Social Media University, Global (SMUG)
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I’m attending a conference in Bloomington, Minn. this morning, called “Closing the Gap: Innovative Strategies to Patient Involvement,” sponsored by ICSI, Institute for Clinical Systems Improvement. I’m doing a presentation on…you guessed it: Social Media.
Here are my slides:
I’m encouraging participants in the conference to get involved with the discussion through the #ICSIgap hashtag on Twitter.
I’m honored to be leading a conference call this afternoon with representatives from local chapters of the American Heart Association, discussing how they can use social media to spread the word. The conference call runs from 1-2 p.m. CST, and we’ll be using the #AHAchat hashtag for discussion.
The slides for my presentation (which will be about the first half or so of the discussion) are embedded below. They’re based on my 35 Theses, but I’ve incorporated some examples from AHA and their existing use of social media, and I’m not including the Octogenarian Idols section. If you want to contribute to the discussion via #AHAchat on Twitter, I’m sure you’d be welcome. Otherwise, please feel free to join in the comments on this post.
If you’re not sure how to participate in a Twitter chat, check out Twitter 115 and Twitter 116 for tips.
Here is the Twitter search widget so you can track the conversation, even if you haven’t yet joined Twitter:
Note: This post is part of a series providing fuller discussion for my 35 Social Media Theses. I welcome your feedback and comments to challenge and improve them.
In Thesis 1, I discussed how social media really aren’t completely new, since air was the original social medium. This leads us, however, to what is new:
What these electronic tools like Facebook, YouTube and Twitter do is not different in kind from what has happened with word of mouth since the dawn of civilization.
They just make it a whole lot easier.
People have always talked with friends and family about their experiences, including those with merchants and service providers. From which blacksmith did the best job with horseshoes a century ago to which dentist is best able to prevent pain, a huge portion of our “purchase” decisions have been and remain significantly affected by word-of-mouth.
As I mentioned in Thesis 1, word of mouth from patients and their families has been the top source of information for people who prefer Mayo Clinic, and it’s been that way for more than a century.
Now that word just spreads a lot faster.
So when someone writes on our Mayo Clinic Facebook wall, it’s available for the world to see…
…but more importantly, it may show up in her friends’ news feeds.
Social tools just mean that people are sharing with a lot more people, with a lot less effort.
Offline word of mouth is still more prevalent and more powerful than online, even with the new tools. Hearing a friend talk in person about an experience makes a deeper impression. And if a person, let’s call him Bob, is telling his friend Carl about his mysterious illness and his frustration that it hasn’t been diagnosed, if Carl tells him right then, at the point of need, about his good experience and recommends that Bob try Mayo, that’s obviously going to have deeper impact than a wall posting on Facebook.
But social media can have a broader impact. In the example above, Shannon’s wall posting was potentially visible to 300 million Facebook users, and the sharing she did with her Facebook friends was effortless. The act of writing was the act of sharing.
Likewise, when Rhonda King told the story of bringing her son Trevor to Mayo Clinic for a second opinion on the Mayo Clinic YouTube channel:
…It was seen by many more people than she could have spoken with personally. As of this writing, in fact, it’s been viewed more than 4,400 times. And while nothing is as powerful as face-to-face dialogue, I would argue that the impression Brenda made via video is both broad and deep, for those who have taken time to listen to what she had to say.
So while social media really are as old as human speech, as Thesis 1 says, there is something new and exciting about the ease with which messages can spread with social tools.
I say “merely” in Thesis 2 to emphasize the continuity of social tools with offline word-of-mouth. But don’t think that “merely” minimizes their impact. As we will discuss in the next two theses, social media tools are revolutionary in what they are doing to the anomalous mass media era of the 20th century.
Despite the decidedly social media nature of SMUG (“social media” is part of our name, after all), I’m still a big believer in books. They enable authors to make an extended argument and deal with a topic in more depth than the blog format allows.
I’ve written several book reviews here on SMUG, but it’s time for me to catch up, based on several more I’ve read or listened to via Audible.com. And I thought it would be helpful to develop a more comprehensive list of books that receive the SMUG Seal of Approval. As soon as I’ve finished adding related reviews and links to this post, I will be using it as the basis for a remodeled SMUG Bookstore.
Of course, everything about SMUG is voluntary, and tuition is free, so I can’t really say these are “required reading” for SMUGgles. As I get the reviews done, I will add links to the list of SMUG textbooks below. And if you have recommendations of books I’ve missed that you think would be helpful, please add them in the comments.
Personal Productivity
, by David Allen. GTD-related posts were among the earliest subjects of this blog in the pre-SMUG days, but the life lessons are clearly applicable for SMUGgles. Buy the book here.Social Media Theory and Philosophy
Business and Innovation
The Gladwell Grouping
Malcolm Gladwell’s books defy easy categorization, but he has a wonderful writing style and has a thought-provoking approach to all sorts of topics. If he wrote it, you should read it.
The Seth Section
Like Gladwell, Seth Godin deserves a section of his own. These are all somewhat related to marketing, particularly as it is understood as designing delivery of your products or services in a way that enhances customer satisfaction and word-of-mouth.
The Innovator’s Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail
Clayton Christensen is amazing. I got to hear him speak in person at our Mayo Clinic Transform symposium in September, but I was a fan long before that. In The Innovator’s Dilemma he lays the groundwork for a way of understanding disruptive innovation and why successful incumbent businesses and market leaders are so bad at adopting disruptive technologies.
It’s not because they’re stupid, lazy or unwilling to take risks. Christensen argues that they’re simply making decisions in keeping with sound management practices, and focusing on their most profitable lines of business.
Here’s my simplified version of the product progression Christensen describes. I will illustrate it using video cameras as the example.
This is a simplified overview, so you should read the book for a fuller explanation. But It’s amazing when you see how this same model has played itself out in countless other industries.
The Innovator’s Dilemma