Recently I was privileged to listen to Eames Demetrios, the famous grandson of the Eames design family, give a talk about how “scale is the new geography.” It called to mind a time back in the late 1990s, when I wrote the strategy to relaunch AOL into Australasia. They’d utilized their marketing model from the U.S. (flood the market with CDs) to gain a small foothold, but they wanted to be a dominant player, as they were back home. Their business was all about scale.
Scale met geography for me in 1999, where the scale of the Web and the social discourse happening on it (through instant messaging back then) was funneled into a town of 800 people on the northern coast of faraway Australia. I traveled there to chat with teens and their parents about AOL and Instant Messenger, to see how real Australians were adapting to this incredible innovation. I interviewed the parents, their kids, then the family together.
One set of parents pulled me aside and confided that they were worried about their son’s use of AOL Instant Messenger: “We only recognize five of the 25 people on his Buddy List. We don’t know who they are, whether they really are friends or, what we fear, some perverted predators. We ask him about it, but he just shrugs us off.”
Sound concerns for any parent then, and more so today, given the exponential growth in social media. So I talked to their son.
Now, this was a very small town. And it would have been easy to hear O’Ryan croon, “Just because I’m young doesn’t mean I don’t know how to play” and write him and the other teens off as simply inexperienced in the ways of the world. Right?
Not this 13-year-old boy. He told me there were kids at school he could be seen hanging out with and talking to, and kids he could not. But he found many of those “not” kids interesting, so he became online buddies with them. During the day he talked to the “right kids,” and at night he circumvented the social pressure, talking to whom he wanted to.
His natural ingenuity informed our strategy.
That boy is 23 now and possibly working for your company, buying your brand, or texting, blogging or tweeting about you. Right now.
Today’s version of that boy is a boy (or girl) on Main Street USA with the same smarts, an ability to see light where adults see shade and an innate ability to put social media to work to shape his world. But will you be in it?
Teens are talking about you. So are you really listening? Are you able to help and be useful to them?
There has never been a better time to listen to The Sisterhood. We will be listening. Join us.
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