Engage Expo

I'm really excited to be over in New York this week, where, amongst other engagements, I was speaking on a panel at Engage!Expo with Joi Podgorny, (Director of Community Engagement, Smart Bomb Interactive), George Zaloom, (Founder & CEO, FaceChipz) and Pierre Le Lann, (Co-CEO, TribalNova).

The title of the panel was 'User Generated Online Content for Kids: Freedom vs. Safety' and we covered a healthy balance of the positive aspects of UGC and a stark reminder of the more insidious aspects including bullying, sharing of personal information, innappropriate content and general "Lord of the Flies" type gang mentality. The questions from the floor were excellent and despite an earlier morning panel suggesting that ugc for under 14s was just pointless as it was stuck on the too hard to do pile, our audience had a real support for allowing young children to create their own content and engage with others in a safe way.

Pierre's slides of Woozworld were a great reminder of the sheer joy in seeing how tweens and teens have such brilliant imagination and, given the building blocks, they can create amazing content and continually suprise building hospitals, adoption centres, shops and even self policing by creating a prison.

As many of the questions were around that old connundrum of how to help with the registration process to ensure you know the age of the users it was refreshing to see George's new site which aims to blast the registration issue out of the water. George Zaloom proudly demonstrated FaceChipz, a kind of Facebook with stabilisers. This is a social network that is just for friends to share. It centres around users having to physically give their friends or people they want to connect with special poker chip like "FaceChipz". These have a special code that connect the two friends online so you can only connect with people you know and trust. The code even deactivates after use so if it was lost or got into the wrong hands it would be useless. Very cool and a sign of how far the industry has come.

Joi Podgorny was as wonderful as always at keeping the conversation flowing. As all great Community Managers do she invited the attendees (and anyone else) to continue the conversation. To aid this our twitter handles are:

@tlittleton
@joipod
@plelann
@facechipz

Update: the organisers have now very kindly published the MP3 recording of the panel, so if you'd like to have a listen first hand please do so.

As a side note I'm very excited about the new National Geographic VW for kids coming out so good luck with that Joi. Some brands are just ripe for a VW experience.

My after panel buzz was rather squished by the news that my partner had been caught up in a shop being robbed at gunpoint whilst I was talking (ok but in shock) and it reminded me of this very apt quote from Stephen Fry talking about the online world.

“Like a city, there are slums, there are libraries, there are theatres, there are shops, there are places where you would never go and you certainly would not want your children to go,” he said.

Interesting times.