Selfie-obsessed? Girl Zone says attention to wellness the cure

It's a familiar sight: A teen-age girl, glued to her smart phone. The mobile device lights up with text messages, Snapchats, Facebook posts, games — a feast of information that tempts the girl to keep checking for every new tidbit that comes along.

Now a local start-up hopes to capture the attention of teen girls and young women with a new mobile phone app designed to build confidence and a healthy body image. MJ Reale of Burlington is the president and founder of The Girl Zone Challenge, a free app just launched in June.

The app is designed to encourage girls to embrace healthy mental and physical habits and skip the extreme diets and unrealistic body images that are pervasive in American culture. The company enters a crowded and highly competitive marketplace.

App is shorthand for application, as in a computer software that allows people to perform tasks or access programs. Dozens of apps populate daily in smart phones, and every app is different. Whether they blossom into useful, lucrative, or lasting trends can be anyone's guess. Launching an app starts with a concept, and grows with a programming team that faces the challenge of finding an audience in a crowded environment.

Creativity, technical skill, and first-rate content are needed to make an app that will engage in the short term, and have value for the long term, said Elaine Young, professor of marketing at Champlain College in Burlington. She specializes in digital marketing and social media.

Reale's journey helps illustrate how to navigate new opportunities for business in the digital realm.

Girl Zone is an independently financed Vermont company with a business model that depends heavily on company sponsorships for challenges played by users within the app. "It is an exciting way to engage an audience with brand messaging and game play," Reale said. "When a challenge is completed, players win points and prizes."

Girls complete a series of challenges made up of fitness, nutrition and mental health goals. They compete for rewards such as electronics, fitness games, clothing, books, music, monthly gift boxes and more.

"Evolving self-image is a huge part of every teenager's life and with the increased access to 24/7 news, reality TV, social media and incessant selfies, teens are more self-conscious about body image and identity than ever," Reale said.

Elaine Young is also concerned about adolescents processing the digital photo barrage of sexy poses and pouty "duck faces," so she's developed a guidebook to help families. It's titled "Tuned-In Family: How to Cope, Communicate, and Connect in a Digital World."

Many families struggle with issues around digital communication technologies – from screen time, to mobile devices, to video games to social media.

"There has been very little written about how to raise your family to be digitally savvy," Young said.

Young's mission is to help parents take advantage of the great things technology innovation brings, and to raise children to be smart users of the tools that are available.

Apps: Common every-day distractions for youth

Millions of apps are launched annually. Their makers jockey for attention, vying for the opportunity to keep users coming back again and again. According to Flurry Analytics, a mobile analytics company that tracks app trends, an average of 7.9 new apps launched every day on iOS and Android connected devices.

"Perhaps more interesting than that is the time spent on apps," Young said.

Flurry Analytics indicates apps are dominating the mobile web with people spending 86 percent of their time in apps when on their phone.

The most popular apps are games, Facebook, and social messaging like Instagram and SnapChat, Young said. "Both parents and their children have to be savvy about how they use apps and what the value of each app is," she said. "The top three things to pay attention to are the age appropriateness of an app, the privacy settings and security of the app, and what value that app provides in your daily life."

Becca O'Brien, 18, of Williston gave the Girl Zone app a spin. Twitter and Instagram are her all-time favorite apps, and she admits to being addicted to the game Flappy Bird for a time.

O'Brien took the Girl Zone "Flush Out Mean Girls" quizzes on her iPhone. "It made you think about how you actually deal with problems," O'Brien said.

"I think most of the content is geared for girls a bit younger than I am," O'Brien said.

Sweepstake rewards offered on the app were a plus for O'Brien. "All of these things are things I would definitely like to have," she said.

A successful balance

The app market is very difficult to crack and very noisy, Young said. "Half of all apps lose half their peak users within three months," she said. "This shows just how difficult it is to have long term success."

There is no average cost for application development, Young said. "It all depends on the app, and it's important to remember that apps must be maintained. Ongoing development costs and time add a great deal of expense over the long term."

News and health and fitness apps have the longest shelf life, which bodes well for Girl Zone, Young said.

In addition to the launch of the app, Girl Zone has launched a wellness community on www.girlzone.com called GZ Health that provides teen girls with age appropriate health information and customized guides with fitness, nutrition and mental health trackers.

Reale spent her early career selling print advertising, and originally launched GirlZone.com in 1997. "We were considered a pioneer in the field and our site traffic grew to be one of the top four online teen destinations," she said. "As big media companies got into the game and social media hit, our site traffic plummeted."

GirlZone.com is now repositioned and re-launched with the mobile game app to help girls navigate challenging roads ahead, with a chance to win prizes from popular brands like Uggs, Blue Goji, H&M, ZipAClip, 02MaxFitness and more.

"We are a tiny, efficient, passionate team who believe strongly in the mission of healthy lifestyle and the power of today's technology to engage teen girls," Reale said. "In addition to obesity statistics, we have seen data that shows that teens become more depressed the longer they spend on social media. We want to provide a positive outlet on the Internet and on mobile."

Champlain College's Young said millennial women use apps primarily for messaging, entertainment, and social content. So far into 2014, Flurry Analytics has seen a 62 percent increase in usage of health and fitness apps.

"This tells me there is a lot of potential to engage and connect with young women via mobile apps if the content and the context is right," Young said. "Any site that provides valuable and useful information for our young women and teen girls is a great idea. The key is in the information and support they provide and the advertising they accept."

Young said Girl Zone has a strong social presence and professional staff of dedicated people. "While I'm not personally excited by the advertising they have on their website, they do have some nice content that is broad and provides a wide range of food, fashion, and relationship advice," she said.

So far, so good

The Girl Zone Challenge app has a couple thousand uploads already, and player engagement and sweepstakes participation is good, Reale said.

More than 13,000 girls a month are engaging on the website. "Since we re-launched the site with a focus on healthy lifestyle, we have seen steady increase in traffic and page views, demonstrating to us that for our targeted niche, we are on the right track with our brand and voice."

Many developers make money based on advertising revenue, "freemium" gaming models where a person can play for free, but spends money in app to get upgrades, or through partnerships, Young said.

Reale's short term goal is to demonstrate to investors and sponsors that she can build the app and engage players. "We want to secure investment and grow our company in Vermont," she said. "We have a series of apps planned and goals based on registered players and completed challenges for each new app over the course of the next two years."

The biggest challenge has been getting the app in the hands of teen girls on a broad scale, with no marketing budget, Reale said.

Reale said she believes Girl Zone is ahead of the curve on mobile. "It's exciting to be learning so much about a quickly evolving medium," she said. "We are very proud of this first app, but future versions will be even cooler with more sophisticated, branded challenges and social elements, like competitive and cooperative play."

Contact Lynn Monty at LynnMonty@FreePress Media.comand follow her on Twitter at www.twitter.com/Vermont Songbird.

How She Did It: MJ Reale talks about the launch of the Girl Zone Challenge app

• Convert my basic game concept into a design to show potential investors. I attended the Games For Change conference in New York last year and met Nicole Lazzaro, who is a world-renown game designer. She liked the mission and agreed to work with me. She and her San Francisco-based team created screens, player engagement elements and wireframes.

• Research to confirm that teen girls thought it was a good idea. We conducted online research and mall intercept interviews and the feedback was consistently positive and enthusiastic. A key element to the success of the game is the sponsorship element. Unlike adults, teen girls would love to see their favorite brands all over the app, especially if they have fun with it and can win prizes.

• Build a minimal viable product, better known as MVP. I had preliminary discussions with investors who thought the business model and plan were sound, but they needed to see proof of concept and player engagement before investing. I reworked my app concept so that it was a simpler version.

• Find a developer. I had very little app tech knowledge and there are many different ways to create an MVP version. It became evident to me that I needed a chief technical officer.

• Find a chief technical officer. I connected with a company called Neueon, Inc. which reviewed my business plan and agreed to work with me. My CTO, Scott Weiner, is based in the Boston area and has a great reputation in the area of family-friendly apps. We worked closely to vet the developers. We reached out to about 15 developers and ended up using Brisk Mobile based in Toronto whose primary programmer is in the Ukraine.

• Build the app. A number of issues popped up during the building of the app that we did not anticipate, but we made quick decisions and the development cruised along well with very few hitches. Communication was important and good during the process, including on weekends and evenings.