Twitter Revolution, How TV Can Save the World, Ford's Twitter Cars, Future of Content, Understanding Social Networks, Twitter Spam & More!

The Twitter Revolution: While the use of social media in the Iranian protests quickly garnered the label “Twitter Revolution,” the real revolution was the use of mobile phones, which allowed the original protesters to broadcast their actions to other citizens and to the wider world with remarkable speed and immediacy. This characteristic, of a rapidly assembling and self-documenting public, is more than just a new slogan. Related: Iranian Gen Y on Revolution 2.0 [Prospect Magazine] [Collaborative Creativity]  [Barking Robot]

Understanding Users of Social Networks: People just love to look at pictures. That's the killer app of all online social networks. Seventy percent of all actions are related to viewing pictures or viewing other people's profiles. [Harvard Business School]

Revolution in a Box: It's not Twitter or Facebook that's reinventing the planet. Eighty years after the first commercial broadcast crackled to life, television still rules our world. And let's hear it for the growing legions of couch potatoes: All those soap operas might be the ticket to a better future after all. [Foreign Policy]

Ford Adding Tweets: Ford Motor Co. is adding Twitter messages and Internet radio to its in-car entertainment and communication service, known as Sync, and suggests that the voice-activated system is safer for drivers than trying to manipulate applications on their cell phones. [Yahoo!]

Irish Software Helps Prevent Cyberbullying: The Bully Stop technology allows parents to monitor callers and access abusive text messages before their offspring read them. The Irish-designed product is the first off-the-shelf application to specifically tackle mobile phone bullying and can be downloaded by computer before being transferred to a child's handset. [Breaking News Ireland]

The Rise of the Post Digital World: The world is going increasingly digital but the majority of media and marketing is analog and the majority of people are analog. [India Times]

U.S. Virtual Economy is Booming: When a lot of people think of gamers, they automatically think of mostly male teens who sit around a game console or computer screen all day playing alone. The reality is that the average gamers today are in their 30’s and have a significant disposable income to support the expensive hobby. [InsideTech]

Detecting Spam in a Twitter Network: Spam becomes a problem as soon as an online communication medium becomes popular. Twitter’s behavioral and structural properties make it a fertile breeding ground for spammers to proliferate. [FirstMonday]

The Future of Content Without Walls: From their in-home television and entertainment networks, consumers have grown accustomed to an on-demand culture. The combination of always-on devices and networks is helping extend that culture outside the home.

For the transition to be successful, devices must provide a good user experience, and content delivery needs to be immediate and seamless. [eMarketer] 

Ooh la la! Lady GaGa is Polaroid’s New Brand Ambassador: Yesterday in Vegas, the Lady herself appeared at the Consumer Electronic Show to discuss her new role as creative director for a line of new Polaroid products. Related: 10 Things Brands Can Learn From Lady GaGa [Mediaite] [Barking Robot]

Music Downloads Up as Album Sales Drop: Album sales in the UK fell by 3.5% in 2009 to 128.9 million despite a growth in digital downloads. [BBC]

The Last Decade According to Gen Z

Filmmaker Allison Louie-Garcia made the following short film by interviewing a series of nine-year-olds in 2009, to explore what they think.

Remember, these kids grew up in a world where iPods, computers, the Internet, digital music, YouTube and foreign wars were ubiquitous.

For them, our future is their normal.

They don't remember a time without these technologies. They don't remember 9/11, they read about it in a history book. They can't identify the sound of a dial-up modem, Napster or a Britney Spears song. The biggest news story in their lives? The death of Michael Jackson.

One thing however hasn't changed: they're still scared of Bloody-Mary.