Monthly Archives: June 2011

Jun27

Social Media Delivers ROI, or How I Crowdsourced My Haircut

Posted on by
Social Media Delivers ROI, or How I Crowdsourced My Haircut
Social Media Delivers ROI, or How I Crowdsourced My Haircut

Every once in a while the value of social media is driven home to me in a spectacular way. I’m always asked by my old offline friends whether my online friends are really my friends, or how I can share so much of my life with “complete strangers.”

That always makes me wonder who they think my online friends are: a random gaggle of strangers? Or a carefully selected group of people from all over the world that I have grown to know through repeated conversations on social platforms? It’s the latter, and in a pinch I bet I could depend on my online friends as much as I could my friend IRL.

Case in point. On Saturday I was in Elizabeth Arden getting my “routine maintenance” before going to London. This is no small expenditure — a cut and color at Arden runs about $200. So I usually try to avoid the cut: “oh, just trim the bangs,” i say.

This time the hairdresser said I should “go short.” I took this as marketing spin for “I want to upsell you to a haircut from a trim.” Having never had short hair in my adult life, I was dubious. “Short hair is for old ladies,” I told him.

“Nonsense,” he said. “Get on your iPad and Google celebrity hairstyles. You’ll see.” The long and short of it is that I got on Google images and found four pretty cool short hairstyles. And that’s after I discarded Jane Fonda‘s.

But there I was about to make a big decision alone. So I did what any normal high school kid would do: I uploaded the four photos to my Facebook profile, and to Twitter, and asked my friends to vote. I thought it was pretty funny.

But I got a surprising number of serious opinions, excluding the one from the snarky guy who told me to can my hairdresser (you know who you are) LOL. And after I had asked people to take time out of their Saturday afternoons to vote, I felt I had to honor their choice.

So today I am Annette Benning.
And I love the way I look.

More important, when I posted my new Twitter and Facebook avatars, I got tons of positive reinforcement and feedback. More than I would have gotten before the advent of social media.

Positive feedback, engagement, and support may be very difficult to quantify, but they constitute enormous ROI for me as an individual, and likewise would for any brand. I feel like I got people to interrupt whatever else they were doing and reach out at least for a minute to help me make a decision.

Now if I could only figure out exactly WHY I can get people to engage with me, and bottle that and sell it to “the enterprise,” I bet I could be famous like Brian Solis.

 

Related articles
Enhanced by Zemanta




Amplify

Jun24

If Our Health Care Becomes Like Canada’s is that Good?

Posted on by
If Our Health Care Becomes Like Canada’s is that Good?
If Our Health Care Becomes Like Canada’s is that Good?

My family doctor emigrated to the US from Canada years ago. He has just installed an EMR and qualified easily for meaningful use stimulus funds because he takes Medicaid patients. To qualify for meaningful use under Medicaid, all you have to do is order the EMR; it doesn’t even have to be up and running.
Medicare is more rigid; outcomes must be reported. To report on outcomes, he had to buy another module of the EMR, probably because the EMR he bought was developed before the meaningful use standard or the stimulus money.  In his opinion, it will be difficult to report significant outcomes for Medicare and Medicaid patients, because they often don’t stay in his practice long enough. They move, they change insurance, they drop off Medicaid into the ranks of the uninsured. People in the US no longer stay with a medical practice long enough for longitudinal study — which is why all our EMRs have to talk to each other and we have to track patients as they move from provider to provider.
Today, as part of a wide-ranging discussion we had on the state of health care in America, he told me a little about his experience and that of his family in Canada. He says America does not look at Canadian health care from the right perspective.  We think it’s great that Canadians have universal health care, but we don’t understand what that means.
When he practiced in Montreal (and today),  primary care docs were capped at a certain number of billable dollars and patients a month. After he hit the cap, which he did very early in every month, he was only paid 25% of what he billed. His colleagues would limit the number of patients they saw a day to about 20, so they hit the cap at the end of the month. He liked to see 30-40 patients a day, so he would hit the cap way before the end of the month, and he wanted to continue to see patients because he enjoyed them. But he finally figured out that it cost him 35% of what he billed to run his practice, so it didn’t pay for him to see more patients. He left Canada.
In Canada, the untold story is that although they are insured, 300,000 people are without a primary care doctor — because no matter how many doctors there are, it won’t be enough if they limit the number of appointments the can grant a month.He told me that’s why people in Canada, including his own mother, have to wait two months for an appointment with a family doctor unless it’s a real emergency. I knew that was true of specialists, but I had never heard about primary care scarcity before. Canadians also pay out of pocket for things like camp physicals; there’s a chart of services and costs on the wall of the doctor’s office that tells patients what the government doesn’t pay for, and what the cost will be to them.
Dr. Kramer loves America because in his own practice he can now happily afford to see 30-40 patients a day, or not, depending on the need.  And unlike many family doctors, he continues to see Medicaid patients, even though they pay less, because they are interesting cases. That energizes him; he has problems he can solve.
But he watches the younger docs go on salary and limit themselves to 20 patients a day at places like Mayo Clinic, and it worries him for the future of American health care. He admits that it’s a great improvement in the physician’s quality of life, but he predicts a huge upcoming shortage of doctors as American docs go on a system more similar to that of Canada, and begin limiting the number of patients they see daily because they are no longer incentivized to see more.

 




Amplify

Jun17

The Problem with Social is Social

Posted on by
The Problem with Social is Social
The Problem with Social is Social

For me, all the new social services are much like bars. There’s nothing I like more than to leave my home office at the end of a day and go to a neighborhood bar. There, I will know the bartenders, and some of the regulars. And I will often meet an interesting new person. I will have a few drinks, and then go home. So will most of the patrons, except the alcoholics. At best, I will have seen friends and discovered new people.

And that’s pretty typical human behavior, which some of the designers of popular social media sites don’t seem to understand. The problem with anything social — social networks, social media, social shopping, or hanging out in a bar — is time. If something becomes too intrusive for me, I have to give it up. After all, I have a life. And so do you. That’s why many busy people claim they have no use for Twitter and Facebook. They don’t go to bars, either.

Others learn the lesson of moderation. Myself, I have come to peace with Twitter and Facebook. They are no longer exciting, and no longer new. They are utilities. I’m glad they exist, but they don’t run my life. I’m not trying to learn them, dominate them, build my reputation on them, or even interact with them. I use them almost completely asynchronously, and thus they are no longer interruptive and no longer a time suck. For the first three years, they were. I said good morning and good night to Twitter every night. This morning, I won’t check it until I finish this post.

I no longer check my tweetstream every five minutes, or answer all my @replies as they come in. I no longer stalk people on Facebook that I haven’t seen since college. This is not to say I don’t use these services. I just use them differently. Ditto Foursquare, Turntable, Instagram. They all have a place in my life.

What have I learned?

First, I’ve learned that these services are best when they can be consumed both synchronously (I’m standing in line somewhere and I want someone to interact with to pass the time) and asynchronously (I want to know what the top news has been today when I finally get a moment to pick my head up and notice my surroundings). If there is no way to access a service on my schedule, it falls off my radar. For this reason, I don’t buy Groupons with expiration dates. In fact, I never go to Groupon, and I’ve turned off the email notifications.

Second, I’ve learned that not everything in life is a game, and that the gamification aspect of a service is the first thing that gets old for me. On Empire Avenue, I’m investing in my friends and interacting with new people. But I’m not trying to win anything; in fact I have never even bothered to find out HOW to win, although my buddy Chris Pirillo has published some kickass material on that. Instead, I treat Empire Avenue like a bar where I know my friends are hanging out; I will show up there to see them, and that’s WHY I show up. Occasionally, I will also show up to troll for new people as well.

Now, how do you build a sustainable business on something that is best done in moderation and sometimes asynchronously?

You design it to run in the background of an otherwise normal life. That way it crosses the chasm from eager geeks and teenagers who hop on the latest trends and then hop off, into real life. Pandora will do that, because you can listen to Pandora while doing something else. Turntable may or may not. Facebook has, because it’s there when you get there, and you don’t have to choose between Facebook and work (after the novelty wears off).

 




Amplify

Jun9

How to Spend Your Marketing Money Wisely

Posted on by
How to Spend Your Marketing Money Wisely

I’ve been working on a project that has allowed me to compare small business marketing with enterprise marketing. It’s ridiculous how much big companies spend on wasted marketing: white papers nobody reads, sponsorships that don’t give value, campaigns that don’t work. Startups and small businesses can’t afford to do that, so here are some tips to save you marketing money:

1. If you are no longer printing brochures, at least make your site navigable. No one needs a print brochure anymore. I said that ten years ago, and  print collateral is starting to go away, but it’s not vanishing as quickly as it should be. I’m no statistician, but I’d wager that as much as 90% of print material is wasted, going either in a drawer or straight into the trash unread. Instead of print, convert everything to .pdf and make it downloadable from  your site. Small businesses should NEVER print.

On the other hand,  if you do make all your collateral downloadable, give some thought to what the customer or prospect might be looking for when she comes to your site. If you have been in business for a while, you probably have a site with many pages. How do I find what I need quickly?  Site architecture, navigation and site search are more important than you think. No site should be without custom search, and the keywords for every product feature and benefit should be easily searched. The links to the collateral should be off the landing page.

Yesterday I was looking for a product brochure on SAP’s site, and I couldn’t find it, even though I knew they had it. That’s because the overview of a suite of products did not link in any way to the brochures for the individual products and the search didn’t return any relevant results. I went away dissatisfied, and now I am telling YOU about it.

2. Don’t exhibit at a trade show, but make sure you attend those in your industry. Trade shows are artifacts, and the good ones (Comdex) have had the good sense to disappear. They used to be a way to make sales and show merchandise, but there are much cheaper ways to do that. The only good reasons to go to a trade show are to see what the competition is doing, and to make contacts. So it makes no sense to be stuck at a booth. You are much better off being free to walk the floor, to make friends, or to speak at an educational session. You want to be known as a thought leader in your industry, so you don’t want to be the grunt giving the product demo in the booth.  The exception to this is startup Demo Days, where every startup is giving a demo.

3.Don’t sponsor if you aren’t going to engage. Every event has a long list of sponsors to thank, half of whom are  usually not even in the room. They excuse this by saying they’ve still gotten the “branding” value out of the sponsorship. Not true. If you aren’t going to work the room at an event, explaining what you do and why it’s valuable in person, you probably shouldn’t be a sponsor. You want to be there to be thanked in person, to give people a face for a brand.  For best results from sponsorships, sponsor only those events where your potential customer will be, and make sure you talk to that customer. Sponsorships don’t work by themselves, even in NASCAR. In fact, many former NASCAR sponsors have learned that lesson the hard way.

Instead of writing a marketing plan that includes as much as possible, next time write one that includes as little as possible, and think about going deep instead of going wide. From a sales support perspective, it will probably be more effective.

 

 




Amplify

Jun6

Did Apple Just Take Away More of our Independence?

Posted on by
Did Apple Just Take Away More of our Independence?
Did Apple Just Take Away More of our Independence?

Apple made a big announcement today, and more than 50,000 people watched it online through various pirate video streams, not to mention how many must have followed it on Twitter, or through live blogs. A very thin, almost pitiable-looking Steve Jobs turned on the charm to announce the next big OSX release, Lion, and the details of IOS5 (no new iPhone this time). After a series of demos by other people, Jobs came back to announce the long-awaited iCloud, an online service similar to Google and Amazon that can hold files, contacts, calendars, mail, photos, music, and everything else you need in your personal or professional life.

But what did Apple REALLY do today? It threw  a bunch of its best app developers under the bus.

Well, this all took place at Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference, happening this week in San Francisco. The purpose of the conference is to get developers jazzed about developing for the OSX and IOS platforms, and in the past it has engendered the biggest App Store in history. Almost every app developer starts with an app for IOS, and then goes to Android and on to the also-rans.

Of course Facebook and Twitter have done this before, and people have moaned and groaned and tweaked their business models and tried to move on, never saying a bad word about the big Behemoth that just swallowed their little income stream.

But I wonder if Apple has just looked its best gift horses in the mouth. Or maybe the gift horses themselves must this time learn the lesson they seem not to have learned before: don’t develop on someone else’s platform if you want a sustainable business, for the better you are, the more transient your business will be.

The behemoth will, best case scenario, buy you and shut you down (Google and all the little companies that were aggregated into Google Docs), leaving you with a job in a large corporation, or — worst case — roll out what you have sacrificed your lifeblood for as a small feature in a big announcement.

This happened to a number of great applications today. The New York Times has a list of some of them, including DropBox, Evernote, Instapaper, Readability, and Boxcar.

Many things Apple announced today were solutions that have been around for a while re-worked by the Steve Jobs reality distortion field. Suddenly, we think they are all new. Especially if we are not geeks. For the geeks, these announcements weren’t so earth-shattering:

I have used Dropbox to put all my files in the cloud so I can work from any device. It has worked wonderfully. I have used Google Docs as my productivity application since it arrived on the scene, since it, too, is device-independent. Evernote stores much of my blog drafts, recipes, and less important passwords, in addition to saving things for me to read later.

So did we need much of what was announced today? Not nearly as much as Apple did.

Apple needed all these new things to create lock-in, because certain of its offerings were already leaking customers: last month I uploaded all my music to Amazon and I can stream it back to myself from anywhere. I can also buy music on Amazon. MobileMe was so bad that I fled to Google for my email, calendar, and contacts (although Google’s interface is nothing to write home about). But now that it has put all this stuff in one offering and made it all so easy, we will probably default to Apple.  The way we default to Facebook. Or Twitter.

Apple just did the same things Facebook always does: scan the horizon, see what its users are using most, and launch that within the walled garden. With Facebook, the latest big one was check-ins. Now Apple has also launched integrated tweets in its next OS release. Good-bye all other Twitter apps that Twitter itself hasn’t already killed.

Once in his blog, Jeff Jarvis referred to the Internet and the “Schminternet.” He was talking about the telcos, and how if we didn’t have net neutrality, there would only be parts of the internet available to those who couldn’t pay a premium. I feel like with Apple and Facebook, we might be in danger of the same type of limitation: a curated version of the internet (curated by FB and Apple) according to their terms of service.

Now I’m not saying either Apple of Facebook are malicious. They are just competitive. They want to WIN. And if to win they have to bury their developers every now and then, so be it. And if they also have to bury their customers, um…that’s our decision.




Amplify

Jun2

Why Remote Monitoring in Health Care May Fail

Posted on by
Why Remote Monitoring in Health Care May Fail

Everyone in health IT is looking at the proliferation of mobile devices and wireless communications capacity and they are salivating. Now, they say, we are finally going to be able to monitor the vital signs, activity levels, food intake, lifestyle habits of patients and use all this information for prevention.

Not so fast, Kimo Sabe.

For my birthday this year, I got an iPod Nano Watch. The new Nano has a pedometer built in and it uploads your data to Nike. I have been wearing it every day, even though that means I have to charge it every night (this is decidedly sub-optimal for a watch). Faithfully I count my steps and upload them. Rarely do I have get to 10,000 steps a day, except at BlogWorldExpoNY, where I went over the top twice. Most days a dog walk and a trip to the gym put me at 6,000 or so steps.

The Nano Watch replaced my Fitbit, which I wore faithfully all last year. The Fitbit was more complicated and gave me even more information. It tracked my activity, and if I wore it at night, it tracked my sleep patterns and told me how effectively I was sleeping. I also could log my food.

For months I found out that I have a banana and a frappacino for breakfast, some other kind of fruit in mid-morning, along with a diet Coke right before lunch. I then have a salad of some kind or a sandwich on one piece of bread for lunch, fish and a vegetable for most dinners, 2 glasses of wine, and about half a chocolate bar (dark) after dinner. Every once in a while it varies, but most days, that’s it. Oh, and I sleep at 97%.

I gave up the Fitbit because I had the knowledge. And what did I do with it?

Nothing.

The same thing I am doing with the data I am uploading to Nike. Nothing.

Why? Because now I have to make real changes, and the biggest thing I’ve learned from all these monitoring devices is that I AM NOT WILLING TO DO THAT!

There are certain things all the remote monitoring in the world won’t fix. I’ve read about the applications that will tell doctors whether I have taken my pills, too. But if I don’t want to take them, can’t I still refuse the reminder phone call? Or even thank the (probably robo-) caller, hang up and do nothing?

The technology, as usual, is far ahead of the user. And until it gets into our heads and convinces us that we MUST change, we probably won’t. This is the saddest part of all the talk about invoking “prevention” to lower healthcare costs. All of that requires participation by the patient. It’s not dictated by the provider, the payer, or least of all by the health IT product manager.

Anybody want a Wakemate? I have one of those, too.

 

 

 

 




Amplify