Geek Squad supports Ivy Bean, and everyone seeking to embrace technology

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In fact, I’m happy to share how this all came about. On Friday, May 15th we celebrated “Silver Surfers Day.” This promotion started about 7 years ago to encourage older people to get online. We heard about Ivy Bean nearly two years ago, when she tackled Facebook as a 102 year old. We were impressed. We decided to seek her out and see if she would like to give Twitter a whirl. As it happens – she did! Ivy has a genuine interest in connecting with the world outside of Bradford and her residence. She is attracted to the simplicity of Twitter. We were thrilled to set up Ivy, but we were also excited to tell her story. After all, the point of Silver Surfers Day is to get older people online. This seemed like a great way to do it.

To get to that point, we created and issued a press release about Ivy’s new Twitter account. At no point did we hide our involvement – we were proud of it! For reasons we can’t quite understand, the facts around this have become confused. We want to clarify a few points:

According to Ivy, she has enjoyed the attention she’s received as a result. She got her hair done before the photo shoot and, if you notice, isn’t wearing her glasses–she took her glasses off to look her best in the pics.

We have checked with her residence to ensure they aren’t being overrun by media attention. They assure us they’re not. All of Ivy’s tweets are her own. We may have given her a primer on the lingo, but everything she writes is her own. Were there more than one laptop in her residence, you would probably be getting more Ivy!

Again – we’re happy to have done this. Ivy is enjoying Twitter. From the look of her 14,000+ followers, Twitter is enjoying Ivy. Geek Squad views its role as helping people master technology in all its forms, and this is a great example. We plan to support Silver Surfers Day again in the future and hope to see more Ivy Beans (joining Twitter or whatever is the “hot new thing” next year!) reaching out to connect to the world.