Your child as co-marketer

Though MySpace has barely begun turning users into viral marketers, the New York Times reports, advertisers are creating their own social-networking sites to make that happen for themselves. They want to turn teens and 20-somethings into co-marketers, USATODAY reports. What does that mean? For as long as I've been watching this scene (nine years), I've been hearing marketers say the Net makes word-of-mouth or viral marketing a reality – an exciting prospect for marketers, because young influencers (e.g., "popular kids," gearheads, music fans, etc.) do the marketing for corporations in a way that's hugely more influential than a 30-second TV spot designed for the ultra-impersonal, very blah lowest-common-denominator. USATODAY describes some of their plans in the teens-as-co-marketers space and explains the tricky part of this (e.g., "Chevrolet recently saw the dark side with its make-your-own ad site for its new Tahoe SUV. A number of visitors created ads criticizing its fuel use and circulated them on the Internet. The company did not try to censor such sentiment"). Meanwhile, this is just further evidence that social-networking site are multiplying like rabbits - except that I can't imagine entire peer groups migrating from Xanga or MySpace to socializewithpepsi.com (or something much more cool-sounding Pepsi's interactive ad agency would come up with). This trend too will probably pass.