Diane's observations of 'Teens in Tech' are smokin!

This week we have a post from Diane Zoi, our VP of Marketing here at Bluepulse...

Last week I went to the Teens in Tech Conference, held at the H-P headquarters in Palo Alto. Besides wondering how these kids got out of a day of school to attend a conference, there was a lot that caught my attention.

Here are a few highlights for me:

• You can’t get through your teenage years without developing an online persona. In the same way that I couldn’t get through that era without trying my first cigarette (I didn’t inhale), teens today have to create and present who they want to be online. This is the first generation to experience this rite of passage. And it seems that the grown-ups in the room – the marketers, the product developers, the VCs, the parents – don’t truly understand what an important stepping stone this is for teens today. Whether you are the techy-kind-of introverted kid who works on your open source project in your spare time, or the busy-as-a-bee head cheerleader, or the ambitious-beyond-your-years teen who just so happened to already start a non-profit with a mission to alleviate world hunger, you are IM-ing, MySpace-ing, or Facebook-ing, or in most cases, using all three.


• I believe that these sites and the fact that they facilitate communication enable this generation not only to keep in touch with more people on a regular basis now, they also make it much easier for high schoolers to stay in close touch with their BFFs once they leave home after high school. One panelist at the conference who is currently a college freshman says that she “definitely talks to her high school best friends online everyday”. If you compare this to 20 years ago - not that I know anybody who graduated from college in 1988 - when we would check in with our high school friends at Christmas break and over the summer, you can see a big shift in the social graph. Add in all of the moment to moment updating teens can effortlessly do on their mobiles, and it’s easy to see how all of these high school and college students may never lose touch with anybody.
  
  This does beg the question what all of this virtual keeping in touch does for social skills. After the peppy discussion on all of the ways these teens stay in touch with one another online, one of them commented on Gen Y, “Yeah, I guess we lack social skills.”


• These teenagers want it NOW. The California (PST) kids don’t want to wait to see the new episode of Gossip Girl when it’s just aired in New York (EST). They want to download it and watch it the second it’s available online so they can start IM’ing with their friends about it. Did someone say, “illegal”? They’d be more than happy to get their fix legally, and even cough up a few bucks for it (they really said so!) IF the content and speed could compete with the pirated content experience. But today there’s no comparison according to the crowd at the conference. When it comes to video and TV content, they laugh at what is available online via the above board sites. Not one of the college-age conference panelists owns a TV. I take that back – one Stanford student has an old TV from his parents house in his dorm room because “it’s kind of like having an antique.”

Definitely not like it was in 1988, when viewers couldn’t find out who shot J.R. until it aired on national television. At least that’s what I’ve heard it was like in 1988 ;)