Musings of a Marketing Maven

My fam­ily is get­ting ready to cel­e­brate my mother’s 80th birth­day. We decided to cre­ate a “mem­ory book” in which we’d col­lect fam­ily pho­tos, sto­ries, fam­ily recipes. At the end of this process she’ll end up with:

• a printed book of pho­tos and images, cour­tesy of Shut­ter­fly (or equiv­a­lent service)
• a printed book­let of sto­ries and recipes
• per­haps a photo col­lage that she can hang on her wall
• a DVD with an edited set of fam­ily movies plus other motion graph­ics (thanks to her cre­ative grand­son Kevin)

All these mate­ri­als will be ammu­ni­tion for her “brag­ging rights” — a favorite activ­ity for grand­moth­ers these days. Show-and-tell has become an impor­tant rit­ual for today’s senior cit­i­zens. Digitally-enabled shar­ing and media pro­duc­tion cer­tainly make things eas­ier for the con­trib­u­tors, although not nec­es­sar­ily as effec­tive for the intended recip­i­ent. The trick is to fig­ure out how to bridge the gap.

How We’re Sharing

The process to col­lect all these mate­ri­als is more com­pli­cated than it might seem because my mother has 7 chil­dren, plus a computer-savvy hus­band (83 and an active blog­ger). All of us are actively con­tribut­ing to Mom’s mem­ory book. We live in 5 states and are scat­tered across 3 time zones. Rely­ing on email with attach­ments as the prin­ci­pal means of shar­ing our con­tri­bu­tions became too chaotic, way too quickly. (Need­less to say, we have no com­mon mail server.)

So I set up a project site on Base­camp, fig­ur­ing it was so easy that I wouldn’t have to invest too much time help­ing my broth­ers and sis­ters mas­ter its UI. (That turned out to be a bit opti­mistic, although most of them have fig­ured it out by now.) This site is serv­ing as the cen­tral repos­i­tory for the sto­ries, recipes, pho­tos, movies and so on. The selected con­tent will even­tu­ally be down­loaded by the “edi­tors” respon­si­ble for the photo book and other tan­gi­ble outputs.

In the mean­time we’re all hav­ing a blast post­ing sto­ries, edi­to­ri­al­iz­ing and cri­tiquing each other’s con­tri­bu­tions, cor­rect­ing details, upload­ing pho­tos, etc. The grand­daugh­ter who has a col­lege degree in dig­i­tal media pro­duc­tion is watch­ing over our shoul­ders, chim­ing in from time to time. (She’s prob­a­bly won­der­ing why we didn’t choose Face­book. Answer: the gap referred to above.)

As my sis­ter wrote ear­lier today,

This is get­ting to be addictive.…..looking at this site and post­ing pic­tures! What fun!

I can tell that every­one is log­ging onto the site every day, and in some cases, mul­ti­ple times a day. Real proof that there’s a lot of joy in shar­ing this way.

Once we’ve deliv­ered the books and things to her, we’ll give Mom access to the site, so she can share the mem­o­ries and rel­ish all the juicy com­men­tary and sto­ries. But for now, we don’t want to spoil her surprise.

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