What do you call this symbol: # ? For most of my life the people in my world referred to it as the “number sign“, until the rise of digital voicemail systems, at which point that symbol on the phone keybad was called the “pound sign”. In social media it’s referred to as the “hash” symbol (which apparently has British origins). Whatever. If you dip your toes at all into the world of Twitter, you’ll discover the so-called “hash tag” is used to filter searches so that you can follow any topic that is preceded by the # sign. For example, people at a conference I attended this week added #HCSMNY to their posts, which allowed anyone to listen in on the conversation without having to first find out the names of everyone there. Someday it will seem dumb that I had to explain this. But for now, I thought you might want to know!

It’s Perfectly Outrageous

At least, that’s my opinion of this week’s Facebook “IPO”. There were at least two really good pieces on NPR last week that pointed out potential problems with the efficacy of advertising on Facebook (which is, I think, it’s only source of revenue). Since Facebook’s business model is built on having its members voluntarily fork over vast volumes of personal information about themselves, and then selling that information to others, this is a tricky business. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy Facebook and use it frequently throughout the day for both work and personal reasons. But it looks like a bubble to me. (See: AOL, Yahoo, et al)

A Conference Saved My Job

Do you feel that you know absolutely everything you need to in order to do your job well? If not, where do you learn new skills? In most of the jobs I’ve had, I’ve been the only one doing what I’m doing, and so I need to reach out externally to colleagues in other organizations. In my current line of work this has been especially true, since they never covered social media marketing in any of my college courses or on the job training. Ironically, what helped me deal with two huge online marketing challenges at work was attending a conference of my peers this week where I could simply walk up to people, introduce myself, and say “…listen, could you help me figure out something …”

Chronology and Digits

My 65 year-old aunt recently explained to me how to download an e-book from the public library, and my 86 year-old Mother just finished self-publishing a book on family history which she developed on her computer at home. But neither of these ladies finds social media useful. Oddly, the youngest segment of the adult population doesn’t have much time for social media either (if you define it as Facebook and Twitter). So what the heck does the future hold for us in terms of communications, entertainment, shopping, etc? Anecdotally, based on observing my 15 years-younger husband and others, I think it has to do with texting and a mobile online experience that’s not defined by anyone other than themselves. And what that will look like, I have no idea.

It’s often been said that the pace of technological change is accelerating, which seems hard to believe when human beings themselves take eons to evolve. Yet people do adapt – for example in my adult lifetime, there has been an almost incomprehensible shift towards the acceptance of new social ideas like gay marriage. At the same time, large organizations struggle with change because they tend to enshrine ideas rather than challenge them. When high-level managers are faced with the adoption of social media, they often have no experience with it. So they fight it by asking for proof that it works. Since that’s a whole lot easier than trying something new.

Banning Ads

Do you hate banner ads, too? I just assumed that everyone shared my loathing for these ubiquitous annoyances and concentrated their energy on minimizing, deleting or ignoring them as much as possible. But I observed an ad agency pitch last week that promoted these ads as the biggest game in town, bigger than cable TV and radio advertising, in fact. That’s why my favorite information graphic this week was one which claims it’s more likely that one of your customers would apply to Harvard and get accepted than it is that they’d click on your ad. Or at least, I *think* that’s what this means.

Quick (Don’t) Change

Social media practices are so new and evolve so quickly that it’s easy for anyone to set themselves up as having special knowledge. This blog results from all the stuff (and nonsense) that I sift through during the course of a week, so you can be spared some of the most ridiculous advice. For example, while looking at a purported Top 10 social media “no-no’s” advice column this week, my viewing experience was interrupted by a pop-up ad. I’m thinking these people need to do their homework.

Who You Know, Not What You Know

As a WeightWatchers meeting leader, I cherish the power of a supportive group environment, fostered by in-person get-togethers for a guided discussion. So it stands to reason that in my social media activities I’m most invested in connecting with people that I also know in “real” life. In fact, my personal advice to WeightWatcher members who tell me that they want to just “do it online” is that they’re missing a critical success factor — the need for camaraderie and interpersonal feedback. After all, knowing how to lose weight isn’t the same thing as doing it.

Well, to be clearer, playing on social media is easy, but making a living there is hard. Not only does Facebook force marketing folks like me into tight little boxes, it’s also really hard to convince management that online engagement matters. Everytime my employer’s CEO mentions “Twitter” at a board meeting, the room erupts in laughter, as if creating good tweets was silly child’s play. I can only hope that our new #Idedicate campaign, which engages women in a conversation about getting a mammogram, shows the folks in charge that social media really does matter. And mammograms save lives!

Design for Living

While I’m not a fan of crowd-sourcing when it’s used for advertising or dubious research, I love that the California HealthCare Foundation is asking the web for help with data design. That’s because data are useless to us regular folks unless presented in a compelling way. In fact, creating health-related behavior change is damn hard, regardless of how much data there may be (think: smoking). I’ll be watching for the winners, and I hope that it will be more interesting and useful than this confusing infographic on working out with a mobile phone from Lab42

That Tumblr Thing

Chances are, you’re as sick and tired of political advertising as the next person, but don’t realize that these ads are very hard to escape. You’ve probably also noticed that social media gives politicians the chance to break outside the 30-second spot, and to say and do things they can’t on TV or radio. As a progressive, I enjoyed this piece that felt unscripted and honest, even though surely it was carefully planned. A far cry from this sweet, but old-school-feeling YouTube video from President Obama’s 2008 campaign, just four years ago.

Mob Scene

You’ve no doubt heard me argue before that information technology hasn’t fundamentally changed what it means to be human. And surely electronically-facilitated social conversations are a means of expanding individuals’ networks rather than isolating them. But on the one year anniversary of my arrival in New York City, I remain skeptical of all crowds –whether they be in Times Square or online. The same phenomenon that creates dirty subway stations (careless littering, no supervision) creates messy comment streams online.

It’s human nature to want to see into the future, and to imagine the unimagineable –fantasizing in particular about life-transforming technologies. But let’s be wary about predictions that technology will solve our problems and lead us walking hand-in-hand towards a rosy sunset. Or at least to a halycon future of fairness and leisure. A ridiculously long article in the Guardian notes that ours is a fearful culture, and we must get past our anxieties to understand how to harness the future.

Technology is hard

As I’ve noted many times in this blog, the explosion in growth of social media doesn’t mean that everyone gets it and knows how to take advantage. I wasn’t surprised, for example, to read that most people who use social media sites to rank doctors, give them fairly high marks. It caught me off guard, however, when researchers concluded “One Feedback Question May be Sufficient to Assess Patient Experience.” Really? One question? Do you feel that all you need is a thumbs up or down to pick YOUR caregiver?

Technology makes some things worse

As the print and broadcast-based news media struggles through its final death throes, you might want to remember that “just because it’s online doesn’t make it true.” This week, I fell for a patently false story about Ann Romney, published by a parody site (but told to me by a friend as if true). Worse, big news organizations like the Washington Post, desparate to remain relevant, are pushing employees to sift through vast quantities of online stories in order to “surf the wave” of breaking trends. That they sometimes stumble and report fiction as fact, shouldn’t suprise us.

Social technologies won’t eat your brain

Or shorten your commute. At least, that’s one prediction I (perhaps foolishly) am willing to make. True, almost every aspect of daily work and life has been deeply altered by changes in communications (when was the last time you left your cell phone home on purpose). But utopian visions claiming we’ll all live in mixed use, transit friendly, green, sustainable environments just don’t ring true. Compare the incredible advance of social media and device technology over the past 10 years, against the growth (or shrinkage) of your paycheck.

This month the Atlantic asks “Is Facebook Making us Lonely” (c’mon, you just knew the answer would be ‘yes’, didn’t you?). As a life-long introvert, I’m used to popular culture extolling the virtues of being outgoing, gregarious and extroverted, while hinting that there’s something not quite right with people who prefer a little peace and quiet. While scholarly and interesting, I thought the basic premise of the piece was a flawed assumption that there existed an earlier halcyon era during which we all hung out together in person. Perhaps like that old TV show, “Friends”? I don’t know about you, but I remember life before the internet and don’t recall endless nights of scintillating conversation and deeply meaningful bonding. Mostly we just sat around watching TV.

Hello, Hello There

A while ago I wrote about a new hotel in my neighborhood that offers guests the chance to connect with fellow travellers and interact with the staff thru a hyper-local social network. Nowhere is the feeling of being “alone in a crowd” more profound than in a place like New York City where the sidewalks are packed night and day but you might never encounter a handshake, a smile or a friendly face. Yet, as this clip from one of my favorite old movies shows, it has ever been thus.

Where are you?

I have a theory that it won’t be until the current generation of senior management retires that we’ll really see how technology meaningfully change communications between companies and their customers. Where I work, for example, press releases, press conferences and newspaper mentions are still a strong focus of our communications efforts. I think those days are numbered because what really matters to any organization is to find (and get in front of) the audience wherever they may be. And newspaper reading just isn’t the place. Some people think that websites aren’t the place either. So…got any good ideas?

Nasty-gram

Posting diatribes is not my usual thing, but I’m going to take the low road and declare my real hatred of “instagram.” It’s not that I’m jumping on the bandwagon of those who say that Facebook will ruin it now that they bought the start-up for a cool billion (seriously ONE BILLION). It’s that I don’t really love sepia-toned, frayed-edge photos. I’m old enough to remember when those kind of pictures were the norm, and the delight we all felt when photography progressed beyond that phase for good in the 1970s. Here’s to hoping the instagram will go the way of the telegram.

When you read about “authenticity” and “engagement” in the context of social media, it’s probably a wise idea to keep an eye for a grain of salt to take with it. Of course, any organization –from the corner store to the multinational conglomerate– can create an appealing brand image through the products and service it offers. But there’s absolutely no data demonstrating that consumers are starting to consider these entities to be their friends. People may like fan pages on Facebook, review companies on Yelp, and pin up pictures online. But in real life, around the real water cooler, they’re talking about last night’s game or who got voted off their favorite show.

Facebook vs. Friendship

If you’re a social media nut like me, you can get impatient waiting even a few minutes to hear back from someone. Everywhere I go in New York City I see people wandering down streets and sidewalks in a texting frenzy. By contrast, my Mother just published a book about an ancestor, based on letters he wrote 150 years ago while in the Pacific Northwest, that sometimes took a year or more to get a reply. I don’t know about you, but I’m feeling pretty appreciative of my mobile company’s data network right now.

You Don’t Tweet

In my experience, most webinars achieve extremely low interactivity, so it didn’t bug me too much that this week my work team watched one on social PR that was pre-recorded. The most compelling nugget I got from it was that people are on Facebook because it’s the default place to go, not because they give a damn about social media. Whereas Twitter is a gathering place for communication-hungry nerds (like me) who’ll get their info anywhere. Lesson: you can mention Facebook on Twitter, but don’t mention Twitter on Facebook!

Mad Man
While my office is nothing like the set of Mad Men, this week one of my colleagues upstaged a dull, uninspired proposal I made by coming up with a truly brilliant suggestion for our public awareness campaign. Rather than my dumb posts and posters, she suggested having real patients share real photos of themselves and their loved ones, and then post them on social media with comments about why they wanted to live longer, healthier lives, and for whom. In a nutshell she captured what people do best (talking about their lives and people they love), and imagined a way to let them do it while helping our cause. [I can't post a link until we launch it in May.]

How does 21st century technology impact your health? Aside from breathtakingly complex machinery like MRI’s and spectrometers, has the information revolution really changed the practice of medicine? While medical, political, and administrative leaders in healthcare debate how this works, most of us are already turning to the web for answers for everything from headaches to chronic care. But we should be wary of predictions that care will soon be automated. First and foremost because doctors are not really engaged in any two-way conversations outside the exam room.

Healthy Debate or Stony Silence

From a professional standpoint, I want to know how you think about the choices you have and how you reach the decisions you do. But marketers like me are far from all-knowing, and even farther from having the ability to react to what they do know. As I’ve noted above, in the healthcare world we often either don’t know how best to reach out, or are prohibited from doing so using social media channels. From a practical standpoint this means that consumers have a platform for asking questions and raising complaints, but at best they are engaging the broader community first, while those they most want to hear from are either silent or silenced.

Positive Thinking

According to Merriam Webster, a yelp is a “sharp shrill bark or cry.” Yet Wikipedia says that yelp.dot.com is “a social networking, user review, and local search web site.” So does “yelping” mean shrilly barking, or does it mean reaching out to friends and sharing stories? I’ve read that most website reviews are overwhelmingly positive, and I can see why. Who wants to get sued for going public with a bad customer service story? In the end, I like what New Yorkers have to say in this piece from Business Insider.

Caveat Googler

While dealing with a plantar fasciitis problem, I’ve seen five health specialists over the past three months. Inevitably, each of them gave me some patient education materials, while also mentioning that they assumed I’d “google” the problem as well. Naturally I had, and never really thought twice about it. But what if the diagnosis had been for something more serious, like heart disease or chronic depression. Google, after all, is a publicly traded information company, focused on profits rather than your personal needs. If you google a debilitating health concern, does that create a record of your health that may one day become inadvertently public?

Telling someone you’re an introvert is like admitting to a character flaw. People are quick to tell you that it’s not true or that it can be overcome. So recently I shared a vid from Susan Cain in my social media feed about the value of introversion, just to help people understand what makes me tick. So I rolled my eyes when I read about an airline that is now implementing a policy that is supposed to help the passenger experience by getting travellers to vet each other through Facebook. The New York times poked fun at this, and I have to agree. Not everyone needs or wants to talk all the time.

Who’s Right? Who’s Wrong?

This week my social media feed was packed with an interesting mix of people both lauding and criticizing a viral-video effort to expose a brutal African warlord. The issue was not about the despot himself, but about the motives and tactics of the organization bringing this story to light. By creating a compelling story, packaged effectively, many progressives felt that the emotional message (“we need to stop this killer, dead or alive”) belied a more complex concern about how to create a sustainable rule of law and justice in the region. Manipulating the masses is a tricky business.

Who’s Wrong? Who’s Right?

This week NPR highlighted a story that contrasted the huge gulf between the discipline of academic research and the equally hidebound world of online information crowd-sourcing. In short, a researcher who’s spent his career correcting misperceptions about a famous 19th Century trial found that he was unable to get his facts posted on Wikipedia. Although he tried to link his information to primary sources that backed him up, the wisdom of the crowd was that his efforts weren’t tenacious enough to be true. In the interview the spokesperson for Wikimedia was unabashed. Wikipedia is about “trying to get it right rather than get it fast“. By which he means, it’s about getting it wrong, and then about getting it right, later on. Yikes.

Just. Plain. Wrong.

Last week saw a convergence of two social media phenomena that are still in their adolescence: QR codes and location check-in services. And speaking of adolescents, the idea was to have young (or at least social-savvy) lovers scan a code on a condom wrapper as a means of broadcasting to the world their amorous adventures. My guess is that the people behind the idea are riffing off of the practice of “sexting” (texting while having sex). Call me old fashioned, but back in my day, making love properly required all of one’s attention, not to mention the use of all available hands.

Technology, like fame or wealth, doesn’t alter a person’s intelligence, it simply amplifies their experience. This was brought home to me when I watched, wincing, a YouTube video of an upset father dealing with his bratty daughter’s Facebook outburst by shooting her laptop with his revolver. Social media wasn’t the cause of either the daughter or the father’s behavior — it was merely the means of broadcasting it to the universe. The sad thing is that with over 30 million hits, it’s a meaningless incident which may shape the rest of their lives.

Disappointed? Watch this!

If you have watched as many video blogs as I have, you know that an overwhelming majority of talking-head style clips are boring and cheerless, regardless of the subject matter. It’s amazing, however, what a tiny amount of editing can do to create interest, draw the viewer in and drive a point home. This is so subtle that it can be easily missed. So I’ll link here to a great example of a clip that simply took the phrase “disappointing” and parlayed it into a highly watchable piece on why NJ Governor Christie’s veto of the gay marriage bill was wrong-headed.

Information Please

Trying to pull up an image that I had seen a while ago, I did a quick google search on “social media infographic” and limited the results to “images”. What I found astonished me. Apparently the world has gone ga-ga for information graphics! I had no idea. Ironically, the piece I was looking for had to do with whether social media was ruining our minds. Personally, I think the answer to that question is “No, it’s just changing the way we think.” After all, I didn’t wake up in a cave and light a fire with two sticks this morning. To live in the 21st century requires using 21st century tools. Now pardon me while I go hunt some groceries online.

He Tweeted She Tweeted

This week I got into a losing argument at work with my very talented team. I stood alone in the contention was that it matters who follows you on Twitter. The majority view was that a follow is a follow is a follow, so it’s a waste of time to monitor (and edit) the list, even if it includes bots and spammers. My thinking was that your online reputation could be hindered if your fan base included people selling pills, sex, and god knows what else. An online search failed to yield a definitive answer, meaning my colleagues may well be right. I’d love to know what you think!

Tech startups fail at an astonishing rate – many of them crashing and burning long before they ever have a functional business model or revenue stream figured out. So borrowing a page from the movie/television/theatre industry, some startups apparenly just look around for what’s working, and then copy it verbatim. A great article in Mashable at the end of January highlighted ten of the most “blatant social media design ripoffs“. It’s a fun read, but I wouldn’t bet any money on the copycats. It’s easier to attract investors than users.

Pin Up

Having finally received my “invitation” to join Pinterest, it’s taking me a while to figure the site out. The biggest barrier to getting started is that Pinterest requires you to have a Twitter or Facebook account and to be connected to at least one of them. That kind of bugged me, as I envisioned Pinterest either accidentally or intentionally spamming my friends. So I chose Twitter, since it’s much easier to be ignored there! I began by “pinning” (uploading) a photo of my very photogenic dalmatian taking a nap. And I got three new friends in just an instant! Now if only I could figure out how to create a board…

Girls in the Hood

One of the copycat sites noted in the article above promotes itself as a sort of Pinterest for the male gender. If that seems weird, well it turns out they might be on to something. There’s reason to believe that Pinterest’s users are almost uniformly women –97% according to Tech Crunch. If so, I’ve got to hand it to them because it’s a marketers demographic dream. In a consumer society like ours, the role of women in making household purchasing decisions is a well-established fact. Indeed, the entire web 2.0 economy may turn out to be the most gender-levelling phenomenon since female suffrage.

Green with Ivy

Speaking of making money off of the web, it was interesting to discover that two mega-celebrities decided to forego the usual let’s-make-money-off-the-photos-of-the-baby thing and posted pictures of their newborn on Tumblr. It says a lot about the waning power of tradition media. Instead, the couple has decided they’re much more likely to make money by selling merchandise, and thus are trying to trademark the little one’s name. I wonder if Jonathan™ is already taken?