One Big Happy Web

THE INTERNET brings far-flung people together, and in our postindustrial, postmodern, peripatetic information age (some nice big words, huh?) that can include even families, extended or otherwise. This phenomenon offers an opportunity for marketers. And if there’s one thing we like, it’s an opportunity for marketers.

Herewith we consider two related (pun intended) examples.

MyFamily.com (“It’s a Relative Thing”), launched the day after Christmas, is an outgrowth of a genealogy site. MyFamily.com is divided into four areas: magazine, shopping, news and “family filtered” search and, most importantly, the MyFamily site.

MyFamily.com allows families to create their own password-protected Web sites. At their own Web presence, family members can reach out and touch one another through e-mail, chat, instant messaging and online newsletters. They can swap snapshots in a photo album. Other features include a family calendar, a family tree and family news.

The company says it has over 90,000 Web sites. Some involve only a half-dozen people, but others have as many as 100. “It’s possibly the ultimate community site,” says Curt Allen, CEO of My Family.com’s parent company, Ancestry.com Inc., Provo, UT.

The magazine area has articles on family subjects (“Creating Strong Families,” “Best Kids’ Books”). The shopping area has a gift registry where family members can let the others know their fondest desires. The store has items offered by Web merchants like eToys, PC Flowers and Gifts, J. Crew and SkyMall; clicking a link brings you to the e-commerce site.

MyFamily.com has a few ways of learning about its users. Family members who sign up to join a family site offer the information about themselves (name, address, birthday) needed to stay in touch with others. A service to remind people about family events such as birthdays and anniversaries offers an opportunity to market products. The site also learns about its audience through daily “instant survey” questions (“Have you ever sent an electronic greeting card online?”). In addition, MyFamily.com kicked off with a sweepstakes, giving away more than $100,000 in PCs, digital cameras and other goodies, including the grand prize of a free trip.

“It’s a unique mechanism for collecting information on family members,” Allen says. “We refer to it as ‘genetic marketing.'”

MyFamily.com is run on an advertising model (sister site Ancestry.com is that rare bird-a successful subscription site, at $60 a year). Advertisers include Disney and Intel. Online marketing manager Steve Conlee admits MyFamily.com has to be careful about where it places ads for fear of alienating users.

MyFamily.com offers e-mail opportunities to its marketers-such as a regular, sponsored newsletter and the birthday reminders-but doesn’t rent personal data to third parties.

Also New… The other new family site is BlackFamilies.com. Cox Interactive Media, a subsidiary of Cox Enterprises Inc., Atlanta, launched BlackFamilies.com on Jan. 18, Martin Luther King Jr. Day. The site is aimed at African Americans between the ages of 24 and 44, the presumed ages for people raising families.

It has chat rooms, a shopping area and a wealth of articles (supplied mostly from Cox’s media properties) in different channels: family finance (“Looking and Planning for College Financial Aid”), family relationships (“Handling Stress Is a Must Within Families”) and parenting (“Poor Grades May Mean Poor Study Skills”). BlackFamilies.com offers African-American groups the ability to build their own sites.

“BlackFamilies.com is the sole site focused on African-American families,” says John M. Pembroke, the site’s brand manager. “It’s designed to be a resource, to help African Americans enhance their family lives.”

Pembroke says Cox Interactive, which creates city and specialty sites, looked at Web sites currently out there for blacks and found that they are primarily for “entertainment and social networking.” Cox’s research showed that African Americans wanted serious information, particularly financial, news and parenting. “The site deals with issues that are important to our users,” says Pembroke. “It’s entertaining but not an entertainment site.”

African-American Internet users are significant in size and growing, according to Pembroke; there are almost 7 million black adults online, a number that’s predicted to rise to 11 million in 2003.

Cox wanted to come up with a site that provides advertisers an opportunity to sell products and services to African Americans. Procter & Gamble is sponsoring the parenting channel. The other major sponsor is Equitable Life Assurance Society of the United States, which has banners throughout the site.

Mary McElrath-Jones, Equitable’s assistant vice president for emerging markets, says Cox approached Equitable about sponsoring the site just when the company was creating initiatives to focus on financial planning, which it hopes to begin doing in June 2000 (it started a pilot program in Texas in January). Equitable wants to offer such services especially to the so-called emerging ethnic groups: African, Asian and Hispanic Americans, in addition to women.

Equitable, which currently sells financial products such as annuities and mutual funds, has historically been the No. 1 insurance company for African Americans and wants to regain that reputation across the financial board, especially with the rise of the black middle class. McElrath-Jones says the company’s goals for the site are to build its brand, attract customers and acquire employees.

But why families? Says McElrath-Jones: “Families tie in very nicely with what we do. Although a large number of single people are professionals, the majority of people looking for a financial planner have families.”