Tween Social Network Tries Personal Approach to Keep Pervs at Bay
New meeting place for tween girls or poaching ground for predators?
She’s too old for kiddie sites, too young for MySpace, acts like she’s 11, looks like she’s 17 -and in reality, she’s around 13. Sound like your daughter? If so, the people behind Beacon Street Girls, have developed a social network in beta now and scheduled for official release this fall that is targeted squarely at her and her tweener friends.
Geared toward girls too old for Webkinz and too young for Facebook, Beacon Street Girls aims to “provide provides girls 9-13 with a myriad of online activities designed to satisfy their ever-growing need to create and communicate with each other.”
What interests me about the site (Odd Bits doesn’t typically cover the Tween-scene) is it’s unique approach to keeping predators at bay, since at first glance –let’s face it- the site looks like a perv’s dream come true.
I asked Bobby Carlton, Director of Marketing what steps they take, in addition to the privacy measures outlined on the site in detail (which include not allowing members to give out any personal information including name, school, address, email, etc.), to ensure that predators to not sneak in through the well used comment system. After reading through several dozen comments, for example, I found several that sounded surprisingly articulate for the average 12 or 13 year old girl. This was her response:
All the comments are reviewed by grownup monitors BEFORE they are posted — either our staff or a small group of people we know personally. No personal information is allowed so there is no way for a predator to get access to a kid. We frequently perform what we’ve taken to calling “surgical edits” where we actually edit the post to take out names, school names, anything more specific than a state or country. In other words, a predator could get on the site but couldn’t accomplish anything. Frankly, it is more likely that a kid will be targeted for bullying by someone they know and we spend a lot of time trying to keep mean or ambiguous comments off the site. I personally take monitoring shifts to keep up on what is going on — we’re more likely to see a kid trying to give out their email address to their new found friends, or someone typing in gibberish or a long string of exclamation points than anything else.
Virtual world and toy industry analyst Sean McGowan, Needham & Company LLC, agrees with the placement of the Beacon Street Girls between Webkinz or Club Penguin and Facebook, and sees the growth potential for the site. “The Beacon Street Girls are targeting a marketplace with a readymade feeder system. Sites like Club Penguin and Webkinz are giving children a taste of social networking and whetting their appetite for the more sophisticated fare Club BSG serves. Meanwhile, the continuing popularity of brands with online-offline connections means that the company has a real revenue stream and an existing audience.”
According to B*tween Productions, safety is paramount on the Beacon Street Girls site. Company materials state that, “while Club BSG mimics the “friending” and social networking conventions found on teen and adult sites, the Beacon Street Girls’ website controls do not allow any direct contact between strangers. Girls build their profiles by making selections from pre-defined menus. All comments are reviewed by adult monitors before they are published to the site. Only posts that follow all the “Club Rules” are allowed. No personal information is collected.”
It has yet to be seen if B*tween Productions will be able to support the increased costs of the personal monitoring system if the numbers increase. Also, tweens are an especially fickle audience and, just as 17 Magazine is widely read by 12 year olds, not 17 year olds, it is hard to say if they’ve rightly targeted their audience. I’d rate this as a wait and see, but, in terms of their approach to warding off predators, history has proven that human involvement trumps technology every time, so in that case, at least I think their approach is spot on.
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This entry was posted on Thursday, August 14th, 2008 at 10:00 am and is filed under In Beta, News, Social Networks. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Bobbie Carlton August 29th, 2008 at 9:05 am
Thanks Catherine for the profile.
Answering some of the questions:
The monitoring isn’t as onerous as it might seem. The vast majority of comments and messages are predefined and picked from drop down menus. They don’t need to be reviewed. Meanwhile, based on our previous websites, we have developed substantial tools and expertise that make monitoring much easier. (Yes, we have a 40+ monitor manual but it is mostly a reference guide.)
We do pay our monitors — we’re moving forward on a profitable business model for the site (more on that later) but we also have a healthy real world business — books, gifts and accessories, and licensed products.