CONSTANT BETA

I stumbled upon the Mayo Clinic Innovation blog and was astounded with the amount of research, thinking and ideas that are alive on this blog. My thoughts are random and all over the place so bear with me while I try to make sense of my thesis.

Mayo Clinic was founded on the principle of consistently developing better ways of treating patients and running operations. It would be fair to say that this is the core mission of Mayo Clinic and has been since 1889. Over a century, not only has Mayo Clinic stayed true to its values but become a case-study for other leaders in and outside the healthcare industry to follow suit. This fascinates me because its not very often that you hear about innovations in the Healthcare sector. A revolutionary, disruptive technology might sit in the news for a few weeks before dealing with adoption and scalability issues, but incremental innovations and improvements (esp. in the Healthcare) are overlooked and underestimated. A few months ago, I read Atul Gawande’s The Checklist Manifesto and was astounded by the idea that a tool as simple as a Check-list in ER rooms showed measurable results in improving the quality of health-care and saving lives.

I think there are two things that stand out to me most about Mayo Clinic’s efforts:

Transparency: Leaving aside the social media jargon for a second, Mayo Clinic’s efforts with the The Center for Innovation and their approach to communicating it has not only contributed towards elevating its position as a thought leader in healthcare innovation, but also simplifies the complex world of patient care. Here is an example of a post on the design of a stool-collection kit. A very unsexy topic but the learnings shared from Mayo Clinic’s focus groups are insightful.

Accessibility: Mayoclinic.com is a better, more trust-worthy webmd.com. I was very pleasantly surprised at Mayo Clinic’s adoption of the web in helping users learn more about diseases. I prefer that MayoClinic keeps it to the point unlike webmd.com that has now morphed into an ivillage.com lookalike. I think MC is still working out its kinks (there are several different versions of the sites that exist with a different look and feel on each) but I already like where they are headed.

I’ve been doing a lot of reading on leadership lately. For a few reasons, I’m managing more at work now – whether it’s the client, or vendors or inter-office relationships and since I’ve avoided the business school path, I find myself paying extra attention to inspiring individuals around me and watching how they lead. Two days ago, we were in a C-suite meeting with one of the largest Fortune 500 company. The senior-most leader in the meeting is a a well respected business executive and it can be quite intimidating to be in the same room as her. It was very humbling for us to see how well she was listening, asking questions or further clarifications. It is also worth nothing that this leader created a congenial environment for her team by asking them to share more about their initiatives and asking them questions and their opinions on certain issues.

I’ve been reading articles on Harvard Business Review and the one that resonated most strongly with me is called ‘Why Should Anyone be Led by you?” It is co-authored by Robert Goffee (Prof. of Organizational Behavior, London Business School) and Gareth Jones (Dir of Human Resources and Internal Comms. at BBC)

According to their research, inspirational leaders have four unexpected qualities and I do think they are worth sharing here. And I am quoting directly from the article,:

1. They selectively show their weaknesses – By exposing some vulnerability, they reveal their approachability and humanity
2. They rely heavily on intuition to gauge the appropriate timing and course of action – Their ability to collect and interpret soft data helps them know just when and how to act
3. They manage employees with something we call tough empathy – Inspirational leaders empathize passionately and realistically with people, and they care intensely about the work employees too
4. They reveal their differences – They capitalize on what’s unique about themselves

I think after a point, leadership becomes less about the technical or industry knowledge and more about how a leader is able to empathize with his/her employees and lead them to their best performance. Just my guess..

Facebook announced the launch of Facebook Stories application to celebrate its 500 Millionth user. It blew my mind away. When I saw the the trailer for the film, Social Network – it’s haunting NIN track and the montage of a life (its trials, tribulations, joys and conversations) through Facebook, it reminded me of how Facebook has integrated itself in the everyday lives of millions worldwide. It’s changed the dynamics of relationships we have with family and friends and also how we perceive ourselves.

This Facebook Stories application, in my opinion, is a celebration and documentation of all the ways in which Facebook has affected us. I spent some time reading through the stories and was struck with the palette of emotions they displayed.

What’s also very interesting is this story map generated by Facebook. India, as you can see is one of the most active Asian countries. I find that quite impressive.

We had a very interesting discussion at work earlier this week about all the data on the web and how there is a strong need now for applications and services that analyze, visualize and make sense of this data. I cannot agree more. We’ve amassed a wealth of knowledge about our relationships and interactions with each other.

This project also reminds me a lot about We Feel Fine - although We Feel Fine was more abstract and computer-driven. Just a thought.

Social media execution is more of an art than a science. In my experience so far, brands have only really paid attention to their social media presence (or in most cases, lack of presence) when their brand reputation is at stake. One such case, I had a chance to observe closely was a retail company with poor customer service at its locations. And this was reflected online on the company’s Facebook page and retail review sites.

It’s unfair to expect social media to repair the brand reputation – especially when the reasons for it are rooted in corporate policies and business decisions. However, social media can help mitigate the negativity. In this post, I want to share a few tactics I’ve used to balance out negativity on a brand-owned Facebook fan page:

Take control over Content Programming: As much as the negativity on your Facebook brand page worries you, it is the first eight-ten posts (above the fold) that are most crucial in setting first impression with page visitors. Because Facebook wall refreshes quickly and rapidly with new wall-posts, the past comments and wall-posts don’t hold as much importance or weight as they do on a traditional ratings/ review sites like yelp.com or an tripadvisor.com.

Fueling positive content via status updates on a frequent basis to drown out the negativity. Create a content calendar that pushes out more brand-favored content and pushes down unfavorable comments. Direct conversation and tweak tonality towards positivity by celebrating the fans/ customers.

Set Facebook etiquette: Most brand pages are a kind of public forum, where the community is the boss. However, the page is still owned by the brand and it’s important for brands to remember that and set clear rules for community participation. I’m a huge proponent of Facebook Etiquette boxes that give brands the necessary protection to moderate or remove offensive posts.

(It goes without saying that this Etiquette box, does not give brands unbridled license to delete all negative comments!)

Response Strategy to negative comments: Respond to negative comments when it is an actionable issue. Always provide a direct line of access (phone number, email address) and sign off using real name. (Pref. a communications / corporate affairs personnel or customer service) Try to establish a response time-frame of 8-10 hours. Avoid responding too quickly to negative comments as it creates unrealistic expectations with the customers.

Hope this helps!

Yesterday I noticed my husband log into his Good Reads account and manually add his latest books from Kindle so he could share his recommendations with his friends. It was a little cumbersome and annoying process.

We are both avid readers. We own over 200 physical books and over 25 Kindle books between the two of us (Kindle is just in the last 3 months!) These days, we love coming back home and sneaking some time in the park or at the riverfront with our Kindles. But it is frustrating that I cannot share my books with him. It is even more frustrating that there is no way for either of us to directly port our Kindle buys to a site and rate/ review these books on it and make it accessible to our friends.

So we began thinking, why doesn’t Amazon create an API that allows users to port their Kindle books into a Good Reads equivalent where they can immediately review and recommend the books, or at the very least thumbs up and down it for their friends ?

Then today a few different conversations happened that helped me connect the dots better.

1) We’ve been working on a POV document for our client regarding Blippy. I’m embracing more transparency on the web but am not ready to share my credit card transactions just yet. Blippy is interesting but I’m not sure if people “liking” my purchase is adding any value to me.

At this point, Apple and Amazon have access to majority of my online shopping history. And I’d venture a guess to say that 80% of it is media related. Books, movies, music, DVDS. How amazing would it be for Apple or Amazon to pull a Blippy and give me the option to make any or all of my purchases public. I could not only share them with friends but also record my own experience / review of the particular product.

2. I’ve been playing around with a site called GetGlue for some time now. Getglue reminds me a lot of Netflix but I don’t yet see a tangible return on getglue. Netflix was able to rent or stream me movies and it made sense that the more movies I watched, the better it was able to make recommendations. I guess, I want to discover new faves and have options to buy, rent, read them.

I also spend 30 minutes today answering 50+ questions on Hunch.

3. I also read a terrific review of the KIN phone on the All Things Digital blog. What caught my eye is Mossberg’s assertion that what makes KIN amazing is that all media, images and videos are directly saved online without the user having to do any set-up or transfer! So you take a photo on your KIN, log on to your KIN Studio and lo behold! – it’s already uploaded on it.

So all of this got me thinking, how much richer my experience across all these sites would be if I was able to port in automatically (in addition to my profile/ interests from Facebook) my purchase history from Amazon, Apple and whichever other retailer. (maybe FreshDirect)

I don’t want to physically spend any more time answering questions or likes on sites like Good Reads, Get Glue and Hunch. I want to port in all my available data to them and have them figure it out. Do the work behind-the-scenes and just tell me what I need to know.

Good Reads, Get Glue and even Hunch would become that much more contextual and relevant for me than they are right now.

I actually don’t doubt the possibility of this either. We are moving into an era were privacy is more ambiguous than before and as a generation, we are simply more comfortable sharing personal information at a larger scale. I think an E-Commerce API, or the ability to port in our purchase history (not the amount we spend, but the actual products we buy) will be the next seminal step in creating a more “social” web. It’s not simple about where my friends are and what they are doing – it’ll be more about this is me and this is what I need.

My two cents.

It’s interesting how the damsel-in-distress and prince charming saves the day theme is the essence of most fairy-tales. What kind of conditioning do these tales provide little girls ?

There’s one set of stories: Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella and Snow White that may condition girls to think of their partners as their ultimate saviors. And then there’s another set of stories: Beauty and the Beast, Princess and the Frog etc: that give the impression that love can and does change ugliness into beauty and beasts into princes.

Research has shown that girls that over-identify with fairy-tales are more likely to fall victim to abusive relationships because sub-consciously, they take on the role of the submissive, passive female role model, expecting love and patience to change their partners’ behavior. This quote in particular struck me, “Small children may interpret the story-book submissive roles as a template of how society expects them to develop.” That is disturbing.

When I see movies like “Shrek,” there’s hope that our perception of princesses is changing. “Shrek” to be will always be seminal work of art and cultural reform. It took everything we know and believe about fairytales and princesses and turned it on its head.

Yes, princesses can be fat and stinky. They can and do burp. They know karate and are capable of taking care of themselves. And they are extremely capable of falling in love with the ugly – of seeing beyond. So there’s hope. I know the kind of media I’ll be feeding my kids when they arrive.

Even the new version of “The Princess and the Frog” is quite encouraging. She’s no princess but an ordinary waitress who dreams of owning her own restaurant someday. She’s drive, ambitious and diligent. Then she kisses a frog out of desperation and becomes a frog herself. I love how new writers and thinkers are taking what we know about fairytales and princesses and flipping it around.

Yes, princesses have dreams. And they don’t all want to live in a castle. And they are good at other things besides looking pretty.

I want to see how technology and storytelling come together to create empowering learning experiences for little girls. I want little girls to dream about themselves, the possibilities, their own potential and all the various things they could enjoy about life. I want them to be surrounded by media and cultural artifacts that work as critical thinking tools that will allow girls to think for themselves.

Have you come across such digital tools? I wish I had more kids around me or was friends with more forward-thinking parents. I’d love to learn what’s on their mind and what kind of education they dream of giving their girls.

I’ve been very fascinated with this idea. Now that Facebook is on it’s way towards profitability, it perhaps is not applicable to the social networking giant but there might be something for the new start-ups still trying to figure out their business model.

Plenty of start-ups in the Internet space follow a strategy of building a product, amassing an audience quickly and then trying to figure out how to monetize the audience. Facebook did the same, but it hasn’t and still struggles with winning the in-network advertising conundrum.

It changed its “FAN” to “LIKE” – with the definitive intention of pandering to brands and companies by showing them an increase in enrollment into their fan pages. Facebook also changed the settings on my profile page and now connected each “interest” of mine to a specific fan page. It annoyed me. I had beautifully crafted and super creative interests and activities and now they are all gone because I refused to link them to Pages.

From a brand perspective, these are all excellent changes. Branded content will continue to seep through personal social networks in form of “likes.” My clients are already excited with the possibilities.

But on a personal note, Facebook has become less and less intimate and is losing context for me everyday. I have more people on Limited than I did before and my interactions on Facebook have lessened to wishing happy birthday’s and liking a photograph. Maybe it’s just me but are these changes adding real value to the user to ensure they continue using and trusting Fbook for the long term?

That’s why my $1 business model is so brilliant. If I say so myself.

I’d have MUCH happily paid them a $1/ month subscription fee than be subjected to  forced changes. Facebook would have the operating budget they needed to stave off pressure from the industry and buy time to come up with a smarter strategy. It’s a flawed idea, I know but I just shelled out $20/yr for a flavors.me pro account. Facebook offers a much better service and contains my biography of sorts…so paying a subscription fee to Facebook is a no-brainer.

Just my two cents.

I haven’t written in a while. I’m thinking of migrating my blog over to tumblr. There’s a very work-like, formal feeling to logging into my domain name and blogging. Anyways, what follows are a few ideas I’ve been thinking about over the past few weeks. Just wanted to catalog them before they fly away.

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I’m fairly outgoing and so I enjoy Foursquare. But I very often simply forget to check-in because it’s just not a habit yet. On the other hand, if I’m watching an incredible show, movie or reading a page-turner of a book, I’m the first to yell, facebook, tweet it out to the world. It’s an ingrained habit and now that I read more than 3 books/month and discover new authors more often thanks to my Kindle, I find myself itching all the time to share my ‘finds’ with the community. As a personality, I care more about what people think of my media recommendations over my restaurant/ pub recommendations.

The growth of location-based services has been exponential. Books and reading based services have stumbled along the way, neither of them capturing my interest or attention for a sustained period of time. Books and media-based conversations are so rich and multi-layered in context. Then, I wonder why we can’t yet “check-in” to books and entertainment yet ?

We recently met with the brilliant team at HotPotato to evaluate potential opportunities with them for a client. Miso and Hotpotato allow users to share what they are currently watching. In doing so, they create a live environment of impassioned audiences that discuss live events, TV shows and even movies as they are watching it. But I’d really love to see a version for books and reading.

I’d ventured a guess earlier (largely from my own experience) about new mobile devices such as Kindle and iPad contributing heavily to an increase in media consumption. Perhaps there’s an opportunity waiting to happen here with interactive books on-the-go. Imagine you “check-in” a book everytime you read it and it post reading, you are privy to and have access to discussions and opinions – on the go, on your device.

Just a thought. You know, because I’m really ready to share more than just my location.

This is a rambling of ideas and thoughts that have been floating in my head for the last few days. This morning, I read a very interesting piece in the NYT about an experimental study in a second-grade classroom at a charter school in Massachusetts where undergraduate students from Mount Holyoke College teach these children philosophy. Not about philosophers but about the higher value, morals and questions with no right or wrong answers. The idea that Prof. Thomas E. Wartenberg purports is that philosophy is not an elitist discipline and that children have the capacity of abstract thinking and thus developing deep reasoning skills via participating in dialog of philosophical issues around stories and fables.

I find new ideas and new methods to improving education very compelling. Critics will argue for and against Prof. Wartenberg’s approach, but I think it’s important to consider how similar it is to what parents do with their children after reading a story book to them: they talk at their children about the morals associated in the story. If I collected a penny for every-time my cousin has compared her daughter’s actions to a fictional but highly respected character, I’d be richer. But I think doing it in a classroom and allowing the children to express their thoughts and feelings is different than a parent relating the moral of the story to them. Also, exposing them to each other’s thoughts and feelings probably makes the experience far richer for them.

I think the point here isn’t that Prof. Wartenberg chooses to take a philosophical approach to inculcate reasoning skills in second graders – the point is how he does it. Quite simple actually – they read a book together and then they talk about it.

By now they knew the drill: deciding whether or not they agreed with each question; thinking about why or why not; explaining why or why not; and respecting what their classmates said.

There was no real point to this blog post apart from expressing wonder at a professors attempt to inspire a tiny portion of how we educate our children and prepare them for the future.

… confounds me as much as you. And so on April 30th, I’m headed to the Future of Publishing Conference headed by University of Pennsylvania, Wharton School, to discover and learn what the leading practitioners are thinking and how they are approaching the content business.

This conference is jointly put together by Knowledge@Wharton, the Wharton Interactive Media Initiative and Wharton School Publishing with the goal of “examining new technologies and strategies that impact all facets of the industry to help bring actionable answers to publishing executives.”

Not only does the conference have an impressive line-up of speakers (Demand Media, Simon & Schuster, Fast Pencil, Conde Nast, etc) but the panels are well-designed to tackle one specific issue facing the content industry. While, I’m psyched to hear Martin Nisenholtz (he founded nytimes.com in 1995!) keynote the conference, you must also take a look at all the panels here.

I’m not a fan of concurrent panels because it’s difficult to decide which ones will offer most value (based on speakers, moderator and content) But I’ve decided to attend one panel where I learn something new and another panel, where I go deeper on what I already know. So to learn something new I’m planning on attending this panel on the future of books. Ever since I got my Kindle, I’ve been very surprised by how my own reading habits have changed (for the better). I’m curious to hear how the book industry is thinking about new platforms and pricing.

The Future of Books: (Designed to discuss new book platforms, new delivery methods for content and pricing models)

Ellen Archer, President, Hyperion Books
Brendan Cahill, VP and Publisher, Open Road Media
Steve Ennen, Managing Director, Wharton Interactive Media Initiative
Jason Epstein, On Demand Books
Ellie Hirschhorn, EVP and Chief Digital Officer, Simon & Schuster On Demand Books
Steve Wilson, CEO, Fast Pencil

The next panel I’m planning on attending is on Content Discovery & Promotion. This ties in close to my current work and interests. The panel is designed to explore how partnerships can help drive revenues, traffic and bring more visibility to content.

Richard Baum, Global Editor, Reuters.com
Pete Fader, Frances and Pei-Yuan Chia, Professor; Professor of Marketing; Co-Director, Wharton Interactive Media Initiative (moderator)
Jason Jaynes, VP Marketing and Product Management, Pluck
Seval Oz Ozveren, VP Finance and Business Development, Cuil

If you are planning on attending, buy your tickets now. Drop me a line as well – maybe we can meet up there!