Knowing Teens

Interesting what this article about teenagers and social media cites as completely novel about present day teens .Teens are now cloaking  the meaning of their content in social media to guard against surveillance. 

It is what teens have always done -they have told inside jokes that no one outside their clique would get forget about outsiders and adults. When chat became popular teens found a slew of acronyms to code their messages. The fact that the picture of a donut on Instagram may not be just what it appears is not any different. This should pose a challenge to marketeers perhaps.

While the chat related acronyms were a more universal lexicon, something that is shared with a limited group via social media would have vocabulary that only makes sense to a few So it would be harder to decipher the meaning and target the kid with relevant ads and promotions. If understanding the language is key to understanding the customer, giving some privacy back to the kids may help more than trying take over all their data.