Know-How Exchange : Social Media

(Aside: There was a recent flap about such a business such as yours' - the company that provided the safe surfing turned around and then sold the data about the surfing habits of the kids (and their data)).

The issue you'll face is trust. Why should someone trust your business to keep their kids safe? Are you providing 3rd party verification? Are all your staff involved guaranteed not to be pedophiles? And what is your liability should something "happen" to one of the kids as a result of your site? Not to be all gloom-and-doom, but these are the issues that parents will be thinking about, especially from an unknown website provider.

Thanks for your response - unfortunatly it did not answer my question ..although you point out a number of pitfalls (which we have considered) you have not offered any ideas for entering the marketplace.
FYI - each piece of our site is local and monitored by a local vetted individual - teacher , administrator.
There is never a perfect solution - I think we address as many issues as possible ,including liability. What we hope to offer is as safe a site as possible and keep the kids from those that have no concern for saftey.

Thanks for your response. Basics have been addressed site is technically complete to accomplish stated objectives. We have adopted the premise that parents with kids 12-18 recognize that , like it or not, their kids are participating in an online social site (probably for free and unsupervised) and,,,that they recognize the potential dangers presented if no monitoring is in place (our job is to make monitoring as invisible as possible but maintain reviews 2x a day). Kids need freedom and parents need the best oversite available. If parents don't care then they will not spend the $. Trust is key and that is a part of the question that still needs an answer regarding marketing the product.

What proof do you have to support your adopted premise?
What evidence do you have of a demand? Who's buying? Why would parents pay for this service? How many of the kids' friends will use the service?

If I'm a teen and all my friends are on Facebook, why would I get my parents to pay for a platform on which I'll have no one to interact with?

Social media is not about profit, it's about being social. Offer your service free of charge and support it through advertising.

Your response is is a question to a question rather than a an answer to a question. I was hoping that by posting a marketing question I might get an answer or idea as to how to market this product. How would you answer the question if I were to tell you that I /we have done quite a lot of due diligence - investigated the market and that what we have is a product that has been vetted and revised often to appeal to a specific audience?
I appreciate your response - I hope you understand my response. Thanks, George

Have you contacted (and/or spoken at) local mother's clubs? Preschools (even though your target audience is much older, they may have younger siblings)? Parent/Teacher organizations? What about enlisting young fans to sell to their community the subscription (with a commission)?

Thanks - PTA's - make sense as do commission.

Dear Gary,
Thanks for your comment - my previous responses were not meant to be "snippy" only to provide the reponders with the knowledge that we were not oblivious to the problems that would be encountered ... We hoped that some positive answers might be of help in moving forward as opposed to recovering what we felt were clear hurdles already considered. I believe we have a product that has a special audience , not for the "free" gang that has made face book a less than safe place for "social networking" especially among the younger generation.Thank you for your answer to my question,
George

As a parent of a tween and a longtime public school and parenting advocate, here's my two cents.

First, are you marketing your site to parents or to tweens? They are totally different markets to reach. The suggestions you have are to market to parents, but if it's a site for tweens you're not going to reach them that way. What tween wants to join a site that their parent recommended, unless it addressed a specific interest focus?

The most useful and well-regarded sites offer information and networking of value. Kids would be more apt to try something out if you offer them something in return - a free "something", drawing for something they value, etc. Personally, I think your best bet would be to focus on a particular kind of connecting first - a site to share your video about xxx, or join the discussion about xxx. And as other social networking sites, it will catch on if it meets the needs of those trying out those features.

I guess the thing that struck me about your brief is your definition of a "tween" - 12-18 years old.

A quick Google search gave me this definition from Wickepedia: "a word that typically refers to a person who is between the ages of 10 and 12 years old".

If you were to narrow your focus and target the 10-12 year-old market only (and leave the teenagers for others), I think you would have more success. That's because the desire for less interference from parents is more likely to occur in the teen years than in the tween years.

I think you should market to the parents of tweens as opposed to the tweens themselves. According to the Google keywords tool, there seems to be a bit of demand for information regarding "internet safety", "online safety", "safe internet games" etc - search terms that are more likely derived from the searches of parents than the kids themselves.

If you were able to create content - blogs, articles, press releases, YouTube videos - that tapped into these buzz words and told your story (which I believe would resonate with a lot of concerned parents) at the same time, it might be a potential way into a market that has low-to-medium competition for these terms.

Creating awareness in local junior high schools would also seem logical. If you were to create a downloadable PDF report entitled "A Guide to Internet Safety for Tweens" (or something of that ilk). And send an email with a link to the PDF to the Principal and/or Secretary of local junior highs letting them know that they are welcome to include the link in the school newsletter, you could get some buy-in that way. Particularly, if the PDF contains valuable information related to internet safety for tweens and is not just an ad for your site. A key part of the strategy is to include your details at the back of the PDF with a brief overview of your story and link to your site. But that page is perceived to be an addition to the document, rather than the core. People should think, "Who created this great information?" And want to explore what you do, because of that fact.