What's a Barbie Video Girl you ask? Well Mashable reports that, "Barbie Video Girl doubles as a video camera with LCD screen and comes with video editing software. The doll appears to be designed to get little girls excited about video production, a career path that may not be as geeky as computer engineering, but is still quite modern."
So basically we now have a doll that functions as a video camera. And on top of that Barbie is using Foursquare and Twitter to promote a scavenger-hunt contest starting next week. Participants follow Barbie to get clues and tips for the scavenger-hunt and then check in using Foursquare. Apparently there will be on-site challenges to complete and "street team" on hand to award prizes to the winners.
The thing that puzzles me most about this promotion and the use of social media is how effective it will be. I mean how many young girls (let's say around 10 and younger) are actually using Twitter or Foursquare? My guess is not that many. I seem to recall a study from the PEW Research Center that stated that few teens use Twitter, so I doubt kids even younger have adopted the practice. I know that if I had kids I wouldn't be too keen on letting them have Foursquare or Twitter accounts.
This leaves me to believe that this campaign must be targeting older fans of Barbie (much like the adult fans of Lego), bloggers, and moms of kids that love Barbie. And sure enough Barbie has over 16,000 Twitter followers. So I'm curious how these scavenger-hunts will pay off for the fashion doll of choice. I'm betting a lot of older women are going to be out there clamoring for a free doll. But maybe that's the plan after all?
Posts
3 comments:
I think you make a good point about the technographics of the target audience for Barbie. Kids are ridiculously wired these days, but there is still an age they need to reach before they get a cell phone and start tweeting. I think a better idea might've been to give kids access to a website where they can develop fashion ideas for Barbie and have them created and mailed in for a fee, or otherwise linking to e-mail and websites that kids can actually use. To optimize the tech-savvy education kids are getting, I'm sure they could build in some actual videography onto the website and have kids download their videos to create YouTube events.
This is the type of stuff that really scares me. What on earth do kids need this kind of toy for? I think this highlights a good question: should social media start at a young age? Obviously exposure to it is inevitable; I babysat for 2 children ages 5 and 2 who were addicted to YouTube but only when their father was clicking- but I feel like there's a difference between that and creating your own content. If we're so worried about our children maturing much more quickly than they need to, this is not the right direction to push them in. But maybe it's a good thing- learning at a young age will help them later on in society. I guess the only way to ever truly understand what's better or worse is to have things like social media Barbie let the crazed kids have an outlet and almost tangible interaction with something they enjoy.
Hopefully this is only for parents because Twitter and definitely Foursquare is not the place for young girls. But I also still think Facebook is not the place for kids, but they are popping up more and more. This, like Julie said, is scary because I'm sure people want their kids to be up with the latest technologies but don't want them to grow up to fast either. Even if the idea is targeted to parents and adults, if the word gets out in elementary schools, they will want to partake as well.
Post a Comment