Disney 2.0: Get ‘Em While They’re Young

It may sound strange, but the single session I most wanted to attend at last week's Web 2.0 Expo was Rich Internet Experiences and the Social Graph with the Disney Touch, which ended up being presented by Jason Vasquez, Director of Technology, Family Group - Disney Online. Sponsored sessions tend to be sparsely populated with people who have a full conference pass, but as a parent, the Disney social media machine is in full swing in my house on a regular basis, and I wanted to take advantage of any opportunity to see what sets those gears in motion.

Vasquez covered three facets of Disney.com, including sites geared toward parents and older tweens, and I'm going to cover those as well, but I wanted to start off with the property geared toward users as young as six: Disney Fairies.

My first introduction to the Disney Fairies site was via an email sent to me from Disney. My eight-year-old daughter was already registered on the Disney site, but by adding the Fairies site, it sent another notification letting me know my daughter had added that registration, providing me with the site's terms of use, and a quick link to revoke permission for her to use the site. After a lecture explaining that even another PORTION of a site requires a check-in with us to register (she knows to ask permission and show us any site), my daughter was soon filling the house with the sound of pixie dust and lots of it.

Vasquez described Disney Fairies as social networking for six year olds, and noted that kids connect through game play. You aren't going to find six-year-olds who want to participate in microblogging or a forum environment, but let them play games with a self-created fairy, and they are all in. Disney believes that content, not brands, drive engagement, but he left out the part where the content in branded format drives sales. The movie starring Tinkerbell (yes, just Tinkerbell) is coming, and if you weren't already aware from the interstitials on the Disney Channel, and the 25 books from Gail Carson Levine, you sure will be after your child visits this site, which Vasquez called a micro-virtual world.

The goal for any Disney site is instant access with massive exposure: a low-entry gateway. It took less than 10 seconds for me to realize there's a movie coming from the site, and the available activities are not only easy to find, but often repeated on the site: the top menu gives choices of Meet the Fairies, books, Movies, Games & Activities, Create a Fairy, and Parents, while many of those same options are selections on the splash page; allowing kids to navigate from the menu or the illustrated page.

As Vasquez noted, children want freedom while parents want safety, and that was evident based on the audience demographics in the session. The audience here skewed older, and looked like other parents looking for the same information I was: what exactly is Disney doing behind the scenes that lures our children in so well?

In Disney Fairies, the community is built on context, building conversation around the shared activities on the site. Disney recognizes that their target audience is composed of girls who want to be older, and want individuality and self-expression, and he actually referred to them as confident, sassy, and ready to interact in a safe community

Disney's goal for this property is to allow girls to identify talents, and express themselves in safe environment in creating fairies, playing the games, participating in polls, and interacting with the site. Users create a fairy name and character used throughout the site, which includes recognition (for example, random "newest fairy friends" appear on each fairy character page with number of visits, and users can email the page to friends). The chat features here are limited to pre-constructed phrases, but judging by my daughter's reaction to the site, they've given her exactly what she's looking for. Well, nearly, that is. For the child whose Halloween costume last year was "Goth fairy" she'd like a little more black involved in creating her own fairy.

With over 4.5 million fairies created to date, Disney knows they have a hit, and are staging the next steps for Fairies: tying them closely into what promises to be a glut of consumer products that will tie in with the movie, building out an MMOG that will allow users to import the "DNA" (the fairies they have created along with their user profiles), and a version geared more toward boys, based on characters along the lines of Disney's Jetix brand.

Parts II, III, and IV of my kids and social media via Disney series will appear later this week.