Derek E. Baird :: Barking Robot

Report: Minority Teens Close Digital Divide with Mobile Web

A recent Pew Internet & American Life Project report, Teens and Mobile Phones, indicated that black teens were more than twice as likely as whites to go online on with their mobile phones, at 44% versus 21%. Hispanic teens were also relatively active on the mobile Web.

“Teens from low-income households, particularly African-Americans, are much more likely than other teens to go online using a cell phone,” the report said. “This is a pattern that mirrors Pew Internet Project findings about adults and their cell phones.”

Urban Youth Are Wire(less)

For most of the 1990s the conversation around minority youth and technology was centered on the “digital divide.” This conversation was primarily focused on hardware issues and connection to the Internet.

However, as S. Craig Watkins points out, the digital divide is not just about access, it is “also about social and cultural skills in human networks to enable proper participation.”

In his keynote at the 2010 Digital Media Learning 2010, S. Craig Watkins (University of Texas at Austin) presented a number of emergent patterns about African-American and Latino youth usage and participation in the digital media space:

• Usage Is Mobile: Mobile phones are emerging as the preferred platform among minority youth. 92% of 1500 minority youth surveyed in 6 major urban markets own a mobile phone;

• Usage Is Peer And Interest Driven: They are "living and learning" with new media, engaging their peers, peer interaction, peer informed spaces that drive their usage and interest driven genres (e.g., hip hop);

• Digital Media Is The New Town Square: "Back in the day" hip hop youth were always writing stories, carrying pens and papers; documenting their stories about their life in poems and hip hop. Today, the digital landscape is the new town square and they go online to engage with their community, and engage in a "stunning" critique about the world around them;

• Use Digital Media As A Space Of Opportunity: Messaging & hanging around in digital media is NOT just wasting time, but they are creating gateways for them to create opportunities and engage with what they are love and passionate about (e.g., a young girl who used hip hop to connect with hip hop artists, but also to connect with her friends and record/tweet about her own hip hop).

Whether it's marketing soda, producing digital entertainment or online learning opportunities, it's vital that we have a better understanding how minority and urban youth connect and interact on the web so that we can create more inclusive digital experiences.

Related: The Young and the Digital

Image Source: eMarketer

The Virtual Homeless Project: Using Mobile Phones to Raise Awareness

This is a pretty moving piece from Pathways To Housing & Sarkissian Mason depicting a “virtual” homeless man projected onto a wall in NYC, shivering from the cold of a sleepless night, alone, outdoors, he is just one of 40,000 similar people that are homeless in New York.

The campaign to raise awareness hope to create interaction with someone most people just pass by, in prompting the public to interact with the virtual homeless man by SMSing a number that opens a door.

Passers by are then given the opportunity to send another SMS to make a small donation instantly from their phone. Very, very cool work for a great cause.

via www.digitalbuzzblog.com

Related: Lady Gaga Joins Forces with Virgin Mobile to Fight Teen Homelessness

Weekly Wrap: Foursquare Nabs MTV & VH1, Linguist Urges Kids to Embrace Twitter, Saving the Google Students, COPPA & Youth Marketing, Free iPad eBooks & More!

Six Reasons to be Skeptical of the 'Digital Natives' Discourse: Almost all of the claims of the net gen discourse are in popular media and if they are based on research, it is proprietary and full methodological details are not provided. All of the sound research that refutes the claims is published in scholarly journals and has been subject to peer review. [Net Gen Skeptic]

Saving the Google Students: For the Google generation, closing school libraries could be disastrous. Not teaching kids how to sift through sources is like sending them into the world without knowing how to read. [LA Times]

Weekly Wrap, Foursquare Edition: Meet Gatsby, Fresh off the heels of hooking up with Bravo TV and Harvard Foursquare signs a similar deal with MTV & VH1, Microsoft adds Foursquare data to Bing Maps & a really cool visualization of Foursquare check-ins at SXSW. [Iconoculture] [Mobile Entertainment News] [Mashable] [TechCrunch] [SimpleGeo]

10 Reasons Students Are Tuning Teachers Out: You’re teaching to a generation of students that can access more information more quickly than any other generation. Don’t tell students that you don’t want to figure out how to use the internet or that you don’t answer email. You’re putting yourself into a category you don’t want to be in. [GYJoe]

US Census Bureau Adds Mapping App to Facebook: In an effort to reach out to young people, the U.S. Census Bureau is launching a huge nationwide campaign incorporating social media, broadcast media and print to encourage people to fill out their census forms this year. [Inside Facebook]

Ypulse Interview| Jamie Tworkowski: Jamie is the founder of To Write Love on Her Arms, a non-profit movement dedicated to presenting hope and finding help for people struggling with addiction, depression, self-injury and suicide. Related: MTV Poll: Generation Stress [Ypulse]

Preparing Your Content for iPad: Platform-specific considerations and UX Guidelines for web content in Safari on iPhone OS devices, with specific information for iPad. Also, iPad to Offer 30,000 free eBooks at launch. [Safari Technical Notes] [Apple Blog] [UX Magazine]

Marketing to Kids | A Time for Playing by the Rules:Whether it’s Quiksilver, Monster Energy Drinks or ESPN X Games, the look and feel of the typical action sports-related website is young, edgy, authentic. Action sports marketers need to be aware, however, of the panoply of laws that regulate marketing to kids, including the federal Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA). [GroupY]

Quote O' The Week: “I hate being thought of as a product. I am not a doll, and people want to treat me that way. I’m older now. I have an opinion. I have my own taste.” - Miley Cyrus on why being a Disney pop princess is so difficult. [Gossip Girl] [Barking Robot]

Blogging, academia, and the new public intellectual: John Holbo admits he and his fellow pioneers have lost the “revolutionary fervor” of blogging’s early days. “I’m fortunate to be at the top of the food chain, to have these bully pulpits where I can stand up and know thousands of people will hear me,” he says. “But we all thought blogging was going to transform academic life, and that didn’t really happen.” [Cal Alumni Association]

Linguist Urges Kids to Embrace Twitter: Language is forever changing -- and forms such as tweets and text messages are no less valid than any textbook version, says the linguist David Crystal, whose latest book encourages children to engage with the possibilities of their lingua franca. [The Independent]

More People Are Watching TV While Surfing the Web: This is some decent news for the TV industry, since the fear is that Internet time is eating into boob tube viewing. Overall, TV viewing is up 1%, year over year, according to the report.  [Business Insider]

Why Apple’s iPad Can’t Succeed in Schools (Yet): You see, tablets-as-books is a great idea until the battery dies, and then the student has no textbook and no computer. She will have to plug-in to a power outlet if she wants either of those things back. Related: A Kindle in Every Backpack [The Apple Blog] [Barking Robot]

Weekly Wrap: Miley's 'The Last Song" Webcast, AOL's BeboFAIL, Oscars Score Nielsen Win, TEDxTeen, Books in the Age of the iPad, Wizard of OZ Remake, Twitter Backchannels, 11 Step Content Strategy & More!

Miley's "Last Song" Webcast: Miley Cyrus, Greg Kinnear and Liam Hemsworth, stars of the upcoming film "The Last Song", will host a live chat on UStream Saturday, March 13 @4pm Eastern/1pm Pacific.  [Ustream]

3/13/10 Update: Here's the recording of the webcast with Miley Cyrus and the cast of "The Last Song." [Facebook]

AOL Could Make More Abandoning Bebo Than Selling It: As AOL continues to explore the sale of some of its non-core assets, TechCrunch speculated that the company may fair better financially if it were simply to abandon social network Bebo, rather than sell it. Related: AOL Launches AOL Lifestream [DML Wire]

Oscars Pull Biggest Audience in Five Years: The Oscars were watched by 41.3 million viewers, improving 13 percent over last year's audience and posting significant gains for the second year in a row, according to Nielsen estimates. Looks like that Oscars youth strategy paid off after all! Related: Social Media Played Big Role in Driving Oscar Interest [LA TIMES] [Radixhound] [Clickz]

Why iPad is the Children's Toy of the Year: While nobody was looking, the iPhone became a universally understood part of children's culture. And hundreds of companies have responded by creating child-specific apps, which makes the device even more compelling to kids. Sorta Related: Hard Bound Books will be Finished by 2016 [Computer World] [Wired] [Collaborative Creativity]

A "Wizard of Oz" remake? Say it ain't so!: Fresh off Disney's massive success with Tim Burton's "Alice in Wonderland," Warner Bros. wants to remake another childhood classic. Like, really classic. The studio is examining two existing "Wizard of Oz" projects, with an eye toward giving one of them a modern gloss and moving it toward the screen. [LA TIMES]

Rapid Rise of Children with Cellphones: Though girls still have more cellphones than boys — 21.8 percent of girls have them, compared with 18.3 percent of boys — that gap is about half as large as it was in 2005. Most of the children surveyed who had cellphones were 10 or 11 years old; Mediamark reported that 36.1 percent of children in that age range had phones. [NYT]

TEDxTeen has curated a lineup of international youth (sprinkled with some compelling adults who made big waves as teens) who are tackling the big questions and big problems with passion and action. What are teens across the globe doing to make a difference? You might be surprised! [TEDxTeen]

Peeved Facebook Might Sue Brit Tabloid Over '14-Year-Old Girl' Headline Chaser: The story focuses on the dangers of pedophiles and teens co-mingling on social networking sites, and its original title specifically read "I Posed as a Girl of 14 on Facebook." The problem? The statement was a blatant lie. [YourVersion]

Who Wants an iPad? The Young, the Social & the Pop-Culture Addicts: The prospective iPad buyers on Facebook are young - much younger than the overall Facebook population, in fact. They're also fairly social, with nearly a third of the fans having over 300 friends. And finally, iPad fans are also very interested in other pop culture activities and themes including various celebs, brands and internet memes. Related: Books in the Age of the iPad. [RRW]

11 Steps Toward A Content Strategy: IBM recently published research showing that about 80 percent of those who begin a corporate blog never post more than five entries. And that's just blogging. The Internet is littered with near-tweetless Twitter accounts, expressionless Facebook pages, no-one-home YouTube channels. In the rush to adopt social media as a tactic, too many marketers leave strategy in the dust. [eConsultancy]

Five Ways to Use Twitter to Avoid a Backchannel Disaster: What do you do when you’re giving a presentation, and notice that your audience is looking down, busily typing on their laptops and smartphones? And what about when you get the sense that they are turning against you? To short-circuit a possible disaster, keep in mind these five things you can do to prepare and engage the backchannel. [Mashable]

We're Just Not That Into You: Gen Y, Brand Marketing & Social Media

Armando Samuels has written a really great guest post over on Next Great Generation titled, "Hey Brands, Get out of My Social Media Grill." I've swiped a few of my favorite quotes from the piece, but I hope you'll take the time to read the whole article. It's really spot on.

Armando raises some really good points in his article, but I think his most important lesson for youth marketers and brands is that there is a fine line between (buzz word alert!) engagement and alienating the very customer you are targeting with your message. Possibly forever!

And now, a few words of wisdom from Armando:

"I’m tired of dealing with brands all over social media, I need a minute of my day when brands are not all up on my shit. Is that possible?"

"The more that you try to be part of my life, the more turned off I get. If I love a brand, I will find you, and I’ll be your biggest fan. So instead of trying to be all up in my shit why don’t you act confident (I’ve heard chicks dig it). Act like you believe in your product and its quality and maybe I’ll give you a chance."

"So how about we make a pact, brands of the world, stop trying to be someone you are not (my friend) and be who you are (a confident brand that believes in your product). I know you are there and if I don’t, I’m sure I’ll see you on TV or every time I open a magazine – just please stay away from my social network."

Good stuff, eh? Now go read the whole thing.....

Graham Brown on Building a Youth Brand

Customers Are The Brand

View more presentations from Graham Brown.

Graham Brown, founder of mobileYouth, has put together this presentation to share his most pressing thoughts and insights from his  upcoming book "Customers Are The Brand" due to be released in 2010.

Related: Inbound Marketing is the future, but are you ready?

A Guide to Understanding the Phases of Youth Development

Youth marketing - A guide to understanding youth development phases by Dan Pankraz

View more presentations from guest10a9e56.

Dan Pankraz, an Australian youth planning specialist in Sydney, has put together an insightful presentation that looks at some of the key development stages kids, tweens and teens go through and the implications for marketers looking to have conversations with youth.

Related: Study Finds Facebook and MySpace Enhance Relationships Kids Already Have

Global Youth: What Youth Think | 2010 Youth Trends Report

Partnering with youth marketers, culture and trend experts from around the world, Graham Brown (the force behind mobileYouth) have crowd-sourced an impressive amount of research on global youth trends and shared his findings in a series of three presentations.

What Youth Think: 2010 Youth Trends Report presentations are a must see for youth marketers, media planners, educators, youth pastors and anyone else who works in the youth space.

So sit back, take notes and enjoy. Then let's all meet up at the Carrot Mob!

2010 Youth Trends Report Part 1

View more presentations from Graham Brown.

2010 Youth Trends Report Part 2

View more presentations from Graham Brown.

2010 Youth Trends Report Part 3

View more presentations from Graham Brown.

Millennials: The Gen Y Tsunami is Here

 

"For marketers, the Millennials represent a multifaceted challenge that defies easy categorization. Beyond their demographic diversity, marketers need to recognize distinct behaviors, preferences, attitudes, and values that set this group apart from the rest.

We need to realize that consumer-driven marketing integration is not a dream but a critical reality. And this starts with understanding who these young adults really are."

--DMW Direct Consumer Insights,"Millennials"

Related: 2010 Ypulse Youth Marketing Mashup

CauseWorld: A Location Aware Mobile App for Social Change

CauseWorld is the latest in a flurry of new location-based mobile apps that allow users to 'check in', connect with friends and earn badges. The free app comes in two flavors--iPhone and Android.

The downside of many location-aware mobile apps is that they tend to serve only as fuel for the "look at me" aspect of the social web. One of my Tweep's coined a great term for this trend: "geonarcissism."

Unlike other location-based social networks that put the focus on 'You', CauseWorld provides their community with an opportunity to focus on doing good, funding social change and benefiting others all with a few clicks (or taps) on their phone.

Here's how it works. All you need to do is walk into one of the many stores you most likely frequent anyway, such as common groceries, hardware stores, department stores, and many others. Pull out your phone, open the app, and check in. No purchase is required. When you 'check in' you earn "Karma Points." 

Your 'Karma Points' can then be converted into real dollars and donated, thanks to corporate sponsors Kraft Foods & Citi, to nine potential causes including Support A Classroom, Give Clean Water, Donate A Book or Provide Relief for Haiti. The CauseWorld community has already earned $6 million Karma's for Haiti. Like other location-aware games, you also earn badges for your 'Karma.'

This is also a perfect example of how brands can combine current trends like location-aware games, social media, cause marketing and mobile devices to deliver a unified experience for their customers.

Foursquare Teams With Bravo TV

Bravo TV and Foursquare will announce a new partnership on Monday that will integrate Bravo TV shows with the game aspects of Foursquare, a social networking site that encourages people to interact in the real world.

The partnership hopes to engage viewers long after they turn off the television, close their laptops and stop watching Bravo’s TV shows.

Starting Monday, Bravo will begin offering Foursquare players “badges” and special prizes when viewers visit more than 500 Bravo locations.

The locations will be picked by Bravo to correspond with select Bravo shows including “The Real Housewives,” “The Millionaire Matchmaker,” “Top Chef,” “Kell on Earth,” “Top Chef Masters” and “Shear Genius.”

via bits.blogs.nytimes.com

Weekly Wrap: Slacktivism, Open Source Social Innovation, Boomers & Social Media, Helping Google Get Social, Sundance 2010 Round-Up, Texting Party in the USA, Steve Jobs' Wardrobe & More!

A Time and Place for 'Slacktivism': Slacktivism; (v.) action 4 social change w/o much effort beyond a click/text. Known causes: social media, cellphones. [Ypulse]

Baby Boomers Get Connected with Social Media: Boomers are turning to social media, where they keep up their offline social connections and make new ones. Online marketing messages that help them build on their connections—and foster other online relationships—will get their interest. [eMarketer]

Lady GaGa's Lessons for the Music Business: Underneath Gaga's haystack wigs is a case study of what it takes to succeed in the music business today. Gaga, 23 years old, has made shrewd use of new digital platforms, while still leveraging the clout of a major label, an institution deemed obsolete by many proponents of DIY culture (Thanks Ypulse!). [WSJ]

Conan O'Brien's Fate a Sign of the Times: While the "Tonight Show" ratings fell under O'Brien's tenure as a whole, ratings amongst the younger demographics were better than those of Jay Leno's "Tonight Show." According to the New York Times, the median age of "Tonight Show" viewers fell by 10 years, from 55 to 45, in O'Brien's first month alone. [Colorado Daily]

Social Media Marketing, How Pepsi Got it Right: Social media marketing campaigns are proving to be goldmines rich with customer engagement and insight that companies wouldn’t likely have otherwise. Companies like PepsiCo are going to extensive lengths to foster this type of collaboration with fans, and the payoff has been big. [Mashable]

Will Creating a SWAT Team Help Google Get Social?: As successful as Google has been with plenty of other things — including a little thing called search-related advertising — it has struck out big-time in virtually every attempt at the social side of the web. [GigaOM]

Reflections from the Sundance Film Festival: Lois Vossen, ITVS vice president and Independent Lens series producer, shares her reflections on this year’s festival, which wraps up this weekend. [Beyond the Box]

College Students Hate Email: In fact, the student joked that she only uses her email to “communicate with her boss and adults.” She uses Facebook as her preferred method of peer-to-peer communication – she has had a Facebook thread running between the three of them for three years now. [Off Campus Media]

Tweet O' the Week: Can someone please buy Steve Jobs a new outfit! The man has more money than God and Oprah! A simple button down will do!" (via Scott Nevins) [Twitter]

Americans Sending 4 Times as Many Texts as Brits:There was a turning point a couple of years ago when it was suddenly undeniable: It was either text message or be left behind. If you were paying for it by the message, you suddenly had to find a plan, because you started having more and more friends that wouldn't talk any other way. Well, we're wondering if it has finally reached that point in the U.K. - or if it's yet to come. [ReadWriteWeb]

Teen Drinking May Cause Irreversible Brain Damage: For teenagers, the effects of a drunken night out may linger long after the hangover wears off. A recent study led by neuroscientist Susan Tapert of the University of California, San Diego compared the brain scans of teens who drink heavily with the scans of teens who don't. [NPR]

Open Source Social Innovation: Last week Bill Gates entered the digital publishing world by establishing the Gates Notes - an online evolution of his now annual January letter sharing his thoughts on the progress of the issues central to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. It’s interesting and symbolic that the next chapter of his life story would include an “open source” platform for sharing IP on social innovation. [Cheskin]

Social and Collaborative Marketing Trends

Shiv Singh from Razorfish has put together an informative presentation that highlights the value of social media as part of a collaborative approach to marketing. He calls it Social Influence Marketing, but it’s essentially an approach to marketing that includes the customers in many of the activities. 

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!

Seven Actionable Marketing Trends

Expanded Version - Seven Actionable Marketing Trends

View more documents from Helge Tennø.