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.

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?