For Sarah, Social Media with a Higher Purpose
Sarah is a Millennial. She’s grown up with texting as a primary communication medium, and sharing many of her daily activities via Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat. She’s shared thousands of moments through social media, from important games and night out at movies and family vacations and what she ate for lunch. But in the last year or two, the sharing started to feel more hollow. She thought, “Sure, it’s still a nice way to connect with friends, so much of the sharing is about ‘look at me,’ ‘look what I’m doing now,’ ‘look who I’m hanging out with.’” It felt self-centered to her, and it felt like she had to compete with others to see who was doing the coolest things and going to the best places. Then she discovered GreatAlbum.
GreatAlbum completely changed the dynamic of her social media focus. Rather than focus on her and what she was doing, she began to focus on people she loved - her parents, her grandparents, her high school track coach who had always inspired her. Through the use of Celebration Albums, she was able to create or join albums specifically dedicated to celebrating the lives and impacts of people who were really meaningful to her. She was able to spend more time writing stories of gratitude for lessons and values passed on to her by these cherish individuals, and to learn so much more about them, because each Celebration Album, focused on a single loved one, had 100 or more people contributing stories from across the person’s life, told from a dozen different points of view - as a parent, sibling, spouse, child childhood friend, college friend, coworker, community volunteer. Sarah found not only a great deeper sense of gratitude for the amazing people she had in her life, but a stronger sense of connectedness and resilience, because these people had weathered some incredible hardships and come through with flying colors, which gave her the sense that she could do the same. Now she’s working on an album for herself, to share with her own kids, to share more stories about what made her the person she is today, and hopefully to impart a stronger sense of identity, confidence and resilience to them. And she’s also working on an Alumni Album that she is sharing with her high school classmates for their 20th reunion, to help them share more authentic stories about what has transpired in their lives and bring them closer together than traditional social media ever could.