Post: Positive Propaganda Promotes Internet Safety
Positive Propaganda Promotes Internet Safety
Shaping Youth is all about using media’s magic as a counter-marketing tool, so when I find a new angle to reach kids I get downright giddy.
Internet fodder may be spam to adults, but it’s entertainment to preteens who use "forward to a friend" relentlessly to share silly jokes, "awww"-sweet animal poses, lucky chains, urban legends, and e-card blasts.
Marketers are well aware of this tween phenom and leverage it for their own purposes, but parents rarely consider "click-n-send" viral tactics to embed their own "aha" moments…
Example? At Shaping Youth, we "repurposed" a piece of cyber-safety spam to forward among preteen peers who already know the basics about not giving out personal information online.
This one involved mentioning team names in online chat. (You can read the original spam at the end of this link).
We dialed down the lingo to be very subtle, so the piece wouldn’t lose credibility and receive a tweenspeak ‘duh,’ as in, “Like I’d really say anything personal? How stupid is that?”
Preteens in pushback mode may tune out any whiff of a warning from adults with a roll of the eyes, but they’ll listen to each other in a ‘heads-up’ way with texting tips. So we used kids’ own spam to position 2smrt4u in the hope they’d forward it…
Positive propaganda? Sure beats a heavy-handed lecture. We see it as a way to create awareness using the media itself as a shared language.
Continue reading this entry on the Shaping Youth blog, where it first appeared.