Social Media Will Own Your Mind If You…
Do you own or rent your mind? How much equity do you have in your peace of mind? If you’re not careful, social media will own [your] mind and then rent out the space to people you’ll never even meet. If you mindlessly engage in social media, it’s easy to lose track of time, and time is life. Offered here: four pillars to maintain equity in your own mind.
The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook.
William James
1. ASK: WILL ANYBODY DIE IF I DON’T SIGN UP?
It’s OK to ignore these tools. Perhaps your income depends on them. Well that’s fine, don’t listen to me then. Keep on signing up for as long as your bank account grows. It’s good for the economy.
But if you want peace of mind, you’re going to have to know what to ignore. Not every social media tool is necessary. Besides, as long as guys like Robert Scoble are around, you can be pretty sure that someone else is performing reliable testing.
Claim your name on the latest social medium before someone else does if you wish, just to be safe. But don’t go nuts thinking that the world’s fate rests on the next biggest thing. The Titanic was the next biggest thing.
2. KNOW THAT 3.2 HOURS PER DAY IS YOUR MAXIMUM 20%
Assuming that you sleep 8 hours everyday, that leaves 16 hours of potential productivity. 20% of that is 3.2 hours.
But if you consider your productive time to be closer to 8 hours, then your 20% is just 1.6 hours. So if you work between 8 and 16 hours, you have a maximum of 3.2 hours to get your best in. If that time is spent the wrong way, then 80% of your day is that much more wasted.
According to my rough calculations, then, most of us have about one and a half hours to focus on how to achieve 80% of our work. If you believe 80% of your productivity comes from social media, break your time up into three half-hour sessions. Try it for a week and evaluate your results. Refine accordingly.
3. MINDFULNESS IN ACTION
For your 20% to really pay off, you are going to need to be as mindfully engaged in your activity as possible.
- Take note of your breathing
- Be aware of what exactly you’re accomplishing with every online social transaction
- Use an alarm clock to stop what you’re doing and meditate on your 20%
If you find yourself overwhelmed by it all, admit that you have a problem. It’s OK; you’re not alone. Talk to your closest friends, go for a walk, get a milkshake or schedule a session with a competent therapist. Forget stigma; think oil change. Your mental health is the most profitable asset you’ll ever have.
4. PERSONAL INTERACTION
Take time to know who are the most important one to three people in your network. They don’t need to be A-listers. In fact, they aught to be people you’ve met, people whom you know and trust.
Engage these contacts. Meet them at least once a week. Tweet up if it makes you happy. Do something old-school: hand-write them thank-you notes for being there for you or buy something cheap but fun.
Questions for Commenters:
- What do you do to ensure you’re not renting your mind to the social media Borg?
- How do you measure the effect of social media on your own peace of mind?
- Are these four pillars useful?
Image: Etringita’s Photostream
If you enjoyed this post and want updates subscribe to PhilBaumann.
Commenting is Dead. Long Live Commenting!
Is commenting dead? Or is it more alive than ever before? No and Yes. And Yes.
Here are some thoughts on why.
DARN IT, I JUST STARTED BLOGGING AND NOW YOU…
Just when Corporate America was catching up on blogging and other social media, Twitter and FriendFeed swoosh out of the blue, grab comments out of blogs and sprinkle them all over the interwebs.
Comment fragmentation, as it is called, has a lot of people talking on blogs and Twitter and FriendFeed. The fear is that commenting on blogs is dead or at least 2/3 dead.
Is this true? Are comments really dead or dying?
POPULATION BOTTLENECK
The rumor of the death of the blog comment may have been over-exaggerated, but there’s actually a poignant truth to it. Evolution via natural selection suggests that change is almost always inevitable.
Rather than the extinction of an entire means of dialogue, mutations are spawning new species of commenting tools (think FriendFeed). As these tools proliferate across the interwebs, comment fragmentation becomes increasingly more common in spite of tools to fold them back into original blogs.
As comment fragmentation grows, a critical mass of comment fragmentation builds (see the red line pictured above). This critical mass creates a bottleneck in the flow of information across the web which traditional blog commenting may eventually face.
Think of a population bottleneck as a horizontal version of Seth Godin’s Dip, except a lot crueler. Population size is the number of traditional blog comments, assuming services like FriendFeed do what Robert Scoble expects them to do in the coming years or even months.
The Recovery line would be the new species of commenting that will evolve over time. Extinction is possible, of course, but not inevitable. There are tons of businesses on the web which have yet to adopt blogging. And when they do, blog comments won’t necessarily be their primary purpose of the blog. Rather original content would be.
I believe that these bottlenecks will not extinct comments per se, but they will help to evolve new forms. In fact, that’s just what population bottlenecks can do: they help spur novel changes that lead to new ways of doing things.
SURVIVAL OF THE REMARKABLIST
Remarking will become an almost standard feature of future web-based socializing (personal and professional). Those vectors of remarking which are easiest to use and to help spread messages, will be the ones increasingly adopted.
Right now FriendFeed, Twitter, Disqus, ping.fm, etc. don’t hold a substantial share of the interwebs. But eventually, such services will go mainstream. When that critical mass hits, traditional commenting will likely reach its bottleneck.
THE ECONOMIC CONSEQUENCES OF COMMENTING
So I don’t think this a time to mourn the death of comments. Rather there’s a rebirth of the original spirit of blogging which is now taking place. That spirit was in part was to establish a place on the web to have a *conversation*.
Blogging also evolved into a sort of financial instrument. That also will see change. Comment fragmentation will have positive and negative financial impacts on many blogs.
Yes, as services like FriendFeed and its ilk evolve and grow in web presence, the traditional dynamic of leaving comments on a blog’s post will likely erode. Bloggers will still be a vast source of content, but the comment-genie is now out of the blog.
Even with WordPress plugins and other tools to loop web-wide comments back into posts comments are now going to be everywhere.
Commenting is an important link between people online. There’s tons of revenue in comments. Tons. You can strip-mine them of course and hope that you have control over the selective pressures of the web. Or you can accept the fact that our world is now getting asymptotically closer to a perfect word-of-mouth paradigm of information flow.
If the brains over at FriendFeed are smart (and I think they are), they will launch an algorithmic revenue-sensing model that will tap into the commenting–not exactly in the way AdSense works, but by exploiting all of the social data being generated between and among people.
COMMENTING IS DEAD. LONG LIVE COMMENTING!
If you’re worried about the evaporation of comments on your blog, remember: your commentary is now being published without much effort on your part. If you play it right and get involved in the new ways of communicating then you just might figure out a way to make good returns from those small efforts.
So keep talking. Keep blogging. Keep commenting. Commenting is content and content is still king. It always will be.
Commenting is dead. Long live commenting!
Image source: Wikipedia, markup via Skitch
Related articles by Zemanta
- Just How Much is the Conversation Worth?
- ReadWriteWeb Integrates FriendFeed & Twitter Into Our Comments
If you enjoyed this post and want updates subscribe to PhilBaumann.
A Model for Real-Time Medical Mircroblogging
Peviously, I expounded shortly on the utility of using a Twitter-like service for medical and other healthcare professionals. Right now, Twitter’s reliability, feature-limitations, spam susceptibility and other problems make the Twitter platform shaky for more professional use in healthcare.
But the basic concept is one that aught to inspire an easy-to-use system for the healthcare industry.
Enter Enterprise Social Messaging Experiement (ESME), tweeted by @dahowlett. ESME is a SAP-backed project supported by Siemens IT Solutions and Services (a division of Siemens) that was developed to help clients to communicate with other members of a professional team. ESME includes a service architecture that can allow business users to dynamically communicate, collaborate and solve collective problems. Furthermore it can allow for knowledge mining and microblogging.
The clip below illustrates how ESME can provide the tools to integrate real-time solutions to disparate problems:
IMPLICATIONS FOR HEALTHCARE
What if there were a similar service for the healthcare industry? How more effecitve could problem-sovling get with such a tool?
There are some features in ESME which would be desirable in a medical environment. Additionally, medical social messaging should include:
- Security
- HIPAA-compliance
- Reliability
- Scalability
- Real-time networking
- Dynamic integration
- Searchable content
- Role and group filtering
- Tagging (including priority statuses)
A properly engineered medical social messaging system would naturally be a hefty investment; but the ROI could be worthy of the effort. Of course in its place we have IM, Twitter, Plurk, FriendFeed and countless other services which localized groups of physicians, nurses, and other healthcare providers could exploit rather effectively.
But the the openness of these current services pose problems which a customized enterprise solution could overcome. The public timeline feature is a blessing and a curse. A blessing because it opens users up to potentially millions of of helathcare professionals. A curse because that number could be overwhelming without the proper filters and logins, which if breeched, could harm a patient’s dignity and privacy.
ESME is being developed for use in manufacturing in the example provided in the video. But a similar thought experiement should be conducted for the medical industry.
Image via WikipediaA scalable system could be developed for use within a closed-off network or a within a global network.
Imagine the implications for clinical research, treatment advancement, learning, and the spreading of critically important memes. The list of applications is virtually limitless. An ESME like app could dig deeply into knowledge mines.
The tag cloud and group filtering features are ingenious user-friendly solutions to the problem of data over-abundance. They would go a long way toward intelligent and effective collaborative problem-solving.
There’s a lot of inspiration offered here with ESME. I plan on future posts to discuss the possibilities.
Learn a bit more (and find out what esme also means) here.
If you enjoyed this post and want updates subscribe to PhilBaumann.
Blog ROI: It’s About Value, Stupid!
Simple question: why would a hospital have a blog? Or use Twitter? Or maybe even FriendFeed? Simple answer: value.
A hospital aught to be one of the most valued kinds of facilities in our communities. Every effort aught to be encouraged for such organizations to optimally utilize those resources which can improve the delivery of care, expand an organization’s presence, and even generate positive returns from the investments in those resources.
But not every organization blogs. Not every one needs to. Why? Because the theme of returns and cost efficiency have been propounded so heavily into our heads that we overlook the obvious. We need to kick ourselves and say: It’s about value, stupid.
Hats off to ROI Harper and Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP)
Before addressing the specifics of hosptial blogging we aught to dip into some accouting theory, finance and arithmetic.
Organizations benefit greatly anytime they can create interactive means for people to find, experience and share value. A company’s Return on Invesment (ROI) is a simple quantitative method to express the expected gain from a deployed asset. But often, analysts focus so much on the number that they forget the value that drives it from the start.
Investing in social media is an investment in an intangible asset. Intangible assets generate both tangible and intangible losses and/or returns. Tangible assets include hospital beds, ventilators, infusion pumps, buildings, operating rooms, etc. Accounting theory offers ingenious methods for quantifying these assets in order to provide valuable information to investors and other stakeholders to make the soundest decisions about their resources.
Intangible assets include competent nursing care, physician experience, goodwill, communication styles, etc. They also include blogs and other social media that are currently evolving. Accounting theory has yet to work out how to measure a blog’s asset valuation (it could use a market costing methodology perhaps).
But the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) hasn’t yet seemed to issue a promulgation on the matter. If you’re a CEO, CFO, CIO or CAO of a publicly traded company maybe you can get a conversation going with the SEC or FASB (who knows, you might be able to get some tax deduction rules going: hint, hint).
Until someone establishes a standard measure of Blog ROI, I think it’s helpful to focus our lens on a fundamental question:
What information is needed to decide whether a blog is worth its cost?
There’s probably a complicated anwer to that question, one which depends on the economics of your particular organization. In its place, I’d like to offer up three simple intution pumps:
- Value drives ROI
- Price is a function of Value
- Value-Multiplied is replacing Value-Added
Value Drives ROI
ROI is just a noun. A number. A goal. It’s important.
Value is a verb. A movement. An infection. It’s essential.
If you want to generate positive ROI, you will have to create the setting through which customers (who these days aught to be called citizens) feel the value they seek (consciously or unconsciously). You will not only have to be the creator of value, you will also have to provide the means through which citizens can express their passion for the value they perceive.
So if you’re not able to derive an equation that gets you to ROI, you’re still not in the dark. If you’re trying to decide about developing a blog for your organization, you can just follow one word: value. What value would your blog offer to the people who read or join? Could you list out the (hypothetical) values? I think you could: around a conference table or in your armchair.
Price is a Function of Value
If your service isn’t valued there is no price strategy that will keep your going concern, well, going on. Price is simply a numerical expression of value. It’s either determined by monopolistic Short Snouts, oligopolies, government regulation, or the Long Tail of perfectly competitive market forces.
Be the Genhis Kahn of social value.
Photo: Dunchaser’s Photostream
Your strike-price is a derivative of the value people perceive. So strike value right into the hearts of your target. Be the Genghis Kahn of social value. I say Genghis Kahn because his small horde of lithe soldiers wearing silk shirts conquered more land mass while ridding on tiny horses than any other force in history. His enemies wore thick, heavy, metallic armor and everything they did was big. Why did his strategy and tactics work? Because in silk, there’s value. (Lesson: you’re going to get wounded, so make it easy to pull out the arrows.)
Value-Multiplied is Replacing Value-Added
It’s no longer good enough to “add value”. You’re sinking down the Long Tail. You might be in denial about this, but it’s true. Technology will own you (sorry, we’ve passed the singularity). The value you create and which your customers/citizens perceive has to be multiplied, not simply “added”.
And that’s where intelligent applications of social media come into play. Can you think of a better way to multiply the shared values of your going concern? Word-of-Mouth (WOM) was always king. But know the kingdom of WOM has come. Know thy king. He’s a little different this time around. He’s wearing new clothing: a crown of truth, a cape of respect and a staff of democracy. In fact: he’s you!
You cannot lie in the New Kingdom of WOM without being cast out. This is good news: you can now multiply your value with nobility. You can now impress your citizens with your infectious passion.
Value-Multiplication. That’s the new math you need to learn. And learn well.
Family Values are Social Values
There is an endless list of things people value in general. Here are some activities that I think most people value greatly:
- Kvetching
- Praising
- Sharing
- Bragging
- Linking
- Being flattered
- Being Right
- Never Being Wrong or Hurt (unless it’s a Dominatrix service)
- Loving
- Being Loved
- Inputing
- Suggesting
- Being Listened to
- Commenting
- Creating
- Meeting Others
- Learning
- Getting Great Free Stuff
- Taking Action
- Being Offered Simple, Easy Choices
- Hearing “Thank You” (even when they mess up)
These are all ingredients to successful blogging. Successful relationships. Successful business. Succesfful Successful anything, really. You don’t need Excel for the formulaic recipe. But you can cook. Be creative, use your senses, surprise yourself and become a remarkable presence in the kitchen of your marketplace.
Remarkable Opportunity Ingenuity (ROI)
Let’s redefine ROI. Let’s give ourselves permission to take a few steps back from the professorial whiteboard, put down the calculators and take a look at where we are along the Long Tail. If you don’t know where you are or what value your blog will create, how will you ever hope to properly calculate the returns on your investment? Would it even matter?
“There are some things that count that can’t be counted. And some things that can be counted that don’t count.”
You’ve read Seth’s blog (I hope!). So you already know what to do. You know the answer: be remarkable (don’t just feign it). Be remarkable in your decision about whether to blog or not. It’s not as easy as it looks. It’s hard. It’s costly. Which means it can be numerical and maybe calculable. But do the calculations AFTER you do the valuations. If you lay down the tracks for your customers’ value-train then ROI will come chugging along.
Some Rationales/Reasons for Hospital Blogging
Let’s return to hospital blogging, since it seems to be one of the most challenging. There are considerations in the healthcare industry that may not exist in others, including but not limited to:
- Patient Privacy
- Empolyee Privacy
- Safety
- Efficacy
- The Provision of Authoritative Content
There are of course other considerations. But they are manageble Dips. They’re not dead-ends (although I think many hosptial cultures automatically conclude that these are the dead-ends that deceptively justify the easy choice: not to blog at all).
So what are some of the rationales for crafting a remarkable hospital blog? Here are some suggestions (I use the word citizen in place of patient, family member and general public because it’s the only word that makes sense in a remarkable democracy):
- Citizen Complaints (These Should be Prominent!!!)
- Citizen feedback and praise
- Services updates (a new Operating Room or Surgical Procedure)
- Introduction of New Staff
- Nursing Notes (I Know a Bit Nightingalish)
- Up-to-Date Content on Disease Processes and Management
- Community News
- Pledge Drive Announcements
- Guest Posts from Prominent Doctors, Nurses & Other Healthcare Professionals
- Staff Recruitment (Show Off What a Remarkable Facility You Have - Be The Zappos of Healthcare!)
The same could be (partially) true for services like Twitter or FriendFeed. Here are some values to be shared through those media:
- Tweeting facilities about emergent crises
- Using Twitter for staffing needs
- Using FriendFeed to keep a stream of blog posts and other information about your facility for the whole world to see (also: if Google purchases FriendFeed, wouldn’t you want to be listed on their prime SERPs?)
- Using Twitter or FriendFeed as an educational tool for nursing and medical students (let them follow the best in the business)
Conclusion: Value Multiplied by Infectious Interaction Equals Gross Blog ROI
If all of this is new and bewildering to you, perhaps you aught to focus your investing efforts on a blog. For one, blogging develops the kinds of skills needed for effective social media marketing. Also, it offers a simple interface with your citizens.
Being passionate about your hospital and the services it provides is important. But: that passion must always be subordinated to something even more important. Be passionate about infusing your citizens with the infectious vectors of value that they can spread through the community.
A blog is one component of the passion-pump. Additional social media tools offer more options, which I will talk about soon (Twitter & FriendFeed). For now, you can follow me on Twitter or subscribe to my feed and we can continue the discussion. And feel free to (respectfully) obliterate my arguments here. Quality of life is at hand here.
Whatever your background, a blog is a good start to a healthier hospital. Then again, you could just let someone else do all the talking for you while you keep handing cash over to lawyers and PR wizards instead of your nurses and doctors and capital equipment. Who knows, with all of the ultra-portable devices around these days, you could just let your organization become a featured superstar on Youtube. Just what are you waiting for?
For remarkable resources on blogging and social media, follow these links:
Darren Rowse Problogger (No Nonsense Mate from Down Under)
Chris Brogan (Knows his stuff and knows how to communicate it!)
Guy Kawasaki’s Alltop Blogging (A Great Collection for Beginners & Pros)
If you enjoyed this post and want updates subscribe to PhilBaumann.
The Red Cross is Social
I wish that organizations like the Red Cross didn’t have to exist, I really do.
But we live in a fragile world. Given that tsunamis, hurricanes, local fires, explosions, tornados, terrorist attacks, pandemics, and other disasters can strike small or large groups of people spontaneously, perhaps it’s not such a bad idea to link into the many offerings of the Red Cross (I’m still in the process myself).
As of today, here are the official places that the Red Cross has set up:
- The blogosphere: Red Cross Chat, Good News Blog, Red Cross Youth
- Flickr: American Red Cross photo pool
- YouTube: American Red Cross channel
- LinkedIn: American Red Cross badge
- Facebook: American Red Cross Group and Cause
- Twitter: Red Cross disaster information
- Podcasts: A few small audio experiments
- I’m Making a Difference: i’m Initiative
I checked to see if the Red Cross is on FriendFeed and it looks like Joe has claimed it. Hey Joe, where you going with that…FriendFeed account in your name? I don’t know who Joe is but I hope he has good intentions for staking out RedCross on FriendFeed.
If you are Joe, and you’re not affiliated with the Red Cross, would you be a hero and offer it up to its namesake organization? There are literally millions of lives who you could affect. (If you do give it to the Red Cross, you could just say you held it with purely altruistic intentions and maybe you’ll get a ton of gratitude (and traffic). Just a thought.)
Which raises a point: what do you think about the rights of charitable organizations to stake claims on current and future social media sites?
To read more about how the Red Cross is using Web 2.0 check out their page on Social Media.
If you enjoyed this post and want updates subscribe to PhilBaumann.
