I’m horrible – I never remember anyone’s birthday. I couldn’t tell name birthdays for more than a handful of people I know, save a small handful, including my wife and mom  (thanks to the credit card companies using that as part of the security question line-up).

Thanks to Facebook, I’m now like that friend that everyone has – the one that remembers everyone’s birthdays. Whenever I log into Facebook I get those oh-so-handy reminders of my xxx friends current and upcoming birthdays.

Even better, I can just write “Happy Birthday” on their wall and be done with this. No more feeling guilty about not buying a birthday card at the supermarket (not that I ever did that before, again, except for my significant other, mom, etc.).

But again, I know a lot of people who would send birthday cards to everyone (especially to all the kids in the family). Will there be any people like this in the future when millennials grow up?

That’s a fascinating question – one that will determine the future of an entire industry. While thinking about this, I did a search and came across an article about Hallmark and their bullishness in light of these big social media-driven changes. The article mentions that Hallmark is definitely incorporating technology into their business model, but paper greeting cards sales continue to be the biggest source of revenue for the company.

My take is two-fold:

1) the people who remember everyone’s birthdays and send cards to everyone will not go away (if anything, they’ll grow with tools like Facebook to help remind them of all their friends’ birthday) – their behavior simply evolve based on technology.

2) the greeting card “product” will need to evolve to remain relevant to new consumer behavior and modes of communication

Seems like a perfect opening for a new disruptive product/service to address the core value proposition / benefit derived from paper greeting cards.

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