Reaching Teens

Originally posted on eurorscgpr.com/blog.

There’s a new digital lexicon spoken fluently by today’s teenagers but barely understood by their elders. Naturally, POS (“parent over shoulder”) is on the list. This private language is only one facet of the complex of communications used by teens today. Technology, microculture and, most of all, interactivity have combined to create a whole new world of communication for teens and their families.

It’s no surprise, then, that today’s teens have been called the Lord of the Flies (or maybe more appropriately, Lord of the Files) generation, since children are educating and acculturating one another in the parentless virtual villages of MySpace and Facebook, and in gaming environments such as World of Warcraft and Habbo Hotel.

The sentiment among teens that social media environments belong to them (especially when compared with their parents, who are often still trying to grasp what, exactly, Twitter is) has presented new challenges to communication in families with teens. In a novel role reversal, parents have found themselves subject to the digital rules of their teen or tween children. “You can be my friend on Facebook,” today’s teens are telling their parents, “but you can’t write on my Wall, comment on my photos or friend my friends.”

This new dynamic in teen-family and teen-parent relationships has left parents, as well as marketers, wondering what to make of it. Taking a closer look at how teens actually communicate, however, reveals that their behavior is relatively unchanged from that of previous teen generations. What has changed are the methods of communicating and the scope of channels and choices available.

We all know by now that teens are wired into all things digital. But the nuances of how they communicate speak volumes. Nielsen recently presented a report called How Teens Use Media, which found that:

Teens are still addicted to TV and, in fact, watch more TV than ever before, with a 6 percent increase over the past five years.

They spend less time on the Internet than adults, logging 11 hours and 32 minutes per month, compared with the general population’s average of more than 29 hours.

Teens who recall ads from traditional media such as newspapers, radio or TV are 44 percent more likely than other age groups to have liked what they saw.

Further, according to an analysis from Mashable, only 8 percent of Twitter users are under 18, while a Pew Internet & American Life Project report found that 47 percent of teens send daily messages on social network sites.

What we can take away from this is that teenagers like to meet, watch, chat and share. They don’t really like to broadcast (which explains their low Tweet rates) but do like being broadcast to. Thinking about it this way, teenage communication today doesn’t seem so unintelligible—or even that different.

Today’s parents are finding that communicating with their teens means treating social media like any other part of a teenager’s social landscape. Just like the landline used to be, Facebook and MySpace are increasingly seen by parents as privileges, not natural rights. And parents are once again beginning to set the rules of communication instead of being subject to them.

Important conversations among family members are still being carried out in the best-tested form of social media—face-to-face talk—but parents are also learning that after laying some ground rules, they can use social media extremely effectively, especially when combined with mobile access, for checking in, asking about homework or reminding kids to do their chores.