Deb's SM Survey:

… and she is 8 years old.

We were visiting friends Sunday, and their daughter – along with most of her classmates – has discovered Webkinz, the pet-based virtual world created by toy company Ganz. Buying a Webkinz toy provides you with a code to enter this virtual world, where you must keep your pet healthy and entertained. There are things to buy, games to play, and limited chat and social networking features to allow interactions without creating privacy concerns.

Of course kids (who have access to them) are using computers younger and younger, and they’ll grow up not only familiar with technology but expecting certain things from it. While virtual worlds exist for adults today – ranging from Second Life to game-based worlds like World of Warcraft – I think we’ll see a fundamental shift in the way these worlds are used as the Webkinz generation grows up.

Many of these kids will do the majority of their online social networking in these worlds, graduating from Webkinz to tween- and then teen- oriented sites, and eventually go looking for the “grown up” version. Facebook will seem dull to them, and my suspicion is even MySpace will look too, well, “flat.” Of course they will play games, but they won’t be looking for a MMORPG: they’ll be looking for a world where they can continue the relationships they’ve had with their (usually real-world) friends in other virtual worlds.

I don’t know what that world will be yet. Will Second Life overcome some of its difficulties
and become the virtual destination of these youngsters in 6-10 years? (Second Life already has a teen version.) Will one of the current kid or tween sites branch off a version for older users? Or will it be someone completely off the radar right now?

I do think we’ll see more – and more popular – virtual worlds. But when – and who – I don’t have an answer for.

Lisa Stone, co-founder and CEO of BlogHer spoke last night as part of the Berkman Center’s Berkman@10 event series.

BlogHer has grown from a 2005 grassroots conference with 300 attendees to an online network of women bloggers that gets 8 million unique visitors a month. They have 22 full-time employees, plan 8 conferences this year and run an ad network that shares revenue with participating members. Their growth has been facilitated by venture capital from Venrock.

Stone began her talk by emphasizing the power of women as consumers (they control the overwhelming majority of the household budget) and as users of social media, including social networks and text messages. Women use blogging not just to express themselves, but also to take action, responding to a wide spectrum of issues. Stone was especially excited to see so many bloggers who don’t normally write about political issues becoming engaged and excited by the current election season.

After surveying BlogHer members on how the Presidential candidates’ campaigns had (or had not) reached out to women, she provided four conclusions that are equally valuable for advertisers:

1. Reach out to established women’s networks, don’t start your own and force us to come to you.
2. Don’t market to women, talk with women.
3. Don’t use stereotypes to break women down into simplistic or offensive groups (soccer moms, sexy singles, etc.). We’re more complicated that that.
4. Health care is the new number one “women’s issue” – although women are concerned about all issues, including the Iraq war, the economy, etc.

Stone spoke about their advertising program, noting that about 40% of advertisers want to develop a customized program (like giving away free samples). The companies approaching BlogHer are much more savvy about online marketing than they were in the past and want to engage in an authentic interaction with the BlogHer members.

One of the 2008 BlogHer conferences will be in Boston in October, and I’m looking forward to it even more after this introduction to the BlogHer network. Will I see you there? (And yes, men are welcome!)

The blog’s been wallowing, lonely and unloved – and un-updated. Sadly, procrastination has a ripple effect, and the delay in rewriting my résumé spilled over to other projects. But now the résumé is done.

Within the same week that the New Rules of Marketing and PR was recommended to me, I discovered that the author, David Meerman Scott, is on Twitter and I’ve been following him there, and taking a look at his excellent blog.

David has some free e-books on his site, and in another push toward convergence some career-related events have put me in a position to need some info on PR and new media.

The e-books are a great primer, since I don’t have time right this second to read his print book. The New Rules of Viral Marketing e-book is especially helpful. The analogy to a venture capitalist’s investment strategy when preparing viral marketing campaigns made the most sense of anything I’ve read about viral marketing. Since success is not guaranteed, launch several:

Many will be duds that won’t spark any interest; a few will generate some notice and basically pay back your investment of the time required to create them; and a handful will go viral and make the entire program of ten or twenty viral marketing campaigns worthwhile. (pg 19)

The old saying “don’t put all your eggs in one basket” applies equally well to virtual baskets, it turns out.

I went to hear Clay Shirky speak about his new book, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing without Organizations. Shirky explores the “ridiculously easy group forming” inherent in the internet, and how this has the potential to radically change society. Now that many groups can assume that all their members are online, these groups can use the internet to assist in more complicated activities.

Shirky sets up a hierarchy of online group function, with increasing levels of coordination required. The first is simple sharing, then conversation, then collaboration, with collective action the final rung on the ladder. In his talk, Shirky gave fascinating examples of online collective action, from a movement to create an airline passengers’ bill of rights to the use of flash mobs for political protest in Belarus.

This stage is in its infancy, however, and there is still no formula for successful online-based collective action. (In fact, as the subtitle of Shirky’s book suggests, successful online collective actions right now are not spearheaded by traditional organizations which might have the ability to formalize the process.)

The potential for new ways of initiating successful collective action was one of the dreams that got me interested in the internet and social media to begin with, and its exciting to think that the journey is just beginning.

Another beginning that I’m keeping an eye on is Totspot, a new social publishing site for babies and parents that just announced its private beta. I met some of the Totspot team through the local Web Innovators group, and its exciting to see their launch, complete with a write up yesterday in Techcrunch. Good luck, Totspot.

Reading the comments on the Techcrunch article, including parents who buy domain names for their babies and start blogs there (hoping the kids will take them over someday), really drives home the changes that are occurring. We already have a millennial generation with different norms around privacy, technology, and work. Once we have a generation in which online group forming and participation has literally been part of their lives from birth, will we see an even more radical shift toward constant networking, openness and immediate content gratification? What will the discussion of internet-based collective action look like in 2026, when the first Totspot kids are 18?

(Will they laugh at today’s fledgling efforts? Or celebrate today’s pioneers? I can’t wait to find out.)