The Subtle Influence

Social Media/Healthcare Ideagoras Conference Keynote

The video for the keynote I gave via Skype at the Ideagoras conference is up on Vimeo! I got up at 3 am to deliver this 20 minute keynote to a crowd of ~100, I even had a translator that I didn't know about. 

Some points that I talk about in my keynote:

1.  I want community and connection after finding out information about a condition that I am diagnosed with. These conversations are happening in communities/patients, they are going to occur with or without the brands involvement. If nothing else, a pharma brand could listen to the feedback that is generated. Brands are held in the minds of the people.
2.  ACOR, Medgle.com, Medhelp.org as organizations that provide information in the healthcare space.
3. A community is a garden, not a faucet, you can't turn it on and off- it's more planting seeds and watching it grow.

Thank you Ángel González for setting up this opportunity to share my experience with healthcare and social media.

Final Lunch For Good, I Argue for a Technology Based Solution

It's been a nice series of lunches put together by J.R. Johnson, Chris Heuer, Myles Weissleder and the team at Lunch.com to discuss three topics.

To start off, we discussed "Responsible Participation" (Full Video, I come on at 16:25) and how to encourage conversation. What does it mean to have communities with real names and social contexts. What does it mean to encourage responsible participation? I argue during lunch that participation is not a technology problem so technology can't solve it, that it is much more of a social/societal issue.

In the second installment the topic became, "Promoting Critical Thinking" I again argue that this is not a technology problem but one that is sociological. Our culture does not value critical thinking and the inner life, our constant business and distractions take us away from having enough quiet time to reflect. (Video excerpt)

The third installment was on "Finding Common Ground" and I go towards a technology solution. I think the more we expose the user created content to give context during a conversation, the more human we see "the other". We talk about how there's universal themes of "loving your family" to the mundane, "liking soccer". If we have that information on the sidebar as we are talking about a hot button topic, wouldn't that bring more humanity into the conversation? Would it be harder to objectify the "other" and hate them? If we had technology that could crunch through all of the information and expose the similarities between two people, would that change the conversational tone?

What does this have to do with Community Management? These are all very important- how do we promote conversation? How do we set the tone for the conversation? Having common ground encourages civility and healthy communities. It seems that the Lunch For Good conversations were getting at "How to build healthy thriving communities".

All in all, a great series of lunches. I'm glad that I had the chance to meet everyone and discuss these topics, even if we didn't all agree. Look forward to the next series!

Building a Community is Like...

I've been talking to a lot of different people in the past few months in diverse industries, from healthcare to IT the word on everyone's lips is, "Community". I've started to ask the question, "So, what does that mean to you? What would be your goals to having a community?" and from those answers start articulating what the word "Community" means to the person sitting across the table from me.

I've been thinking a lot about the role that a community of people can play in an organization, particularly in the for-profit world since companies are what I come in contact with every day. The conclusion? Building a community is closer to a political campaign or managing a team of volunteers than anything else. In both cases reliance on the passionate converted to carry the message back to their network is the holy grail and the way is to use the passion and energy for the brand. At the heart of every successful viral marketing campaign are the people, period, end of story.

Anyone else have thoughts?

Old interview from March 2009 with Chubby Brain.

http://www.chubbybrain.com/blog/2009/03/interview-with-chia-hwu-community-manager-at-23andme/

A little excerpt where I talk about Community Management:

Tell us a bit about yourself, your background... and what your job of community manager entails?

I primarily interface with members and people curious about the company. I primarily do that through social media – things like Twitter and Facebook and sometimes even LinkedIn. Also, other genealogy/genetic forums. There is actually a group of people very interested in learning about their deep genealogy which our service helps with. And they do their own research so I interface with those people as well.

We also have our forums on our site where people can come on and where people can look at what other people who are part of the service are talking about. For example, there are people who’ve started an adoption thread. A lot of people on the site are adopted and wanted to find out more about themselves. So this is one way for them to find out about their predispositions especially since they don’t have a family history.

The Online Community Manager Roundtable

Got back from @BillJohnston's Online Community Roundtable (appropriately with Round Table pizza) with new social media ideas buzzing through my head.

• Two topics that we got to talking about were the explosive growth of Facebook and how everyone we know in the US is on the network. I tend to think of Facebook as a more intimate party, slightly exclusive in the way that a birthday party for a longtime friend would be. You wouldn't think of inviting a Coke logo that will shout about nothing but Coke all night to it- unless the Coke logo was a fun game or quiz, had some great music or video playing, giving away free stuff all night or adding to the fun in some other way.

• The new way to think of social media marketing is closer to a political campaign where a political party (brand) goes in to a community (online platforms) and engages/energizes a core group of evangelists who are not going to talk about politics (the brand) the whole time. These evangelists will be in different places, some might be in a church group, others the neighborhood watch- and these old forms of community are increasingly being augmented or replaced by the online. Brands need to consider what kind of community these evangelists are in and energize/enable the passionate users to talk about *their* product in the way most appropriate. The tools appropriate for the church group will probably be inappropriate for the hip hop dance class. 

My quickly jotted down thoughts, do you have any?

On the Web Front interview with Chia Hwu and Alex Khomenko of 23andMe

From On The Web Front, episode 16:

In this week’s long overdue episode we are joined by Chia and Alex from 23andMe.com. We chat with Alex and Chia about their startup experiences at 23andMe and at their previous employers. In addition we talk about:

• The 23andMe Research Revolution which allows a discounted $99 rate for your own genetic testing and health traits
• Chia’s role as community manager and how tools like Twitter and Facebook can be used to engage your customer and grow your business
• And why any startup should have good air conditioning

http://www.onthewebfront.com/2009/08/otwf-16-23-and-us/

Check out the other great podcasts that Mike, Gabby, Robert and Stephen do on a semi-regular basis.

Interview with Chia at the Online Community Report

Thanks to Bill Johnston of ForumOne and his Online Community Report for giving me the opportunity to talk about my experiences with the unique 23andMe community.

Excerpt from the interview:
Q: Chia, you have a very unique community, in the sense that your community has the ability explore issues relating to a person's DNA. Can you talk about the strategy behind the 23andMe community?

23andMe has a very unique community that is based on having your genetic data. We currently only allow members who have been genotyped or have an Ancestry account post to the forums and the level of discourse is extremely high. We are very lucky to have such engaged, passionate and well-educated users who want to talk about their genetic results and share their data with each other. If you are interested in seeing what types of discussions are happening, create a free account and you can read through the threads.

Our community creates a place for people to engage with each other, it's pretty interesting to see how the interactions happen and how people connect, sometimes through their data and sometimes just in conversation.

I talk more about the unique community and the challenges of managing one- link to the full post here:

http://www.onlinecommunityreport.com/archives/536-Online-Community-Expert-Interview-Chia-Hwu,-23andMe.html

Chia and Morgan's Social Media Adventure bLogging Starts

Why another social media blog in a sea of blogs? Why get involved in what can sometimes seem like the echo chamber of Web 2.0?

Like it or not, social media is here to stay in one form or another. The tools might change but the internet has taken what made small town life so engaging and made it available on a global level. Want to know what your neighbor is driving? You used to look out the window at your neighbor's drive way- now that conversation has been taken to a new level. Now you can know what your first boy/girl friend in high school is driving. Perhaps the high school friends' choices in cars don't have a huge effect on your car purchasing decisions but your trusted friends' choices likely will. The conversations that used to happen around kitchen tables are now taking place on Facebook and Twitter. Who just bought a new device (and what was it?) or what is the hottest new band? You can see what your friends are doing with a few clicks of a mouse.

These conversations, which used to be private, one on one are now happening in public or semi-public and brands are taking notice. It is an opportunity to make a sale or lose a lead, depending on how the company handles the conversation. With the right amount of listening and sensitivity, the commitment to having authentic conversations, a brand can help co-create a conversation around their product or service.

The Community Managers work on the front lines of social media and brand, it's a hybrid of PR, Customer Service, Marketing, Product Management and "den mother". It's an interesting job description that is just becoming codified in corporate life and we wanted to have a place for that conversation to happen. A community of community professionals, as it were. This is a collaborative effort between Morgan and I and we will have guest bloggers from time to time, to get new discussions going.