The Chinese Firewall, Twitpocalypse, and Marketing to Children

Twitpocalypse and Internet Marketing

Twipocalypse was the term used for the feared downfall of Twitter.  Supposedly on June 13^th at 5:05AM all third party Twitter apps i.e. TweetDeck, TwitPic, TwitterFeed, and TwitterHolic were supposed to crash.  The Twipocalypse website explains the reason below:

“The Twitpocalypse is similar to the Y2K bug. Very soon the unique identifier associated to each tweet will exceed 2,147,483,647.  For some of your favorite third-party Twitter services not designed to handle such a case, the sequence will suddenly turn into negative numbers. At this point, they are very likely to malfunction or crash.”

The weekend of June 13^th came and went, and all of my third party Twitter apps are still working.  I can still use all of the functionalities of my TweetDeck (which by the way are very useful for search).  I can still see that Ashton Kutcher is the top Tweep on TwitterHolic, and I can still see all of my followers’ pictures on TwitPic.  So was all this hype and hysteria for, nothing?  I would say no.  It helps us put things into perspective.  What would we do if Twitter unexpectedly crashed?  How would we go about marketing, sharing our thoughts, ideas, videos, pictures, blogs, and other content?  What would happen with all of our followers?  Would the precious verified accounts still be intact?   Will there be any documentation of any of our previous tweets, or tweets directed to us?

The one thing to take from this is to always be prepared.  Twitter is great, it has revolutionized the way we go about business, but let’s not get too consumed with it.  We must diversify through the use of a wide array of social media and social networking sites.  Subscribe to Murphy’s Law; if you do, you should always feel the need to be prepared just in case (or when) everything goes wrong.

Internet Marketing to Children

Now, more than ever, children from the ages of 4-14 are accessing the internet though many different technological platforms.  These platforms can include but are not limited to cell phones, laptops, gaming consoles (both at home and handheld).  Considering that children are online more than ever before, how do we go about marketing to them?  Is this morally wrong seeing how a child’s mind is easily manipulated, or is this just simply taking advantage of the door that has opened for internet marketing?

Many ads on television are geared for children; there is an opportunity to come up with strategic internet marketing techniques that target children as well.  First we would need to  research a few things such as what do children search, how do they go about searching, what are their intentions for going online, what are their limitations, and how do we target them?

Marketing on mobile and handheld internet devices should also be an area of focus, seeing that this may be a child’s internet access of choice.  A good idea would be to develop a website for games that are accessible through cell phones, PDA’s, and other handheld devices.  Make this website popular and geared for children, then implement your marketing strategies on this site for companies that wish to advertise.  Now not only do you get recurring traffic, but targeted traffic as well.

As long as we stay creative as marketers, we can always take advantage of the playing field.

Chinese Firewall

As most of us are aware, the Chinese government has implemented a firewall that limits internet access to certain sites.  The reason provided was to block porn, but none of us are really that naïve.  It was very coincidental how from June 3^rd-June 6^th internet connection in China was down for the following documented reason:

“In order to improve the internet content and provide a healthy environment for our netizens, we have designated 3 to June 6 as national server maintenance day.  This move is widely supported by the public.”

The coincidence is that this server maintenance falls on the 20^th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square Protests.  .  Social sites such as Facebook, Twitter, WordPress, and many other forums and blogs are being blocked (sites that are all about freedom of speech).

It is most unfortunate, and worse, that the Chinese Government prevents freedoms that free societies provide such as internet access. There are also set-backs from a marketing perspective as well.  There are 1.3 billion people in China; those are all potential buyers.  How do we go about marketing to this population if we are totally cut off from them?

Twitter is accessible via third party apps and mobile phones, so keep your efforts going on the Twitter front, but that only can do so much.  Other means of connection would be to use proxies.  Many social sites would provide Chinese internet users proxies to be able to access their sites.  This is of course goes against the Chinese government, but how else can the masses be reached?

The key is to get creative; recently most of our marketing has targeted social media and networking sites … and China seems to hate these sites.  The Chinese consumer will require new, creative and alternative means to be reached.  Of course, stay tuned on this as we will surely keep our readers up to date as events break.