Immediately upon arrival at the
YPulse National Mashup in San Francisco this week I realized the brightly lit backdrop and short spurts of rock music playing while the participants stepped up to the stage were going to keep it lively. These aesthetic details also reminded me why I was thrilled to be at a youth-centric conference. The focus on targeting products and services to youth means that those product or services should be cool, colorful, dynamic, fresh, and well ... not too serious. Who wouldn't want those aspects integrated into their work? The Mashup presented a captivating blend of panelists and participants ranging from directions in mobile technology to "Leveraging User-Generated Content to Reach Youth" and included quite a few youth participants who had started their own successful websites. There were some definitive points that were reiterated throughout the entire couple of days, reverberating in my mind still. Although they weren't new information necessarily to most people present, they were amplified enough to provide a through-line to the various work that we are all doing in the realm of youth and media.
On almost every panel, three words were uttered: KEEP IT REAL. Well it actually ranged from "Make your message real" according to the folks at
Premise Marketing to "Authenticity is important... girls can smell a rat" from Ashley Qualls of
Whatever Life.com to "Be honest, authentic, sincere" by Nikol Hasler and Guy Clark of "The Midwest Teen Sex Show". Vu Nguyen of
Crunchyroll.com advised the audience to be as transparent as possible. YouthBeat's research shows that although humor draws young people in, authenticity keeps them there. MC Hammer of
DanceJam.com acknowledged the fact that this phrase "Keep it real" was floating around quite a bit, and reminded the audience that even though the hip-hop community coined this term way back, it still frequently used because of its relevance and importance. He explained it this way: "Keeping it real means keeping it real to what is real to you ... or in other words, sticking to what matters to you".
Many of the above mentioned panelists plus most of the rest of them also mentioned to LET THE COMMUNITY DRIVE THE WEBSITE. Respond to what the youth want. Don't be afraid to tweak, revise, revisit, and reshape your goals based on your community's wishes and requests. Chloe Spencer, a teen entrepeneur and the Founder of
NeopetsFanatic.com broke it down by telling the audience to communicate directly and personally with the youth participants. She has learned in her experience that they want to know the person or people behind the website. Scott Tilton of
Loop'd Network presented the idea like: Don't try to get the community to conform to the ideal or model of the company but go to where they are and what they're already doing.
Humor was addressed throughout (also contributing to the fun and lively factor) as super-important when marketing to youth or trying to get them interested and involved as well as the need to keep your product or service always evolving and offering something new and fresh. And of course the point that viral marketing is absolutely the number one way for teens to learn about the coolest new thing was repeated constantly. YouthBeat's syndicated report corraborated the fact that teens are finding out about music, videos, games and cool websites from their friends more than any other way. Another interesting tidbit from their research shows that although those of us in the industry are always talking about how busy kids are today, they actually perceive their reality otherwise. Most tweens and teens do think they have a good deal of free time to play and experiment with digital media of all kinds.
Coming from TakingITGLOBAL, I was missing any discussion (other than a lunch breakout session) on the global reach that much of this technology beholds and how these emerging technologies and marketing practices are affecting the global community, bridging the divide between continents and cultures. Fair enough, it is called the YPulse National Mashup, but the reality was that there was a compare/contrast effect happening anyhow in moments such as Antti Ohrling's presentation of
Blyk (which is a particularly cool premise of providing free mobile service to 16-24 year olds in exchange for a minimum number of mobile-based advertisments, only in Europe at this time). One of the brilliant youth entrepeneurs, Jared Kim, of WeGame.com (hails from Korea, was educated in China, and now owns his third start-up in the US) was a fascinating example of global connectedness. But his story only really emerged in the Q&A and was a side-note to the rest of his presentation. My suggestion would be to add the global reach aspect to YPulse Mashups in the future. Everyday it is becoming more difficult to keep it as a footnote in this industry.
