Before my daughter was born, my husband and I did what all good parents do: set her up for legal, medical and educational security. We had wills drawn up and assigned four levels of guardians should anything ever happen to us. We arranged to have her cord blood banked should her stem cells ever be needed to save her life. We put her not-yet-given name onto preschool waitlists and set up 529 savings accounts for her college education.
So as my pregnant belly grew, I wracked my brain: what else should we be arranging? What else–aside from an unlimited, lifelong trust fund–did I wish my parents had prepared for me?
Well, I wish that I hadn’t lost touch with my friend Brooke from nursery school, or Renee from gymnastics class when I was 3, or “Alison with one “l” from middle school.
In fact, what a horrible loss of data! If social influence is becoming more valuable than money–we see marketers shifting strategies from expensive broadcast media to virtually free social media–managing our social networks is more important than managing our finances.
What if parents could digitally maintain and manage their children’s social networks from birth until the children are capable of owning and maintaining their own social history and data? Input could include contacts from schools, camps, extracurricular activities, etc. I really do wonder if there is a business here…
I’d call the company Social Currency (yes, consider that “virtually trademarked” now). It would be a service, not a destination: the data could be exported to any contact programs or social networking sites that might be in vogue when the children “come of age” (yeah, that could mean when they become 8 or 10 or 12 years old).
There is no doubt that there are tremendous data capture issues and even bigger privacy concerns, but nonetheless, it’s kind of a cool concept.
If anyone out there wants to work with me on turning this concept into a reality, be in touch…
