If you haven’t seen it already, Google brought to life an awesome new side-project that’s incredibly useful, especially for the folks of my generation. Enter TeachParentsTech.org. From Google’s blog:
TeachParentsTech.org lets you select from more than 50 basic how-to videos to send to mom, dad, your old college roommate, your neighbor or anyone else who could use a little help with tech tasks—whether it’s how to copy & paste to how to share a big file. Wrap up your video with a custom email and off it goes! The recipient will receive your message and a link to the video(s) you selected.
In a word, brilliant. On it’s own, and in illustrating a bigger picture. Why?
- It’s timely. Google knows how many younger-folk will be traveling home next week for the holidays? What does that mean? Parents asking how to change their desktop background, how to bookmark your blog, or how to restart the computer (seriously). Perfect timing to launch a campaign like this.
- It’s viral. I guarantee you we won’t be the only people writing about this today – I guarantee many of you will read this, will go check it out yourselves, you’ll Tweet about it, share it on Facebook, etc. It’s going to spread. Keep an eye on the “Number of Parents Served” number (currently just over 10,000) – it’ll skyrocket over the next week.
- It’s useful. This wouldn’t go very far without purpose. Above all, these videos are useful, probably no-brainers to everyone reading this, but incredibly useful to those who are tech nerds like me.
- It’s timeless. This information, at least for the foreseeable future, won’t be going anywhere – Google has developed (wrapped up in a cute package) something that can and will be used well into the future – and I’m sure they’ll never run out of more ideas, more videos to add to the “list”.
- It’s human. When you think of Google, you may think of it as the default website on your computer – a verb you use countless times during the course of a day, a company, that along with Apple, is seemingly taking over the world – but you may not be thinking about the people behind the scenes – the humans that make Google what it is. Humans that have parents and families. Through the power of a simple 30 second video explaining you how to re-size a photo on your desktop, they establish a connection with you and I.
Each of these five points illustrate a take-away for every business and organization considering launching their own campaign. Think about each of these things before you kick things off. Don’t only focus on the “what” – focus on the “why” . Then go do something great.
Now, if I could only get Google to make a video on how to get my mom to stop sending me Farmville invites…
Bonus: What is the most frustrating “tech” thing you’ve had to teach your parents, clients, etc. how to do?