By Ryan Okum    05/08/08  

The Golden Rules For Engaging Youth Online

Keeping your brand fresh and building connections to create a base of youth advocates
Today the biggest challenge in marketing to youth is the rapid pace with which trends emerge, creating a need for brands to stay fresh and relevant. This challenge is compounded by a youth market that is increasingly product-savvy and informed on the many choices available to them; which means that brands must establish authentic connections to best engage these young, intelligent consumers.

Having spent more than 10 years working closely with the youth market, I have gained crucial insight into what strategies are most successful in mobilizing young people and generating buzz for brands. The most important principle to follow when marketing to young people is to never pretend to be something you're not online, as youth are the first to see past quick sales attempts.

Here are four golden rules for keeping your brands fresh and building long-lasting connections with youth:

Get personal
Involve your customers in your campaigns and create a community of advocates - who better to learn from than your peers? It's a noisy, often impersonal world: On average consumers are hit with two marketing messages a minute. Nothing helps break through all of that like engaging your audience in a relevant way.

Experiment with unconventional platforms
An element of entertainment is key to engaging with youth, as they are constantly bombarded with information, communication and entertainment. You need to create an interactive environment with breakthrough creative that actually engages. Take Amazon's Mechanical Turk tool: It creates a dialogue and surrounding community by allowing people to post problems for others to solve in a compelling way. Imagine building audience loyalty with a similar tool that enables fans to provide feedback directly on a movie script or video game plot.

Integrate your online with off-line campaigns and go mobile
Create ongoing connections wherever and whenever young people are engaging. According to a recent OTX Research study, anywhere from a third to half of teens say mediums such as TV, magazines and advertising in general are still among their most important influences. Additionally, young people are exposed to images daily just by utilizing public transportation and traveling around their city or town. This understanding of the ebb and flow of humans on a given day was behind the Halo 3 viral campaign that included a group called "The Society for the Ancients" handing out seemingly innocuous flyers on city streets. But Halo-savvy passersby picked up on some visual clues and ended up a website that took the story deeper.

People don't exist in a vacuum or rely on a single medium. The power of an impression builds with the number of different ways your message is disseminated. Repetition, in a variety of media, can be your best friend.

Kids are increasingly communicating on mobile devices, whether it be through IM or Twitter. Smart campaigns leverage the communities and immediacy that those mediums offer.

Leverage new social networking tools
As the Web becomes modularized through the use of widgets and gadgets, there's an opportunity to use those technologies to spread a community virally in the social-networking world. A band's latest songs, for example, can be packaged in a widget and spread to many different audiences. A clip from a new movie, made portable through YouTube embed codes, moves quickly among the youth market and can become fodder for additional mash-up content.

Building a social-networking environment can be a very important technique, not only to build community but enable a new type of connection that leads to increased word of mouth (WOM), better products and services, and a more engaged customer base.

view article source