Personal content opportunities: Births

This is the first part of the personal content section of the Blueprint for the Complete Community Connection.

Births are huge personal news and they are spending occasions. More important, this is an opportunity for the Complete Community Connection to connect with a family.

We should provide the baby’s first web page, created automatically upon the blessed event. We should give hospitals gift packets of samples and coupons we have collected from businesses in the community for diapers, child care, formula, etc. The packet includes an invitation to the parents to use the baby’s new web site. (If they don’t within a week or two, we send email and/or snail mail invitations.) We prepopulate the baby’s web site with the basic public-record data: Name, date and time born, parents’ names. We invite the parents to add to it: photos, videos, gift registry, family comments, milestones such as teeth, crawling and first haircut, links to siblings’, cousins’ and friends’ pages. This becomes the digital baby book, sharing the infant’s story with family and friends around the world and connecting those friends and family to our content network, their convenient way to buy gifts for this child again and again.

Adding to the baby’s page involves registration, which gives us leads to sell to businesses in the community that cater to parents of children (and the cast of businesses changes as the child grows up). With registration, we have email addresses to use to remind parents to update periodically with baby photos. A month or so before each birthday, we send out email reminders to update the gift registry. We don’t generate content for this site beyond launching it and sending occasional automatic reminders. But the family makes it part of our content collection that tells more and more about the community. The aggregate birth effort generates leads for business customers and allows us to sell gifts from our business customers directly to family and friends not just in our community but around the world.

We also might be able to sell our own products directly to the family. For instance, we could sell the parents a custom-printed keepsake newspaper of the day the baby was born, with the birth as the lead story, using copy and photos from the family and filling out with the real news of the day. On the baby’s first birthday, we offer a newspaper using the content posted during the year (presuming the family has posted enough content). Or maybe we sell a DVD of the photos and videos posted to the site, with a sound track of songs the family chooses or of the family’s recording of the baby’s babbling, first words, etc.

Our goal is to make this the child’s web page for life, a site that grows with the child, providing fresh user-generated content and sales opportunities. We allow distant grandparents, aunts and uncles to receive email or text notification (a promising advertising vehicle) about milestones such as first tooth, first word, etc. when the parents fill them in.

With each of these personal-content areas, we need to watch for possibilities with our packaged products. Would an annual or quarterly “community baby book” section for The Gazette have possibilities? Or an occasional feature on best baby video clips on KCRG? Or would we give parents an opportunity to check off on posting baby pictures to a gallery of Iowa baby photos on Iowa.com? I won’t go through the product possibilities in each of the personal content areas, but I encourage product managers and planners to explore them.

With this as well as with other milestones, especially for children, we need to consider giving parents a way to limit access to content. Perhaps as with Facebook, we would offer a limited public profile, with more information available only to chosen family and friends who have the password. Or maybe parents would have the option to make personal content all password-protected. We also need to give parents the ability to opt out and remove a baby’s page if they don’t want to participate. But the offers from businesses should give most parents plenty of incentive to participate.

Continue reading the Blueprint for the Complete Community Connection with Personal content opportunities: Growing-up Milestones.

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