Derek E. Baird

Connecting with the 'Missing Middle': For Gen Z, Diversity Matters

I'm pleased to share that I've written a new piece, Widen the Welcome: How Public Media Can Connect with the 'Missing Middle' for the Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop.

One of the primary lessons from the latest Cooney Center's landmark research report, The Missing Middle: Reimagining a Future for Tweens, Teens, and Public Media, is that public media can look to the content created by Gen Z, streaming networks, and commercial media as examples of how to connect with the missing middle.

In my Cooney Center piece, I share my thoughts on how public media can widen the welcome to the 'Missing Middle' next-generation public media viewers through cultural alignment, co-creation, and inclusion.

The key to earning the trust of Gen Z audiences is rooted in listening, acknowledging their life experiences, sharing stories that mirror their lived reality, and creating content that widens the welcome to public media through representation and inclusion to viewers of all races, abilities, genders, ethnicities, and orientations.

You can read my full article here. 

 

Dear Evan Hansen, Teen Broadway fandoms, and Mental Health on Tumblr and Instagram

Dear Evan Hansen (DEH) is a social media-centric musical that has been widely celebrated by a show-specific online fan community, known as ‘Fansens’, on Instagram and Tumblr, having won the Tony Award for Best Musical in 2017. 

The growth of this fandom, on these platforms, is unique as Fansens have adopted plot points and thematic elements from the musical relating to how social media affects social anxiety, depression, and suicide to create fan art and fanfictions that, in turn, result in a community of care on social media where fans can discuss their own encounters with social anxiety, teen suicide and cyberbullying.

Though most Fansens would not have been able to see the musical performed on Broadway or live in-person, their fanfictions, personal posts, and fan art reflect and refract the difficulties that young people have with mental health, social anxiety, and suicide.

Using both digital methods and post-structuralist textual analysis, written by Derek E. Baird and Jarrod Walczer, analyses numerous fan cultural artifacts collected from DEH-specific hash-tagged posts on Tumblr and Instagram.

In doing so, this article provides a new perspective on the role that fan communities, their artifacts, their use of digital media, and their fan activist and upstanding techniques can play in providing avenues of self-care and modeling positive online support for those dealing with mental health issues.

By examining the emotional resonance between the characters, plot points, and music of DEH, and the fandom that spontaneously grew around it, we maintain that fandom studies scholars can gain a richer understanding of how visual media and fandom can be used to foster unity among young people and combat social issues both on social media and in the corporeal world.

You can read the full article here, or you can read a synopsis of our research over on Medium. You can access the full article on the Journal of Fandom website.

Humanizing User Experience Design Strategies with New Technologies: AR, VR, MR, and AI to Support Student Engagement and Retention in Higher Education

Today, I'm pleased to announce the book chapter I co-authored with Mercedes Fisher, Ph.D. for "International Perspectives on the Role of Technology in Humanizing Higher Education" is now available on both the Emerald Publishing website and Amazon!

Our chapter is focused on using new technologies like AR, VR, Zoom, and AI to support student engagement in higher education.

The Gen Z Frequency Translated into Chinese Language Edition

I'm so proud and excited to announce that my book, The Gen Z Frequency, has been translated into a Chinese language edition by Blue Lion Press and Zhejiang University Press.

Just like the original version of the book, the Chinese language edition offers a comprehensive guide for any youth brand or organization trying to reach Gen Z.

"Many books talk about Gen Z, but this is a definitive playbook for modern marketers and business people to authentically engage an emerging generation."

-Stefan Heinrich, Head of Global Marketing, ByteDance (TikTok)

The book covers content creation, connecting with youth culture, online community and content engagement strategies, and tactics such as social media, experiential, emerging technologies (like AR and VR), kids' privacy law, building online communities, embracing youth culture, and much more.

 

 

Case Study: How I Grew A GIPHY Channel from Scratch to 14 Million GIF Views

Like most successful recording artists, the COVID-19 outbreak in March brought everything — live concerts, recording, and fan events — to a screaming halt. After the initial shock of lockdown, Chris Mann got busy creating coronavirus parody videos that unintentionally went internationally mega-viral.

In addition to using Facebook and YouTube to distribute the videos, I also looked at ways to make the video content evergreen, grow his fanbase, allow fans to participate, show his lesser-known comedic personality, and tap into the cultural conversation around the COVID-19 outbreak.

While we had previously used GIPHY, the animated Graphics Interchange Format (GIF) hadn’t been, up to that point, a priority social platform for our digital content, culture, or community strategy.

Fast forward a pandemic and five months later, and we’ve seen the GIPHY channel grow from a couple of thousand GIF views to nearly 14 Million GIF views (as of this post) in just a few months.

Over on Medium, I wrote up a small case study sharing the content, culture, and fandom strategies I’ve learned from growing the GIPHY channel from nearly zero to 14 million GIF views.

'The internet is all around us': How children come to understand the Internet

While children are living more of their lives online, little is known about what they understand about the implications of their online participation.

In this report, the Tiana Murray & Rachel Buchanan report on the Best Footprint Forward project conducted at the University of Newcastle (UON), which explored how children come to understand the internet.

Thirty-three children (ranging in age from 10 to 12 years old) from three primary schools in regional Australia participated in focus groups and created a work sample depicting the internet.

Analysis of the focus group transcripts and work samples revealed that while the children’s understanding of the internet was not technical, their knowledge was developed through the social activities that they engaged in online, and influenced by the interactions they have in their ‘real life’ with parents, teachers, and friends.

The children in the study demonstrated ambivalence about the internet; they regularly went online for a variety of purposes but these positive experiences were tempered by concerns and fears. This research presents a nuanced perspective of children’s knowledge of the internet; by rejecting the notion that children are naïve, passive consumers of digital culture, analysis of their understanding reveals it to be balanced and sophisticated.

You can read the full study below. 

Gen Z Culture Report: Mini Keanu, Finsta, Song for a Whale, Gen Z Social Impact [June 2019]

Gen Z Speak: "Finsta" 📷

Teens have always had their own language and Gen Z is no different. Keeping up can be difficult. I'm here to help you out.

A "Finsta" is a second (or third or sixth) "fake" Instagram account used for posting photos you don't want to post on your "real" Instagram or that you want to keep away from your parental units.

 

Meme Culture 🤣

The latest meme to hit the socials? Mini Keanu Reeves. Here's what you need to know.

 

Gen Z Social Impact 💖

At 11 years old Jahkil Jackson is the CEO of Trophies, a streetwear brand that champions positivity and education, and the Executive Director of 'Project IAM,' a philanthropic endeavor that raises awareness and support for the homeless.

Learn more about this amazing young social changemaker. 

 

Teaching Gen Z 🏫

While there’s much hype around the use of VR in education, how are teachers using this emerging technology in the classroom? What do students think? Those are just some of the questions Foundry 10 asked teachers and students in their VR in Education Pilot Program.

 

Gen Z Book Pick 📕

Full of heart and celebrating the things that make us different, ‘Song for a Whale’ by Lynne Kelly shows how, with a little determination, kids can make big waves and change the world.

How The California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) Will Reshape Online Privacy for Kids’ Across America

Here's my latest piece for Virtual Reality Pop! magazine, this time focused on the new privacy law, California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) and how it will impact both publishers and creators of digital experiences for kids, including virtual reality.

The primary challenge for many companies is that to be CCPA compliant, they will now be required to acquire actual knowledge of a users age, and by doing so, it may potentially open them to COPPA liability.

The primary benefit for kids, teens, and families are that the CCPA will give parents and teens more control over what personal data companies can collect from minors.

Gen Z, Privacy & Photos on Social Media

MediaSmarts has been developing digital and media literacy programs and resources for Canadian homes, schools and communities since 1996.

Through their work, Media Smarts supports parents, educators and youth media professionals with information and tools so they can help children and teens develop the critical thinking skills they need for interacting with the media they love.

Building on the privacy findings from their Young Canadians in a Wired World research, this 2017 qualitative study, To Share or Not to Share, of Gen Z youth ages 13 to 16 examines the reasoning that teens apply when deciding to share photos of themselves or other people electronically.

These interviews explore the ways that reputational privacy and social norms impact teens’ decisions to post photos and investigate whether or not they actively consent to the collection and use of their personal information by the platforms they use for sharing photos. The findings of the Media Smarts study also dovetailed with my own research for my book, The Gen Z Frequency.

Key Highlights

• Participants engaged in a number of different strategies to manage their privacy. Though a small number of photos were kept entirely private, most of the participants’ efforts were aimed at controlling who saw particular photos and preventing them from being spread to unintended audiences.
  
  
• A small number of topics were seen as not appropriate to share because they were seen as “private” (as opposed to not being shared out of fear of a negative.
  
  
• Photos containing family members were the most commonly cited as not appropriate to share because they were seen as “private”, though some participants included close friends as well.
  
  
• Snapchat, where photos are temporary by default, creates an expectation of being casual and “fun”, while Instagram’s persistent feed promotes the careful maintenance of a public-facing profile.
  
  
• When participants actively sought consent before posting photos of friends, the question was generally not “Should I share it?” but “Which one should I share?”, with the emphasis on selecting a photo in which everyone looks good according to the standards of the platform.

 

VR Pop: Gen Z Tunes into Augmented Reality

Here's my latest piece for Virtual Reality Pop magazine! From Disney Studios + Pixar VR entertainment experiences to Google Cardboard and Oculus VR in school, Gen Z's reality now comes in virtual and augmented.

Given that all the big tech giants (Apple, Google, and Facebook) have already baked augmented reality capabilities into their smartphones or apps, the rate at which this always-connected Gen Z has adopted these technologies shouldn’t be surprising.

The Gen Z Frequency: Book Release Day

Today my book ‘The GenZ Frequency’, co-written with Gregg L. Witt, was officially published in the UK and the rest of the world by Kogan Page! The book will be published in the US on September 28th!

‪If I’ve learned anything during the process of writing this book, it’s that Gen Z is going to change the world.‬ Thank you to all the young people who were willing to talk to me during the writing of this book and helping me to tune into the Gen Z frequency. ‬

'The Gen Z Frequency' offers a comprehensive youth marketing guide for any brand or organization trying to reach this demographic, covering fundamental truths, content creation, connecting with youth culture, engagement strategies and tactics such as social media, experiential, emerging technologies (like AR and VR), kids privacy law, building online communities, edtech and much more.

Available on Amazon, iBooks and KoganPage

Blocking Bad: Protecting Teens on Instagram

Yesterday, during the annual Facebook F8 Developer Conference, Instagram announced that they had launched new anti-bullying & comment filtering AI technology that will automatically filter out comments that “harass or upset people in our community.

As the number one social network for Gen Z teens, Instagram has been increasingly proactive in developing both technology and wellbeing programs that improve the lives of the teens. In addition, the new comment filter is focusing on protecting teen celebrities and influencers who are often the recipients of brutal attacks in the comment section on their social feeds.

We first got a sneak peek at this new filtering technology last summer when Instagram co-founder and CEO Kevin Systrom sat down with CBS News to talk about how the social network is betting that limiting hate speech will encourage more expression on the platform.

"Is it free speech just to be mean to someone?" - Kevin Systrom, CEO Instagram

According to Instagram, "This new filter hides comments containing attacks on a person's appearance or character, as well as threats to a person's well-being or health. The bullying filter is on for our global community and can be disabled in the Comment Controls center in the app.”

As teens  increasingly turning to social media platforms, like Instagram, to talk about their mental health and find resources to help them through their personal struggles, it's more important than ever that social media companies realize that they play an increasingly vital role and responsibility in promoting kindness and supporting the mental health of teens in their online communities. 

 

Related: Instagram #KindnessProm

Trend Watch: How Gen Z Use GIFs to Convey Emotion and Celebrate Shared Cultural Moments

In the last few years, there’s been an explosion in the use of GIFS – those little-looped videos that seem to be everywhere. The GIF is often misunderstood as a component of modern communication. 

Gen Z navigates their anxieties by relying on visual-centric social media platforms, like GIFs, emoji, and memes, wherein they can both create and share visual content to express their emotions. 

On social platforms, they embrace memes, visual narratives, GIFs and emoji to create fan art and provide their visual interpretations of shared cultural experiences and project their own emotions into their social media feeds. The visual narrative content posted on these platforms can largely be employed, remixed, and re-appropriated across one another and be reused for multiple purposes across multiple moments in time.

This creates a form of unity in social narratives, situating visual materials as both conversational and archival, across the platforms while also positing disunity and the breakdown of platform exclusive vernaculars.

This episode of the Australian podcast, Future Tense, host Antony Funnell talks to digital researchers and linguists about the ways that people are using GIFs, emoji, selfies and other visual communication tools as narratives to express their ideas, emotions or as visual expressions and celebrations of shared cultural moments.

 

 

Related

Giphy builds transparent GIF library for Instagram Stories

Trend Watch: Facebook Freebooting

Here are all the new Animojis coming to your iPhone X (AAPL)

STUDY: The Role of Social Media and Technology in Peer Bullying

Top 10 best meme generator apps Android 2018

#YouWillBeFound: Teens, Social Media Artifacts and 'Dear Evan Hansen'

My colleague Jarrod Walczer and I have been working on a book chapter for a forthcoming publication about the upstander culture sprouting up around the hit Broadway musical, Dear Evan Hansen and the visual social media artifacts being created by teens.

 

We've spent the last few months scouring Instagram and Tumblr and reading countless numbers of Dear Evan Hansen posts, visual social media and culled data on thousands of posts.

 

It's been a pretty amazing, and, to be honest at times, a humbling experience. But mostly, it's heartbreaking to read how disconnected and alone the most connected generation in human history feels from the real world.

 

Either way, one thing has become very clear: it's hard to be a teen in the social media age. So much harder than most adults can even comprehend. 

We've learned a lot, developed a deep respect for the Fansen fandom, the Evan Hansen cast and most especially, Ben Platt.  As we delve deep into the culture of Evan Hansen, and read the personal stories of these teens, it's clear that Mr. Platt is holding the hopes and emotional fears of many young fans on his shoulders.

Yet, night after night, he continues to carry the emotional weight of the role, he continues to be gracious with his fans and greets them with a smile on his face at the stage door. 

We are putting the final touches on our book chapter and will have more details, soon!

Meet the Tweens of Gen Z

What sets Gen Z apart is an unrelenting relationship with information and technology, and their early independence, born of impatience and the confidence to act. These are the identifying traits of what will be the largest demographic in history.

And yet, their confidence and knowledge often out pace experience...which causes tension between an advanced intellect, and the reality of their actual age and emotional intelligence.

At the epicenter of this tension we find tweens—a complex subset of Gen Z. They are caught up in the turbulent transition from simply being a kid, to fending off the intricate pressures of teenage existence. They are the pivotal middle-ground of Gen Z.  

Tweens pose an interesting dilemma. Kids (5–8) are still largely influenced by and accessed through their parents.

Teens (14–18) are rapidly forming their own opinions and establishing independence from parents, and there are direct channels to reach them.

Tweens (9–13), on the contrary, are the hardest to reach, even while they are actively seeking cues and learning to form opinions. 

Because they are the least accessible, and arguably the most open to influence, tweens are an important puzzle to solve for companies marketing to Gen Z.

Gen Z is set to influence nearly $600 billion dollars of family spending and will comprise 40% of consumers by 2020. To succeed in marketing to this unique segment, any brand that wants in, has to be willing to play by their rules.

My colleague, Gregg Witt and I have co-authored a new book for Motivate Youth.

In this guide, you will learn key insights, strategies, and tactics your company can deploy to improve tween marketing efforts. You can download a copy of Meet the Tweens of Gen Z over on Scribd.