Thanks to my success with Twittercize, I was asked to guest lecture for a graduate Internet Marketing Communication class at the University of Denver. For one week, the online students obliged my rambling, opinionated self. This series of blog posts excerpts some of my answers. Special thanks to a real marketing whiz, Lora Louise Broady, for asking me to participate. You know I loves the spotlight.
Heh, Webkinz in the classroom. I’ll tell you who came up with that program: Ganz Corporation. They’re making a fortune selling video games and stuffed animals as education. There’s already “lunch by Pepsi” and “biology by Webkinz”–what’s next, “math with Pokemon”?
I’m joking about the above, but the financial successes of toy companies infiltrating our schools also emphasizes my point from before: social media is missing out on a huge chunk of marketshare when they fail to create good monitoring systems for young users.
Current parental controls don’t control much–they are little more than easily exploited content filters. Parents should be able to serve as moderators for their kids’ posts or at least receive digest emails of their activity on the web. Saddest of all, the infrastructure i’s very easily implemented but hasn’t been made a priority.
In terms of potential marketshare, think of it this way:
- Worldwide there are 631 million children ages 0-4. At 9.4% of the world population, they are the single largest demographic group on the planet.
- Ages 5-9, 10-14, and 15-19 follow close behind with 9% each.
- For comparision, baby boomers worldwide, ages 60-69, are only 5.8% at ~391 million. Not even close.
- Collectively, the youth of the world (ages 0-19) make up 36.4% of the world population.
- That’s nearly 2.5 billion potential consumers–if companies can successfully reach their parents.
Statistics courtesy of the U.S. Census Bureau. Click here for the link.
