Surprising success

Saturday, prior to our annual meeting, Girl Scouts held an event called the Girl Summit, in which we gathered girls in grades 6-12 and asked them to talk about Girl Scouts. They had discussions, recorded thoughts at their tables, and placed Post-its on posters throughout the room.

Additionally, I took this opportunity to set up a Tweetwally for the event, just to see how girls in this age group would react, knowing full well that this is not the audience for Twitter. The suspicion was that girls, like adults, would think it was pretty cool (I've been told that "cool" is officially outdated and they now say "legit") to see their words projected on a screen.

Because most girls do not currently use Twitter, we provided laptops that were already signed in to a special council-owned Twitter handle: @GirlScoutVoice. Girls were able to use these computers to tweet at any time during the event, using the hashtag #elementsofleadership to appear on the Elements of Leadership Tweetwally.

Results
I was anticipating a handful of tweets, maybe 25 to 30 - a few useful responses, some quotes to show volunteers and staff members. But my expectations were blown out of the water. In 90 minutes, @GirlScoutVoice generated about 100 tweets.

Obviously, that's nothing compared to most adult events. But for girls, the participation seemed impressive.

It's telling that almost all tweets with the hashtag were from the council-owned Twitter account. Girls really aren't on Twitter, but they did like to play with the cool toy. And they did take it seriously. Although several girls got a bit silly ("I <3 COWS!!!"), most gave honest feedback about what would make Girl Scouting better for them.

So what?
For youth, maybe the best thing we can do is give them a space to play - a space specifically created for them, rather than an invitation to play in an adult's playground (Twitter and Facebook). One girl at the event floated the idea of "GirlBook," like Facebook but just for girls.

I think there's a false impression that youth don't care about social media, when really, youth just don't care about Twitter and Facebook. These are adult tools. And unlike adults, who feel overtaxed by invites to myriad networks and would rather just have everyone in one place, youth may truly value exclusivity and a sense of belonging to something made specifically for them.

Maybe this has all been said before, but I'm excited to finally have a real, relevant example in my pocket of how girls are willing to interact online. I'm really hoping to use this modest Tweetwally experiment as a lesson to help us design a great user experience for girls as we create a new website.

The lingering question for me is, "Would girls have participated without the promise of anonymity?"

P.S. Dibs on GirlBook.