Surfing the Net with Kids: Fooling around is serious fun

Why online games can be a powerful marketing tool for an organisation.

The Site

Surfnetkids is an extension of US author and publisher Barbara Feldman’s weekly syndicated column, Surfing the Net with Kids. Its quoted audience of 1 million monthly visitors can dip into a mix of educational resources and entertainments, some of which are paid-for.

A topical item in the well-stocked Games section (and the third-most popular yesterday, 31 March) is the April Fool’s Day Word Search. This is an interactive letters grid in which are hidden nine theme-related words. Users highlight the words as they find them while a clock ticks off how long it takes to complete the game. Along with April Foolery, another word puzzle, it can be printed off as well as played online.

The Takeaway

There is a valuable lesson here for grown-ups’ websites, too. While the featured games make effective use of a topical theme and the web’s interactivity to engage children in learning about words, it would be easy to discount them as child’s play among the usual April Fool’s Day pranksterism.

But elsewhere on the Surfnetkids site Ms Feldman lists nine hard-nosed reasons why online games can be a powerful marketing tool for an organisation. These include their ‘stickiness’ (holding people on the site), ‘buzzability’ (people recommend them to other people) and their ease of implementation.

The increasing number of companies running online games in brand promotion campaigns is a clear tip that it is worth taking a serious look at the commercial as well as the educational potential of fooling around.

First published on 01 April, 2004