My mom is not what you’d call a geek, or even someone who is really interested in computers or the Internet.
She works for an HMO in the US and uses the computer for work-related tasks and email. She also keeps up to date on her favourite tennis players at the US Open site and forwards me funny photos of cats, but that’s about it. She does 100% of her Internet activity at work because she doesn’t have a computer at home.
I looked into getting her Internet access at home last year, but she lives in a rural area in Pennsylvania. Dial-up is still the norm and *that* is a level of technical support I don’t want to provide long-distance. It is surprising to me how many places in the States still don’t have access to broadband. According to some recent ComScore data I’ve seen, 77% of Canadians use broadband while only 53% of Americans do! (Q3 2005 data). That’s something I definitely take for granted being up here.
But, back to my mom. Her workplace has slowly been implementing security measures on their computer networks. And they have recently introduced some network sniffers to monitor for illegal downloads. Now my mom doesn’t know how to download music or movies, either legally or illegally. So imagine her surprise when her boss burst into her office one morning and announced “Network Security has found illegal files on your computer. You could be fired!!” and stormed out.
Category: Internet Marketing
When “Ken”:http://www.onedegree.ca/category/ken-schafer sent a “request for Mother’s Day postings to One Degree”:http://www.onedegree.ca/2006/05/08/its-mom-week-at-one-degree, it made me scratch my head. I wondered what relevance my Mother had in terms of online marketing? And then it struck me: everything.
I have three brothers (I know, poor Mrs. Joel). We grew up in a middle-class family, which meant that we had everything we wanted but we shared a lot. Instead of individual gifts, my mother would always pool the resources together and get us something we could use together. Stuff like “Pong”:http://www.pong-story.com/, “Atari 2600”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_2600, “Atari 800”:http://oldcomputers.net/atari800.html, “Intellivision”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellivision and one of the first PCs.
From a technology standpoint, we were always ahead of the curve. I remember typing book reports on my Atari 800 and printing them up on a “dot matrix printer”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dot-matrix_printer while the other kids were still grappling in handwritten assignments.
I also remember the tag-team effort my brothers and I would put into programming a game with the code we got from “Compute Magazine”:http://www.atarimagazines.com/compute/.
I also remember how my Mother never balked when it was time to upgrade from an 800 to a “1200 baud modem”:http://www.cyberroach.com/analog/an19/hayes_1200.htm, or when I wanted Internet service, but the only ISP was out of the province, so I had to pay long distance fees on top of my Internet service. I had a four-digit ICQ number.
And that’s the point, isn’t it?
Growing up, neither “my brother”:http://www.onedegree.ca/category/karel-wegert nor I expected to work in interactive media. As a kid I abhorred technology, and my brother was far more interested in “NOFX”:http://www.nofxofficialwebsite.com/ than PPC. So it never ceases to amaze us – let alone our Mom – that we’re both now deeply entrenched in the interactive marketing industry.
Although she’s Internet-savvy in her own right (she emails, uses an instant messenger program, and is considering building a Web site to sell her decorative painting work online), our Mom still struggles a little to wrap her head around what it is that we do. Once, during a visit home, she happened to overhear my brother and I commiserating about a paid search campaign. “They might as well be speaking a different language!” she later told my father. But as she said it, there was a distinguishable note of pride in her voice.