Twying Twitter

I’ve been watching all the chirping about Twitter, those who are addicted and those who hate it. One of the questions I had was how I might practically use it. Lifehacker has some good thoughts, and other related posts are here, here and here.

So, I decided to try it. Part of my job as Manager for National Media and New Media at Mayo Clinic is to explore new trends and how they might affect our work of communicating about research, relating with journalists and making reliable health and medical information available to the general public.

I’ll admit that SMS text messaging is something with which I wasn’t too familiar, mainly because it was an extra charge on my cell phone bill. And with six users on our cell phone plan (even with my oldest daughter getting married and moving to a new account) we didn’t need more cell phone expense.

But my daughters are seriously into IM and SMS, as is everyone else in their generation, so I rationalized buying the 300 message plan for myself on grounds of connecting with them and also better understanding the next generation.

I set up a Twitter account here, and would welcome friends to join. You can sign up for my Twitter RSS feed (I can’t guarantee it will be interesting) even without joining Twitter, but if you do join Twitter you can get alerts on your cell phone.

I’m not sure how I can best use Twitter or whether Mayo Clinic should, but I look forward to exploring. My friend Shel Holtz at FIR uses it to tweet people and invite comments when he’s recording his twice weekly podcast with Neville Hobson, which I think is a neat way to create more timely interactivity with their audience.

I could see this possibly being used for emergency communications, disaster drills, to quickly get messages to a core team. Setting up a Twitter account called “Disaster55905” for our zip code, and asking people to sign up for SMS alerts, would be a good way to reach participants quickly.

I could see this having some media relations possiblities too, where maybe journalists could set up an account where they post what stories they’re working on, and what kinds of sources they need. It might be a way to get sources quickly without using email or placing phone calls. And maybe for organizations that have news releases/studies, etc., they (or we) could use it for a heads up to journalists who opt in to receive notification of story ideas…creating a community of news related to a topic like health, or medicine, or for a particular company or industry.

Journalists and their editors have traditionally wanted to keep their story budgets close to the vest for competitive reasons, but maybe not in the future. Wired magazine has an interesting crowdsourcing article that suggests maybe journalists might be opening up a bit.

What do you think? Possibilities?

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Media and Marketing Chaos

In Bob Garfield’s Chaos Scenario 2.0, from Advertising Age, Garfield summarizes in one place what I’ve been writing for several months about layoffs in traditional media and their plummeting stock prices and market valuations.

In December 2005, Viacom spun off CBS, the so-called Tiffany Network, lest the broadcast business impede growth and depress shareholder value.

Just before Christmas 2005, Time Inc. laid off 100 employees. Just after Christmas, in January 2006, Time Inc. laid off 100 more employees. In April 2006, Time Inc. laid off 250 more employees — the last round of job cuts, the company said. In January, Time Inc. laid off 300 more employees. No wonder. Since 2001, Time Warner’s market capitalization has shrunk to $82 billion from $193 billion.

Last fall, ostensibly to promote their new seasons, five broadcast networks bypassed their local affiliates and gave away new programs online.

In October 2006, NBC announced a $750 million cost cutback, including 700 jobs and a moratorium on scripted programs in the first hour of prime time.

In November 2006, Clear Channel — the boogeyman of media consolidation — sold to private-equity owners and declared that it wants to unload its TV and small-market radio stations. The sale fetched $38 a share. In 2000, the stock sold at $100 a share.

The Minneapolis Star Tribune, acquired by McClatchy in 1998 for $1.2 billion, was sold to private investors in December 2006 for $530 million.

In 2000, Chicago-based Tribune Co. was valued at $12 billion. It then bought Times-Mirror Co. for more than $8 billion. At this writing, with Tribune Co. for sale as a whole or in part, the value of the merged company is $7.34 billion.

YouTube. Two years ago, it — much less Joost and Revver and Brightcove and the online-video industry in general — did not exist.

And of course, the Tribune deal went down just last week, with a creatively financed $8 billion package, or roughly what Tribune paid for the Times-Mirror in 2000.

I highly recommend reading the whole article, including the prequel from 2005.

Shel Holtz is right when he says new media don’t make old media obsolete, but the old media adapt. The question Garfield raises is whether they will adapt quickly enough to remain economically viable in the long term, or whether they will put on a brave face as they steam toward the iceberg, not wanting to alarm the passengers/advertisers.

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Upcoming Presentations

In the next few weeks I’ll be presenting at some conferences, of both the audio and full-body/multimedia varieties:

  • Wednesday, March 28 (tomorrow) I’m one of four presenters in a Healthcare Intelligence Network audio conference entitled Healthcare for the New Generations: Understanding and Engaging Generation “Xers” and “Yers” Through Tailored Products and Channels
  • During the second week of April I’ll be at this conference in Chicago, the Advanced Learning Institute’s Social Media Summit. I presented at a similar conference last October in San Francisco, and found it well-run and highly informative.
  • In late April, a colleague and I will be in Orlando for the Forum for Healthcare Strategists’ Twelfth National Forum on Customer Based Marketing Strategies (PDF).
  • I enjoy presenting at and participating in these seminars and conferences because they’re a lot like the blogosphere, with threads of conversation, various points of view, and people chiming in and contributing to the shared knowledge. I always learn a lot that I can apply in my work.

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Getting Nekkid

On Wired, Clive Thompson has a provocative article The See-Through CEO about the value of radical transparency achieved through CEO blogging…

Pretend for a second that you’re a CEO. Would you reveal your deepest, darkest secrets online? Would you confess that you’re an indecisive weakling, that your colleagues are inept, that you’re not really sure if you can meet payroll? Sounds crazy, right? After all, Coke doesn’t tell Pepsi what’s in the formula. Nobody sane strips down naked in front of their peers. But that’s exactly what Glenn Kelman did. And he thinks it saved his business.

You’ve gotta read that now, right? Go here to see it.

And while you’re at it, this history of Microsoft’s Channel 9 is a good case study of how blogging, and especially video blogging, can help key audiences better understand a company. If you think your company is basically doing things right, transparency like this can help the world see it. And if you’ve got problems, it can help even more…by shining the light on things that need to change, and showing that you’re open to solutions. Let your stakeholders help find them.

Interestingly, Thompson’s article was written “in the buff,” so to speak. He did it out in the open and asked for comments, which made the final product stronger. Not the way to do it if you’re looking for a “scoop,” but a way to take advantage of engaged readers to bring different facts and points of view into focus.

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Snap Judgment on Gladwell

In an earlier post, I did a review of Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point, about social epidemics and how they spread. If you’re looking for provocative thinking that will challenge how you view reality, particularly in the social sciences, you could do a lot worse than reading Gladwell, either on his blog or in one of his books.

Fast Company has a good profile, including one of the best lines about market research that I’ve read: “I think we would all be better off if focus groups ceased to exist.” (That point is substantiated in Blink by the story of All in the Family and the Mary Tyler Moore show, which the focus groups hated.)

Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking looks at rapid cognition, both in its positive and negative manifestations, and how sometimes too much data gives the illusion of a better choice, when in reality the essential information is much simpler and often comes by way of the unconscious. His stories include:

  • How art experts sensed a fraudulent statue almost instantaneously, when scientists examining it for months with sophisticated technology were fooled.
  • How a “love lab” expert can analyze an hour of a couple’s interaction and predict with 95 percent accuracy which ones will divorce within 15 years (and with 90 percent accuracy based on just 15 minutes of tape.)
  • How the immense planning of the US military was defeated in a war simulation by a shoot-from-the-hip sparring partner in the lead-up to the Iraq war.

I’m going to focus on a couple of medical applications, though:

  • How listening to snippets of surgeons’ interaction with patients can predict which ones will be sued for malpractice (Hint: those who weren’t sued spent, on average, 3 minutes more in conversation with patients…and their tone of voice was more pleasant and engaging). The skill level or training of the surgeon had nothing to do with it…and this difference was spotted by listening to just 40 seconds of conversation for each surgeon.
  • How Cook County Hospital improved service and survival among ED patients with chest pain by boiling the factors to be considered in determining whether to admit the patient down to four:
  1. Is the ECG abnormal?
  2. Is the patient having unstable angina?
  3. Is there fluid in the patient’s lungs?
  4. Is the systolic blood pressure below 100?

The Goldman algorithm using these four factors was tested against physicians doing their best by using all of the tests and data available, and the algorithm was 70 percent better at spotting people who weren’t having a heart attack. It was also better at identifying those who were having a hear attack. The doctors left to their own devices guessed right between 75 and 89 percent of the time; the algorithm was 95 percent accurate.

Sometimes more information gives the illusion of a better decision, when the reality is there are a few factors that really matter. The extra information may just be clutter.

And, to tie the two together, if you can make the judgment that a patient isn’t having a heart attack based on just a few questions and one test, that frees up time for deeper interactions with the patient about what is wrong. Then maybe you will be less likely to get sued.