Author Archive

419 fraud from Alex de Carvalho, UK Holiday Inn Hotels, Kensington Forum

UK Holiday Inn Hotels, Kensington Forum">419 fraud from Alex de Carvalho, UK Holiday Inn Hotels, Kensington Forum

June 2, 2010  |  Miscellaneous  |  View Comments

It turns out some­one has been send­ing out employ­ment offers around the world promis­ing a job at the Hol­i­day Inn Kens­ing­ton Forum in the UK. The let­ters are signed “Alex de Carvalho”.

For the record, I am not the Alex de Car­valho in ques­tion. I do not work for the Hol­i­day Inn, I do not live in the UK, and I am not related to the per­son who is send­ing out these letters.

This 419 scam has been doc­u­mented at the fol­low­ing links:

http://www.fraudwatchers.org/forums/showthread.php?t=36023

http://www.419scam.org/emails/2010–02/14/01009521.29.htm

For more infor­ma­tion on what a 419 scams and advance-fee frauds, see the fol­low­ing: http://www.419eater.com/ and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advance-fee_fraud

And that’s just the way the cookie crum­bles.

UPDATE: There’s a good thread on Yahoo! Answers about this: http://uk.answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20100601231817AAml806

You may also con­tact the hotel directly:

LONDON KENSINGTON FORUM
97 CROMWELL ROAD
LONDON SW7 4DN
ENGLAND
Hotel Front Desk: +44–871-9429100
Hotel Fax: +44–20-73731448

, , , , ,

Implementing social media: brand monitoring

Implementing social media: brand monitoring

April 2, 2010  |  Social media  |  , , , ,  |  View Comments

Table of con­tents for Keys to Imple­ment­ing Social Media series

  1. Imple­ment­ing social media: the adop­tion matrix
  2. Imple­ment­ing social media: brand monitoring

tl;dr: So you’ve been tasked with “tack­ling” social media for your orga­ni­za­tion: now what? At the Eye­For­Pharma eMar­ket­ing Sum­mit 2010 in Berlin, I pre­sented “5 Keys to Imple­ment­ing Social Media,” a frame­work to help you define your organization’s social media activ­ity. This post sum­ma­rizes the first key, mon­i­tor­ing your brand online. As a dis­claimer, I am the co-founder of a brand mon­i­tor­ing ser­vice for the life sci­ences indus­try.

If mar­kets are conversations …

“Any savvy party goer knows to lis­ten before jump­ing into a con­ver­sa­tion at a cock­tail party.” -Jere­miah Owyang, Part­ner, Altime­ter Group

“There’s no tagline” to con­ver­sa­tions, accord­ing to the Clue­train Man­i­festo: “For thou­sands of years, we knew exactly what mar­kets were: con­ver­sa­tions between peo­ple who sought out oth­ers who shared the same inter­ests. Buy­ers had as much to say as sell­ers. They spoke directly to each other with­out the fil­ter of media, the arti­fice of posi­tion­ing state­ments, the arro­gance of adver­tis­ing, or the shad­ing of pub­lic relations.”

All sell­ers and brands may not be fully aware yet (see the social media adop­tion matrix) but their con­sumers sure are talk­ing about them. Whether you believe these inter­ac­tions should be called “con­ver­sa­tions” or “self-publishing,” research by Penn State Uni­ver­sity found that “20 per­cent of all tweets—or one out of every five updates—mention spe­cific brand names or prod­ucts.” As for the value of these tweets? “There’s room to glean qual­i­ta­tive analy­sis about brand per­cep­tion and affin­ity from them, at least.” -Jim Jansen, Penn State (and some “Com­pa­nies court tweet­ers and blog­gers”).

A large pro­por­tion of these con­ver­sa­tions are related to health. Accord­ing to Pew Inter­net, 61% of Amer­i­can adults look online for health infor­ma­tion (June 2009).

Fully 42% of all adults, or 60% of e-patients, say they or some­one they know has been helped by fol­low­ing med­ical advice or health infor­ma­tion found on the internet.

In Ger­many alone, “there are more than 100 health-related search queries per sec­ond,” accord­ing to Jens Mon­sees from Google, cit­ing 2010 search stats at Eye­For­Pharma in Berlin.

… are you listening?

Accord­ing to Jere­miah Owyang, “In the social media com­mu­ni­ca­tions life­cy­cle [pic­tured above], com­pa­nies often fail to lis­ten .… One of the biggest prob­lems for [online] com­mu­ni­ca­tors today, just like a real con­ver­sa­tion, is learn­ing to listen.”

For exam­ple, do you know:

  • Whether your clients and con­sumers are men­tion­ing your brands, prod­ucts, and ser­vice experiences?
  • What are physi­cians dis­cussing online, and who’s becom­ing influential?
  • How do patients feel about your brand?
  • Is the med­ical con­tent accurate?
  • Is your pro­mo­tional activ­ity effective?
  • In what con­text are your brands mentioned?

By becom­ing aware of your online men­tions through­out social media sites and plat­forms (see the con­ver­sa­tion prism), you will effec­tively and quickly gain new insights, to:

  • Under­stand your cus­tomers and your community
  • See how and where your brands are mentioned
  • Pin­point cus­tomer sat­is­fac­tion issues
  • Find out what really con­cerns physi­cians and patients
  • What and where is the false information?
  • How are com­pet­ing brands perceived?

Social media mon­i­tor­ing tools help keep your team orga­nized and on top of mar­ket trends. For exam­ple, like a canary in the coal mine, online men­tions of Avan­dia were clearly mul­ti­ply­ing pre­ced­ing the announce­ment of the drug’s recall. On a more pos­i­tive note, the buzz on Her­ceptin increased five folds fol­low­ing pub­li­ca­tion in Europe’s Lancet about pos­i­tive results clin­i­cal tri­als for Her­ceptin, a part of the chemother­apy reg­i­men for HER2 pro­tein pos­i­tive breast can­cer (The Lancet, 2002). How­ever, some physi­cians and patients had allegedly been using Her­ceptin treat­ment before chemother­apy, to reduce the size of lumps in HER-2 pos­i­tive patients, and shar­ing their expe­ri­ences online. After recent clin­i­cal tri­als were per­formed, these proved the drug did indeed improve progression-free sur­vival before start­ing the chemother­apy reg­i­men (The Lancet, Jan­u­ary 2010).

That’s all very well, but how does one keep track of online mentions?

Brand mon­i­tor­ing platforms

There’s a grow­ing cat­e­gory of Soft­ware as a Ser­vice called brand mon­i­tor­ing, with a num­ber of sys­tems that work to col­lect and ana­lyze the online buzz about your brand and the key words that mat­ter to you. Rather than con­duct­ing daily man­ual searches through blog search engines, these sys­tems are con­ve­nient when you need to per­form the fol­low­ing activities:

  1. Pull men­tions from blogs, videos, med­ical resources and forums, patient and physi­cian social networks;
  2. Track specific top­ics, drugs, dis­ease, ther­a­peu­tic areas;
  3. Graph­i­cally dis­play daily men­tions, rolling averages;
  4. Con­duct sen­ti­ment analy­sis and other types of data mining;
  5. Cre­ate auto­matic alerts for unusual or increased online men­tions activity;
  6. Fil­ter out low-value or irrel­e­vant mentions;
  7. Del­e­gate men­tions for fur­ther action by your team;
  8. Ticket men­tions to keep track of issue res­o­lu­tion and prob­lem solving;
  9. Anno­tate and archive men­tions for record keep­ing and future retrieval;
  10. Export weekly, monthly, or quar­terly inter­nal reports;
  11. Post responses on social sites like Twitter;
  12. and more.

Your social media busi­ness case and resource allocation

When con­sid­er­ing social media for your orga­ni­za­tion, there are few steps as impor­tant as under­stand­ing where you fit in the con­ver­sa­tion online. Social media mon­i­tor­ing allows you to more effec­tively man­age your rep­u­ta­tion, track your com­peti­tors, and mon­i­tor mar­ket trends. As a side ben­e­fit, what you find out in terms of the qual­ity, vol­ume, and scope of men­tions online regard­ing your key terms will help you cre­ate the busi­ness case for social media adop­tion (or not) by your orga­ni­za­tion, and deter­mine the resources you will require.

If you are inter­ested in the “5 Keys to Social Media Imple­men­ta­tion” and the “Social Media Adop­tion Matrix”, please see the full deck on Slideshare:

, , , , , , , , ,

Pre­vi­ous in series
Implementing social media: the adoption matrix

Implementing social media: the adoption matrix

March 31, 2010  |  Social media  |  , , , ,  |  View Comments

Table of con­tents for Keys to Imple­ment­ing Social Media series

  1. Imple­ment­ing social media: the adop­tion matrix
  2. Imple­ment­ing social media: brand monitoring

tl;dr: First post in a series sum­ma­riz­ing the “5 Keys to Imple­ment­ing Social Media” pre­sen­ta­tion, start­ing with “The Social Media Adop­tion Matrix“

Check­point Char­lie, Berlin, and the pharma indus­try

The recent Eye­For­Pharma eMar­ket­ing Sum­mit 2010 was held in Berlin, a fit­ting place to talk about social media for the phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal indus­try. The Mauer Museum at Check­point Char­lie exhibits the many ways civil­ians and sol­diers attempted to escape from East Berlin. By air, land and sea, peo­ple tried to cross the bor­der by every con­ceiv­able method, includ­ing light air­craft, bal­loons, ziplines, hid­den com­part­ments in cars, under­wa­ter propul­sion, and so on. Their imag­i­na­tions were lim­it­less in break­ing down that great bar­rier to com­mu­ni­ca­tion, the Berlin Wall.

This was my sec­ond visit to Berlin; I love the energy and cre­ativ­ity with which the city rein­vents itself, as it dis­tances itself from the past. Pharmaceutical firms and reg­u­la­tory agen­cies must also rein­vent their com­mu­ni­ca­tions prac­tices as quicker and eas­ier to use tools allow physi­cians and patients to pub­lish to vast audi­ences online.

The Social Media Adop­tion Matrix

At the Eye­For­Pharma con­fer­ence, I pre­sented “5 Keys to Imple­ment­ing Social Media.” If you’ve been tasked with look­ing into social media for your com­pany, this is a sug­gested frame­work to help you define the busi­ness case and strat­egy, deter­mine resource require­ments and allo­ca­tion, and set inter­nal con­trols and per­for­mance metrics.

http://img.skitch.com/20100330-p859kyxh3ugbcjmb69qtju4iec.jpg

Let’s start with the adop­tion matrix. In short, it’s a rep­re­sen­ta­tion on how active your com­pany and your cus­tomers are in con­ver­sa­tions online. The hor­i­zon­tal axis plots how engaged your cus­tomers are about your com­pany and related prod­ucts and ser­vices; the ver­ti­cal axis plots how aware your com­pany is of the social media activ­ity sur­round­ing your brand, prod­ucts, ser­vices, com­peti­tors, and indus­try. In other words, are peo­ple talk­ing, and where do you fit in the conversation?

First quad­rant: The Mar­ket­ing Neanderthal

Nean­derthals and mod­ern humans were con­tem­po­ra­ne­ous species, co-existing with Cro-Magnon in Europe for about 10,000 years. Despite their larger phys­i­cal size and brains, Nean­derthals are believed to have expired due to behav­ioral and cul­tural traits not shared by their more suc­cess­ful rivals.

Are your company’s mar­ket­ing efforts floun­der­ing while your com­peti­tors achieve mile­stones online? Are you aware of your customer’s online con­ver­sa­tions about you, if they exist? If your com­mu­nity is not active, do you under­stand the trade offs you’re making?

Most hos­pi­tals (some excep­tions here: Hos­pi­tal Social Net­work List) and edu­ca­tional insti­tu­tions fit in this quad­rant, with nei­ther the inter­est nor resources to devote to research­ing how to develop and con­nect with their com­mu­nity online. How­ever, they are mean­ing­ful spaces which are poten­tially rich with conversations.

Sec­ond quad­rant: The Wise Monkeys

So you sus­pect your cus­tomers are engaged in con­ver­sa­tions about your brand, prod­ucts, ser­vices, or cus­tomer ser­vice online, but you’d rather turn a blind eye? Maybe only Apple can get away with that, and only while their prod­ucts rock. At least they no longer sue leak­ers. But Inter­net bas­tions Google and Ama­zon paid their dues recently. Motrin too.

What about Nestlé, who was absent from the con­ver­sa­tion, and then showed snark? Here’s a sum­mary, from ime­di­a­con­nec­tion:

Now, by all accounts it was Green­peace that “started it” – with the cre­ation of a snarky viral video (more on that in a moment).  Then, enter Nes­tle legal claim­ing trade­mark infringe­ment and ask­ing that the video be taken down.  This resulted in a fairly coor­di­nated protest (some have called it attack) on Nestle’s Fan Page.   Then, Nes­tle cer­tainly didn’t do itself any favors – with a few ham fisted responses.  Help­ful Safety Tip to every cor­po­rate PR / Social Media Man­ager: delet­ing com­ments, or whip­ping out the “copyright/intellectual prop­erty” jus­ti­fi­ca­tions are the social media equiv­a­lent of “let them eat cake”.

But, here’s the inter­est­ing part, whether you believe them or not, Nes­tle did respond to the Green­peace report by “assur­ing” every­one that they will not use Palm Oil pro­duced by the ven­dor that Green­peace is asserting.  Why they aren’t doing this more vocif­er­ously on their Face­book Fan Page is some­thing of a mys­tery.  Green­peace then responded that their con­ces­sions “don’t go nearly far enough”.

Their con­clu­sion is stun­ning:

But I won­der if, after a few more of these types of storms, we won’t see cor­po­rate brands tighten up and kill off some of the social media channels.   One thing I do know (and I’m not say­ing this about the Nes­tle case in par­tic­u­lar) is that as prac­ti­tion­ers we are going to have to start to call bull­shit on the mob as often as we do the mobbed.  Just because they’re out­side some company’s walls with pitch­forks doesn’t mean they’re right.  Or does it?

You guessed it: cor­po­rate Wise Mon­keys see no evil, hear no evil, and speak no evil. Check off quad­rant two of the social media adop­tion matrix.

Third quad­rant: The Pris­oner; The Thinker

Ok, so you know there’s some­thing going on, and that you might tap into the poten­tial of find­ing or devel­op­ing or con­nect­ing with your com­mu­nity online. Unfor­tu­nately, you’re held in check, a Pris­oner to your company’s restric­tive poli­cies, per­haps set in place by an overzeal­ous legal department.

For instance, how many insti­tu­tions block every­one from Face­book, like the high school I grad­u­ated from (many eons ago)? Not even the school’s admin­is­tra­tion is allowed access the plat­form that their stu­dents are so obvi­ously using dur­ing the school­day on their iPhones. Or what about Lehman Toy­ota, where I had my car ser­viced last week­end? I had many hours to spare while I waited, so I brought my lap­top. The dealer had three locked wi-fi sys­tems and informed me and another cus­tomer that access was indeed restricted. Gra­ciously, a man­ager offered to hook us into landlines.

To their credit, AstraZeneca is try­ing out dif­fer­ent social media plat­forms. The Nex­ium Face­book page and their AZHelps Twit­ter account are still a far cry from com­mu­nity man­age­ment. Of course, part of the blame sits with the FDA (see this), which has not set out social media poli­cies for the phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal industry.

“Thank you for all the recent com­ments! We are in the process of review­ing and post­ing them. We’ll have some new dis­cus­sion top­ics shortly and in the com­ing weeks.” -Nex­ium on Facebook

The Thinker, on the other hand, suf­fers from paral­y­sis by analy­sis, read­ing a lot about social media and attend­ing con­fer­ences, yet not tak­ing actionnable steps. 5 Keys to Social Media out­lines a clear roadmap for imple­men­ta­tion. Which com­pa­nies are over-rationalizing social media? Here’s an inter­est­ing post com­par­ing Ford (which “gets it”) with Chrysler. There’s a lot of room for improve­ment, there.

Fourth quad­rant: The Pioneer

Many brands across many indus­tries are actively engag­ing their com­mu­nity online. Kudos for tak­ing the lead and show­ing the way for oth­ers to fol­low, and case stud­ies abound high­light­ing emer­gent best prac­tices. Mash­able and Read­WriteWeb are good places to start for reg­u­lar cov­er­age of social media suc­cesses and fail­ures by big brands and small.

Where does your orga­ni­za­tion fit on the adop­tion matrix? And where do you fit?

A warm word of thanks to Brett Petersel for retweet­ing (@brett) this pre­sen­ta­tion many times, dri­ving it to thou­sands of views in under a week. The full deck is on Slideshare:

, , , , , , , , ,

Next in series

SXSW Live blogging: Who Needs Venture Capital?">SXSW Live blogging: Who Needs Venture Capital?

March 15, 2010  |  Startup  |  View Comments
This is a live post from a SXSW panel on Ven­ture Cap­i­tal, March 15th, 2010

Only a frac­tion of busi­ness financ­ing comes from Sand Hill Road. Yet entre­pre­neurs still obsess over tra­di­tional big meeting/big money Sil­i­con Val­ley ven­ture cap­i­tal. This heated panel debates what types of com­pa­nies actu­ally ben­e­fit from VC and reviews con­crete exam­ples of alter­na­tives to tra­di­tional ven­ture capital.



Pre­sen­ters
53203_thumb Mitch Lasky
Bench­mark Cap­i­tal
53204_thumb Mike Trotzke
Sprout­Box
53205_thumb Jolie O’Dell
Read­WriteWeb
53206_thumb Dave Mcclure
500 Hats

Chris Wanstrath, founder of GitHub

Ses­sion:

To get funded at the Pow­er­point stage, you prob­a­bly need to have a track record with VCs. Oth­er­wise you’ll need a func­tion­ing pro­to­type or more, like pay­ing customers.

There are com­pa­nies that shouldn’t be rais­ing ven­ture cap­i­tal, and there are many that aren’t going to get funded because demand far out­strips sup­ply. When you build a busi­ness, ven­ture cap­i­tal should be a sec­ond order con­sid­er­a­tion. Build a solid busi­ness first and think about ven­ture cap­i­tal sec­ond … your busi­ness should not be about rais­ing the money. On the other hand,there are com­pa­nies that do require ven­ture fund­ing, because they do need to get the servers and band­width and employ­ees to be able to scale.

“Don’t write busi­ness plans. It’s a f*ing waste of time” –Mcclure. For Dave, the trust fil­ter is the most impor­tant, and he only con­sid­ers star­tups who have ref­er­ences in common.

Wanstrath did not take Ven­ture Cap­i­tal for Github. It did take a lot of money to set the com­pany up, but they found other ways, includ­ing friends and fam­ily. They made a lot of busi­ness deals for servers, maxed out credit cards and bor­rowed money and gen­er­ally did what­ever it took. They did not feel a $10 mil­lion val­u­a­tion was fair when they were prof­itable mak­ing $1 mil­lion in rev­enues. They cer­tainly did not want to take on a VC that was going to start set­ting their direction.

Lasky sees a lot of great com­pa­nies that are not good ven­ture invest­ments, because the return pro­file does not fit the time or ratios that VCs are look­ing for. For exam­ple, a $500 mil­lion fund will invest in 30 to 40 com­pa­nies and are look­ing at 3X return on cap­i­tal in 10 years. So they’re look­ing for $250 mil­lion exit for all com­pa­nies, or $750 mil­lion with a 2/3 fail­ure rate. Smaller VCs with funds under $100 mil­lion can tol­er­ate smaller exits. An exam­ple would be Mint, which is a com­pany that did need ven­ture backing.

Huge exits are not the median sce­nario by any means and the ven­ture cap­i­tal game has a huge cor­rupt­ing effect on star­tups. A bet­ter approach is to build a cool busi­ness and then things will hap­pen. For most busi­nesses, the core prod­uct can be built by two peo­ple in eight to ten months. This means a $50k to $100k invest­ment, which is not VC; it’s per­sonal sav­ings and friends and fam­ily. The cru­cial seed phase is $250k to $1 mil­lion, where it’s really hard to boot­strap to that size. The best thing to do is to look at VCs with funds under $100M.

The aver­age Tech­stars deal is invest­ing $15k to $30k for about a 7% to 10% stake on a $300k val­u­a­tion — but they bring huge value in their men­tor­ship model. How­ever, this is good for stu­dents out of col­lege, because they have no savings.

The typ­i­cal sce­nario is tak­ing a 20% to 40% dilu­tion when fund­ing through VCs, and prob­a­bly more.

There are plenty of lifestyle busi­nesses online where the founders can make $1 mil­lion to $2 mil­lion per year and live hap­pily ever after with­out hav­ing a big exit plan.

When pitch­ing ven­ture cap­i­tal, you have to sift through the good, the bad, and the crim­i­nally neg­li­gent. Weird term sheets, dis­hon­esty, etc., are the pit­falls to watch out for. Ven­ture cap­i­tal­ists fund the expan­sion of the busi­ness in antic­i­pa­tion of upcom­ing rev­enues. The idea is not to fig­ure out new ways of spend­ing the busi­ness; the fun­da­men­tal con­cept is to spend the money in ways that grow the busi­ness. VCs are will­ing to fail, whereas banks are not.

What are the alter­na­tives to VC fund­ing? What do you do if your friends and fam­ily are broke?

The impor­tant thing about alter­na­tives is that there is no indus­try based around boot­strap­ping, like there is around ven­ture cap­i­tal. First, fig­ure out what you need and then start cut­ting. Do you need PR? Do you need an office? What can you do away with? After that, fig­ure out where you can get the money from. Tak­ing money from par­ents or going into debt is a big deal in case of failure.

A real­is­tic alter­na­tive to boot­strap­ping is rais­ing $100k to $2 mil­lion for up to 20% of the com­pany, with an exit at $10 million.

Q&A:

Euro­pean entre­pre­neurs a decade ago were pissed off about how dif­fi­cult it was to raise money, because of hugh risk aver­sion. The Amer­i­can model of risk is migrat­ing over and things seem to be get­ting bet­ter for Euro­pean startups.

Cus­tomer financ­ing with upfront dis­counts, cus­tomer receiv­able financ­ing or fac­tor­ing, asset-backed leas­ing are some other alter­na­tive strate­gies to help man­age the cash flow and off­set the need for fundraising.

Wanstrath would not boot­strap a con­sumer web com­pany or a con­sumer app.

Wanstrath advises open­ing up as many dif­fer­ent rev­enue streams as pos­si­ble. Offer peo­ple many dif­fer­ent plans and ways to pay you for your services.

For Lasky, the dif­fer­ence in being there six months early meant a $400 mil­lion advan­tage in val­u­a­tion over the sec­ond mover in his market.

The ven­ture cap­i­tal indus­try has to con­tract. There are too many firms with very mediocre results. Part of the rea­son is there are more mature com­pa­nies doing deals earlier.

If you have 20% equity in your startup and are look­ing for a $10 mil­lion pay­out, then your sweet spot for exit must be around $50 to $75 million.

, , , , , , , ,

SXSW Live blogging: ER 2.0">SXSW Live blogging: ER 2.0

March 14, 2010  |  Social media  |  View Comments

This is a live post from a SXSW round­table on ER 2.0, March 14th, 2010
Hos­pi­tals and health care providers are slowly but surely using new media and social net­work­ing soft­ware for some of their pri­mary objectives–treatment, research, edu­ca­tion and out­reach, and patient-provider com­mu­ni­ca­tion. This pre­sen­ta­tion will fea­ture best prac­tices from case stud­ies and pre­scribe future uses of new media in pub­lic health.

Pre­sen­ters
50882_thumb Ed Ben­nett
Uni­ver­sity of Mary­land Med­ical Cen­ter
50883_thumb Aimee Roundtree
Uni­ver­sity of Houston-Downtown


Also pan­elling is Jen McCabe of Con­ta­gion Health.

How does this tech­nol­ogy com­pli­cate HIPAA compliance?

There’s a say­ing: “Don’t say no, just say HIPAA.” There’s a lot of fear and trep­i­da­tion around what might hap­pen, but best prac­tices are emerg­ing from those providers who are exper­i­ment­ing first. For exam­ple, some have writ­ten com­ment­ing poli­cies that pro­tect them, and so on.

The involve­ment in physi­cians in the social space is dis­ap­point­ing. They have a dis­in­cli­na­tion toward trans­parency because of the tra­di­tional patient — physi­cian rela­tion­ship that has been ingrained since med­ical school.

Why are hos­pi­tals so slow to adopt social media?

Cross­ing into the space where patients have direct online inter­ac­tion with their physi­cian is still a long way away, because of secu­rity issues. How­ever, when deal­ing with hos­pi­tals, it is a mat­ter of show­ing them how much good is pos­si­ble by using social tech­nolo­gies. We don’t remu­ner­ate doc­tors for inter­act­ing with patients in this way. Also, we are legally bound by reg­u­la­tory bod­ies, and these social chan­nels must com­ply with reg­u­la­tions as well. Twit­ter feeds are admis­si­ble in court.

One of the heav­i­est “things” to move is human resources. For exam­ple, the ques­tion of who is the per­son or peo­ple who are going to address “the tidal wave” of com­ing complaints.

The real-world expe­ri­ence is that 99% of com­ments are pos­i­tive or neu­tral, and there are very few com­plaints: “the unex­pected out­comes of social media for hos­pi­tals will be pos­i­tive, because we’ve antic­i­pated all the neg­a­tives” — Lee Aase, Mayo Clinic. Mon­i­tor­ing is the first step to under­stand how much is neg­a­tive, how much is pos­i­tive, where are the reported vari­ances, and who is doing the talk­ing. One of the most effi­cient means of com­mu­ni­cat­ing is to attach a face to an insti­tu­tion, and to add 10% to 20% per­sonal tweet­ing into these accounts. Exam­ples are Scott Monty of Ford and Frank Elia­son of Com­cast. By the way, it’s great to get neg­a­tive feed­back, because that high­lights what needs to be changed. Lia­bil­ity poi­sons the envi­ron­ment, but fewer law­suits arise when peo­ple treat peo­ple like peo­ple, rather than with­hold­ing infor­ma­tion.

What are victim’s rights online?

The place to start for patient advo­cates is with sys­temic advo­cacy for patient rights in gen­eral, so peo­ple start to trust you over time on a case by case basis.

What are the agents of change in hos­pi­tals and who should we work with?

Under­stand who holds the bud­gets and who is involved with patient care. Under­stand their com­mu­nity engage­ment strate­gies in the real world and show them par­al­lels online. How­ever, under­stand also that it is too early to prove that social media changes behav­ior, so it’s chal­leng­ing to legit­imize these tools.

What about com­pat­i­bil­ity with hos­pi­tal systems?

Hos­pi­tals use lots of sys­tems that don’t talk to each other. Some hos­pi­tals are block­ing Face­book access, for instance, whereas patients are using Face­book to talk about the hos­pi­tal. The imple­men­ta­tion of EMR is address­ing this to an extent and dri­ving a change in behav­ior. Ven­dors need to adopt open source stan­dards and look at inno­va­tions like microsyn­tax and HL7 from MIT.

What about com­mu­ni­cat­ing with patients through mobile devices, par­tic­u­larly for improv­ing the cus­tomer ser­vice expe­ri­ence? By the way, hos­pi­tals pro­vide the most opaque and worst cus­tomer ser­vice experiences.

Some hos­pi­tals and sur­geons are using Twit­ter to pro­vide updates dur­ing an oper­a­tion, after waivers are signed. This way patients’ fam­i­lies can be kept up to date dur­ing the hours of wait­ing. It’s a small but impor­tant step in cus­tomer satisfaction.

In Africa and the Philip­pines, social media adop­tion is increas­ing because social tools are the most inex­pen­sive to use for com­mu­ni­ca­tions, com­pared to legacy or tra­di­tional systems.

The devel­op­ing world is dri­ving inno­va­tion out of need. Maybe the answer in devel­oped nations is to iden­tify orga­ni­za­tions like freelancer’s union, iro­bot, and oth­ers, that have an incen­tive to dis­rupt the health­care sys­tem. Just build really awe­some stuff and you will start to see behav­ior change and integration.

We already have  a well devel­oped social media strat­egy, but our chal­lenge now is to get the physi­cians engaged. Is this even possible?

Hire for that. Find physi­cians that are already blog­ging. Find a leader that sets the exam­ple. Find some­one that oth­ers will follow.

What about cri­sis communications?

If as an insti­tu­tion you start to com­mu­ni­cate and to tweet, then you start to become the source of truth (rather than the media or some­one else). Go through @swhealthcare’s Twit­ter account to under­stand how they responded to crisis.

One of the best ways to drive change is to demand it as the health­care con­sumers we all are.

What tools are miss­ing? What are the new trends?

One big trend is cura­tion of health infor­ma­tion, which is grow­ing at an astro­nom­i­cal rate. Demand will never match sup­ply, so cura­tion is absolutely key.

, , , , , , , ,

SXSW Live blogging: Story.Next — Narrating the Crowd">SXSW Live blogging: Story.Next — Narrating the Crowd

March 14, 2010  |  Social media  |  ,  |  View Comments

This is a live post from a SXSW panel about Sto­ryCorps, March 14th , 2010

Sto­ryCorps was built on the prin­ci­ple that ordi­nary peo­ple have extra­or­di­nary sto­ries to share — you just need to ask. Social net­work­ing and hand-held tech­nol­ogy now enables com­mu­ni­ties to cap­ture and dis­trib­ute these sto­ries with unprece­dented scale and qual­ity. Pan­elists will dis­cuss the art of blend­ing sto­ry­telling with social networking.

Pre­sen­ters
51494_thumb Suneel Gupta
Kahani Movement
51495_thumb Dr San­jay Gupta
Kahani Movement


“Story”: a nar­ra­tion of the events in the life of a per­son or the exis­tence of a thing.

Saneel and San­jay are broth­ers. The panel starts off with a clip show­ing an fam­ily in India and the Kahani Move­ment: “Some sto­ries are never told … because no one asks.”

Sto­ries have a begin­ning, a mid­dle, and an end. The ingre­di­ents of a story include a cen­tral char­ac­ter or a hero and this project itself has a hero. StoryCorp’s hero is Louis “Studs” Terkel, the “pre­mier chron­i­cler of Amer­i­can life,” accord­ing to John Stew­art. Ordi­nary peo­ple have extra­or­di­nary sto­ries to tell. More impor­tantly, if you don’t cap­ture these sto­ries, there is a time limit and the sto­ries dis­ap­pear. The Gup­tas are tak­ing this mis­sion to the web. The word Kahani means story in Indian. Every com­mu­nity has sto­ries worth pre­serv­ing.

If tech­nol­ogy is a cat­alytic, what would Studs do?

  1. Chron­i­cle the story by shift­ing the con­ver­sa­tion from the stu­dio to the liv­ing room
  2. Expand from audio con­ver­sa­tions to film, pho­tos, and writings
  3. Every­one is a Sto­ry­teller, so they are cre­at­ing a net­work of sto­ry­tellers who are col­lab­o­rat­ing, con­nect­ing, and shar­ing each oth­ers’ sto­ries — to tell one com­mon story
  4. We’ve made it approach­able — give clips a sense of opti­mism and hope. Steven Spiel­berg is advis­ing Kahani Move­ment with the expe­ri­ence he gar­nered from his work with the Shoah project, where he cap­tured many sto­ries before they expired.
  5. We’ve made it focused. The focus is Indian Immi­gra­tion to the United States from the 1960’s to the 1970’s. Cre­at­ing a com­mu­nity around a cen­tral topic

So, where is this project headed?

As hap­pens with any pop­u­la­tion of peo­ple, there’s a ten­dency to paint that peo­ple with one broad brush stroke. A project like this adds het­ero­gene­ity to a pop­u­la­tion. Things that sur­prise are already start­ing to emerge. For exam­ple, because the immi­grants were not flee­ing per­se­cu­tion or pros­e­cu­tion, there was no gal­va­niz­ing force to tie the peo­ple together. So what helped cre­ated the community?

Tech­nol­ogy allows for deeper engage­ment for each member.

Remix. Every­thing is licensed under a Cre­ative Com­mons license. A lot of deriv­a­tive works are being posted and shared on the site.

Studs passed away in 2008, so the Gup­tas have been doing a lot of home­work to under­stand what he was think­ing and what was dri­ving him. “Peo­ple are ready to say ‘Yes, we are part of a world’.” This could lead to broad­en­ing out Kahani, to cre­ate more Kahani’s, by archiv­ing and spin­ning out other ini­tia­tives. There could be a long tail of Kahani Move­ments. Our call to action to you today is start, and start soon, because time is lim­ited.

Questions:

What about con­tro­ver­sial or sen­si­tive sto­ries, like about abortion?

The Kahani Move­ment or Sto­ryCorps are great oppor­tu­ni­ties to share inti­mate and dif­fi­cult con­ver­sa­tions by record­ing con­ver­sa­tions within fam­i­lies, as fam­ily mem­bers inter­view each other.

What incen­tives are there for peo­ple to be involved in online com­mu­ni­ties if they don’t live online?

What Kahani is try­ing to achieve is online but much of it hap­pens offline, around fam­ily liv­ing room tables. Some of the gam­ing pan­els at SXSW are inter­est­ing, because some of the moti­va­tional aspects around gam­ing could be applied.

Are the guide­lines for sto­ry­telling, par­tic­u­larly around the ques­tions to ask and also about how to use tech­nol­ogy to accu­mu­late stories?

Skype has been a good tool. One of the most pow­er­ful tools is to pull out a pic­ture and ask: “tell me about this photo.“

How does the social net­work work?

It starts with the pro­file and with the visual and tex­tual ele­ments you are shar­ing with oth­ers. That’s when the con­nec­tions start to hap­pen between peo­ple. Col­lab­o­ra­tion ensues from con­nec­tions, which are based on shared interests.

Is there a struc­ture or best prac­tices about how to cap­ture an entire lifes­pan? What about tech­ni­cal best prac­tices? For exam­ple, my par­ents are not com­fort­able in front of a cam­era, so how do I cap­ture their stories?

The top pri­or­ity is the story, not the tech­nol­ogy. As far as best prac­tices, it traces back to you and your own com­fort. Ulti­mately, we are com­prised of moments of life, so let’s go back and explore thor­oughly the moments that mattered.

Note to self: An impor­tant aspect is the cre­ation of social cap­i­tal by build­ing cred­i­bil­ity through mutual ver­i­fi­ca­tion of stories.

Creating a marketing ecosystem for social media

January 28, 2010  |  Social media  |  View Comments

The fol­low­ing is para­phrased from a pre­sen­ta­tion made by Alli­son Cerra, Chief Mar­ket­ing Offi­cer, Amer­i­cas Region — Alcatel-Lucent, at the Social Net­work­ing Con­fer­ence 2010 in Miami, FL.

Con­sider the fol­low­ing iden­ti­fied mar­ket­ing chal­lenges in the cur­rent online social media ecosystem:

  1. Ser­vice providers are con­strained: Today, just 20 house­holds con­sume more broad­band than the entire band­width used in 1995
  2. Devel­oper com­mu­nity aren’t mak­ing money: They need to launch and main­tain ser­vices that end-users want for free
  3. End-users are fru­gal: How to get users to pay for things when they are accus­tomed to hav­ing things for free?
  4. Mar­keters are strapped: Very few in the mar­ket­ing space have fig­ured out how to mon­e­tize things

The com­mon thread above is that cur­rent busi­ness mod­els aren’t sta­ble in today’s social media ecosystem.

How­ever, research indi­cates that con­di­tions can be cre­ated to mar­ket ser­vices bet­ter online. Based on a sur­vey and focus group ses­sions with over 1,000 social net­work­ers, three key points stand out:

  • Social net­work­ers are not that social

A recur­ring theme in the study was: “I have a lot of rela­tion­ships I try to main­tain, but I don’t have time to develop deep sub­stan­tive relationships.”

Also, social net­work­ing is all about the users: their social net­work­ing expe­ri­ence “val­i­dates” them. For exam­ple, being tagged in a photo is an ego­cen­tric plea­sure: to the user, it means “I am important”.

In con­trast, MMORPG play­ers are not intro­verts at all, quite the oppo­site. These peo­ple love the net­work, not the game. It’s about shar­ing a pas­sion so inti­mately with a small group of peo­ple, that the rela­tion­ship becomes more impor­tant than the game.

  • Social net­work­ers can be con­vinced to pay

Peo­ple online are used to hav­ing things for free. But what if you know your friend’s sta­tus at any time, regard­less of the device you’re using? What if you know where your friends are at any time? How would this change the social net­work­ing experience?

Let’s think about an “advanced friend finder” appli­ca­tion: I land in Miami and I can know where you are and what places you rec­om­mend and whether you are free to meet or not, based on your loca­tion data, your pres­ence, your his­tory of geolo­ca­tion, and your shared cal­en­dar. If this type of ecosys­tem of ser­vices is put together, would you pay for this type of  information?

Another exam­ple is, what if you meet some­one at a con­fer­ence and two weeks later they call you and you don’t remem­ber them well any­more? But how about if when they call you, their LinkedIn pro­file pops up auto­mat­i­cally? Would you pay for this type of infor­ma­tion, if ser­vices were inte­grated in this way?

Research show that social net­work­ers are will­ing to pay for these types of value-added ser­vices. (Also, they are not as averse to adver­tis­ing as we might like to think.)

  • Pri­vacy is a con­cern … or is it?

If I’m going to give you my pres­ence and loca­tion, isn’t that too much info? In focus groups, peo­ple are not com­fort­able with shar­ing infor­ma­tion. How­ever, in prac­tice, peo­ple do share this infor­ma­tion when the fol­low­ing three con­di­tions are met:

  1. You allow  users to opt-in (rather than opt-out) — the user must remain in control
  2. Social net­work­ers are more con­cerned about when infor­ma­tion about them is released, than who has access to it
  3. Social net­work­ers over­whelm­ingly trust ser­vice providers more than social app devel­op­ers with their sen­si­tive information

Con­clu­sion:

The above sug­gests that when pri­vacy con­cerns are addressed and social appli­ca­tions are com­bined with ser­vice providers, new con­di­tions can be cre­ated to develop an ecosys­tem that is more con­ducive to mar­ket­ing and mon­e­tiz­ing online services.

, , , , , ,

Soaring

January 1, 2010  |  Travel  |  , , , , ,  |  View Comments

cor­co­v­ado
Orig­i­nally uploaded by alexde­car­valho

One of the advan­tages of trav­el­ing on a major hol­i­day is that no one else does, and so my flight to Rio was empty as my cal­en­dar turned its page to 2010 at 30,000 feet.

Cor­co­v­ado (the Christ the Redeemer statue) is an inspi­ra­tion to many for reli­gious rea­sons. Stand­ing high above the city with arms out­stretched, it evokes feel­ings of pro­tec­tion, benev­o­lence, com­pas­sion, char­ity, and friendship.

Have you seen videos of wing­suit fly­ers? What if Cor­co­v­ado was also remind­ing us to soar in our daily lives?

Chris Bro­gan just blogged his 3 key­words for 2010. I’ll draw inspi­ra­tion this year from Cor­co­v­ado as a visual metaphor for soaring.

“Refuse to be aver­age. Let your heart soar as high as it will.” –A.W. Tozer

Wish­ing you good for­tune in the new year.

CNJ595: Social Media — Communication, Community, and Literacy">CNJ595: Social Media — Communication, Community, and Literacy

November 16, 2009  |  Social media  |  , , , , , , , , , ,  |  View Comments

Uni­ver­sity of Miami — School of Com­mu­ni­ca­tion
CNJ595: Web 2.0: Social Media: Com­mu­ni­ca­tion, Com­mu­nity, and Lit­er­acy
Spring Semes­ter 2010

SYLLABUS

COURSE DESCRIPTION AND PURPOSE:

In a few short years, social media has pro­foundly changed the online com­mu­ni­ca­tion land­scape. With the advent of new tools and plat­forms, more and more peo­ple are pub­lish­ing and par­tic­i­pat­ing in con­ver­sa­tions online. Mass adop­tion of social com­put­ing tech­nolo­gies has led to new types of medi­ated inter­ac­tion as peo­ple main­tain more rela­tion­ships than any time prior.

As for­mer mem­bers of the audi­ence become the cre­ators of con­tent, cor­po­ra­tions and media orga­ni­za­tions lose con­trol of their mar­ket­ing mes­sage and indi­vid­u­als face new chal­lenges in terms of pri­vacy, iden­tity, and the main­te­nance of vir­tual relationships.

After an overview of how we got here, this course explores these oppor­tu­ni­ties and chal­lenges across a num­ber of dis­ci­plines and technologies.

This course is grounded in prac­tice, and you will be required to par­tic­i­pate in social net­works, forums, blogs, wikis, micro-blogs, and more. Class dis­cus­sions, pre­sen­ta­tions by stu­dents, read­ings, and exam­ples of emerg­ing tech­nolo­gies and media will bring us greater under­stand­ing of the issues, evo­lu­tion, and prac­tice of social media. We will also learn from case stud­ies, invited speak­ers, and our own learn­ing jour­nals, new effec­tive strate­gies and appli­ca­tions of these platforms.

The class is highly par­tic­i­pa­tory both offline and online. Between the weekly sched­uled class meet­ings, this course’s dis­cus­sion con­tin­ues in a vari­ety of online and vir­tual envi­ron­ments. Those who com­plete this course will know how to use social media pro­duc­tively, and have a frame­work for under­stand­ing and eval­u­at­ing new tools and platforms.

ASSIGNMENTS/COURSEWORK:

We will be using a shared wiki, indi­vid­ual blogs, a book­mark­ing ser­vice, and indi­vid­ual twit­ter accounts as the web plat­forms for this course.

The wiki func­tions as the cen­tral space for col­lab­o­ra­tion, where assign­ments and read­ings will be posted and dis­cus­sions will be held. The wiki will also have the required read­ing list, which may change dur­ing the course accord­ing to our progress.

The online require­ments serve both to famil­iar­ize you with new web com­mu­ni­ca­tion tech­nolo­gies and to con­tinue the dis­cus­sion beyond the con­fines of the campus.

  • Wiki – 5% of final grade. The first require­ment is to use the wiki as directed in the class assign­ments or to add to the dis­cus­sion or com­mon pages.
  • Blog — 25% of final grade. The sec­ond is to pub­lish a min­i­mum of two blog posts each week on top­ics rel­e­vant to the class dis­cus­sion, as described in the syl­labus and con­text of the read­ings. Each blog post should link to rel­e­vant resources on the web. The blog will be eval­u­ated on the qual­ity of engage­ment with themes of the class, the clar­ity of expres­sion, and the cul­ti­va­tion of com­mu­nity through reg­u­lar posts and com­ments. Each blog post must include the tag “S10CNJ595”.
  • Microblog – 10% of final grade. The third will involve main­tain­ing a Twit­ter account active with at min­i­mum one post­ing every 24hrs. Twit­ter is a free micro-blogging ser­vice and com­mu­nity where a post is 140 char­ac­ters or less. Twit­ter posts will be eval­u­ated on the cul­ti­va­tion of com­mu­nity through friend­ing, retweets (and being retweeted), and gen­eral engage­ment through @replies.
  • Social Book­mark­ing – 5% of final grade. The fourth is to book­mark web­sites that are of inter­est to the course, using the free ser­vice deli­cious ( http://del.icio.us/ or http://delicious.com ). Stu­dents will be expected to com­plete 40 book­marks rel­e­vant to class top­ics through­out the semes­ter, at least 20 of which should be done by mid-term. Each book­mark must also include the tag “S10CNJ595”.
  • Top­i­cal Pre­sen­ta­tion and Dis­cus­sion – 25% of final grade. You will be expected to deliver a pre­sen­ta­tion dur­ing the course.You may choose to research and present an exist­ing rela­tional tech­nol­ogy (a social net­work or a social media tool), cov­er­ing the fol­low­ing aspects: what is the his­tory of the tech­nol­ogy or plat­form? What are the rela­tional aspects and func­tion­al­i­ties? How is iden­tity devel­oped? What types of activ­i­ties cre­ated dig­i­tal traces? How are rela­tion­ships cre­ated and dis­played? How are com­mu­ni­ties formed and man­aged? How does the social dis­cov­ery of infor­ma­tion, news, and events occur? How does the plat­form or tech­nol­ogy inte­grate with exter­nal web services?

    Alter­na­tively, you may choose to inter­view a rec­og­nized thought-leader or entre­pre­neur in social media, includ­ing: how did they get started with social media? What is their field of exper­tise or strength in social media? What were the mile­stones in their own online devel­op­ment? What do they con­sider to be his­tor­i­cal mile­stones in social media (case stud­ies, new tech­nolo­gies, etc.)? What chal­lenges have they faced and what bat­tles have they fought along the way (anec­dotes are impor­tant)? What is the future of social media?Presentations should be 20 min­utes in length with accom­pa­ny­ing visuals.

Par­tic­i­pa­tion — 20% of final grade. Class par­tic­i­pa­tion is required. Stu­dents are expected to do all the required read­ings for the course, to attend classes reg­u­larly, to have com­pleted the read­ing in advance of classes, and to par­tic­i­pate actively in class dis­cus­sion. Stu­dents will facil­i­tate dis­cus­sion, together with one other stu­dent, on selected syl­labus read­ings. Each read­ing will be pre­sented by this team of two stu­dents, who will coor­di­nate among them­selves and come to class pre­pared to sum­ma­rize the mate­r­ial, develop addi­tional themes for fur­ther dis­cus­sion and facil­i­tate broad dis­cus­sion, work­ing from ques­tions sub­mit­ted by stu­dents. Stu­dents will be graded on the clar­ity of pre­sen­ta­tion and the level of under­stand­ing of the read­ings under discussion.

Final Exam — 10% of final grade. The final exam will eval­u­ate your famil­iar­ity with social media con­cepts, case stud­ies, and vocabulary.

COURSE TOPICS OUTLINE

Ses­sion 1 Jan­u­ary 20, 2010 — Meet the social web

Class intro­duc­tions: who are we and what are our inter­ests; what do we expect and want out of this class?

Instruc­tor and stu­dents intro­duce them­selves, instruc­tor explains objec­tives, assign­ments and expectations.

Course intro­duc­tion: what has changed online, how and why we got here:

* Overview of social media and Web 2.0

*  Dif­fer­ences between tra­di­tional media and social media

*  Intro­duc­tion to wikis, includ­ing PBwiki and MediaWiki

Ses­sion 2 Jan­u­ary 27, 2010 — Blog­ging con­cepts, ethics, terms, tools, and techniques

*  Blog­ging cul­ture: authen­tic­ity, trans­parency, author­ity, influ­ence, ethics, and credibility

*  Writ­ing for the web: how do peo­ple read and browse online?

*  News­pa­pers text vs. online text: sim­i­lar­i­ties and contrasts

*  Cor­po­rate blogging

*  Host­ing your own blog vs. using hosted blog platforms

*  Cre­ation of a web site using Word­Press con­tent man­age­ment system

*  Basics of HTML and CSS to get you out of a jam

*  Track­backs, links, tags, side­bars, blogrolls, wid­gets, and feeds

*  Prin­ci­pal search engines for blogs

Ses­sion 3 Feb­ru­ary 3, 2010 — RSS feeds and fee­dread­ers: tech­niques in dis­tri­b­u­tion, pro­duc­tiv­ity, and monitoring.

All you wanted to know about RSS but were afraid to ask:

*  Feed read­ers: man­age your infor­ma­tion over­load and save time.

*  Google Reader and Feedly

*  Google Shared Items

*  Pub­lish­ing and dis­trib­ut­ing your media online; syn­di­cat­ing your media and con­tent to your com­mu­ni­ties through RSS

*  Mon­i­tor­ing your rep­u­ta­tion, your brands and your keywords

*  Set­ting up feeds and alerts for the infor­ma­tion that mat­ters to you

*  Feed­burner

*  Face­book feeds, Tum­blr, Jaiku, Friend­Feed and SocialThing

*  Blog and social net­work widgets

Ses­sion 4 Feb­ru­ary 10, 2010 — Social net­works, iden­tity, and your brand

*  Your life online: con­sid­er­a­tions when set­ting up an account

*  Your online CV: busi­ness net­work­ing with LinkedIn

*  Social Graph: 6 degrees of sep­a­ra­tion, in the­ory and practice

*  Online com­mu­ni­ties and social net­works: becom­ing an active mem­ber and participating

*  Rapid cog­ni­tion online

*  Social net­work­ing for pro­mot­ing peo­ple, prod­ucts, and services

*  How does social net­work design and archi­tec­ture affect par­tic­i­pa­tion? What else affects participation?

Invited guest: Face­book app expert

* Com­par­ing the plat­forms: LinkedIn, MySpace, Face­book, Hi5, Orkut, and more

*  Face­book apps and Open Social

*  Whose data is it? Closed gar­dens and net­work data portability

Ses­sion 5 Feb­ru­ary 17, 2010 — Addi­tional con­cepts, plat­forms, and techniques

*  It’s all social. How peo­ple con­nect: frame­work for under­stand­ing and analysis

*  Social object: friend-based social­ity and object-centered sociality

*  The social media starfish

*  OpenID

*  Pho­tog­ra­phy on the web: what’s Flickr and how does it fit in?

*  Copy­right and Cre­ative Commons

*  Har­ness­ing col­lec­tive intel­li­gence: social book­marks, folk­sonomies, col­lab­o­ra­tive and active filtering

*  Google and Google News search hacks

Invited speaker: web ana­lyt­ics and SEO expert

*  How online robots and spi­ders index and crawl through your content

*  Met­rics, mea­sure­ment and analytics

*  Search engine opti­miza­tion (SEO), search mar­ket­ing, and social media opti­miza­tion (SMO)

Ses­sion 6 Feb­ru­ary 24, 2010 — Video and audio dis­tri­b­u­tion and sharing

* Medi­as­nacks. Film­ing, edit­ing, and pub­lish­ing a short video online

*  Record­ing an audio inter­view, edit­ing, and upload­ing it

*  Use of images, graphs, and maps to illus­trate texts

*  Cre­at­ing Sound­slides with pho­tos and audio

*  Using Bit­tor­rent for upload­ing and down­load­ing large files

*  Con­ver­sa­tional video: Seesmic is to YouTube what Twit­ter is to Blogger

Ses­sion 7 March 3, 2010 — Your iden­tity online and offline.

Behav­ior affects cred­i­bil­ity, author­ity, and influence.

What about pri­vacy, secu­rity, and ethics?

Spe­cial guests: local blog­gers are invited to class for a round­table dis­cus­sion on their expe­ri­ences, over pizza and soft drinks

Ses­sion 8 March 10, 2010 — Vir­tual worlds, Sec­ond Life, and World of Warcraft

Vir­tual worlds exist in many forms, and many more are sure to be cre­ated. We first look at World of War­craft, and then explore Sec­ondLife, the immer­sive vir­tual world. We’ll look at ways to bridge the vir­tual and phys­i­cal world in SecondLife.

Ses­sion 9 March 17, 2010 — SPRING RECESS / INTERCESSION

Required Read­ings: please con­sult the course wiki

Ses­sion 10 March 24, 2010 — Get­ting things done online, col­lec­tive action, and shar­ing economies

What can be done alone? What can be done col­lec­tively? How do indi­vid­u­als build up social cap­i­tal?  How can self-interest be lever­aged to cre­ate pub­lic goods? How do peo­ple orga­nize online into groups for coop­er­a­tion, col­lab­o­ra­tion, and col­lec­tive action? What are the rela­tion­ships between col­lec­tive action, com­mu­nity, and democ­racy? What mech­a­nisms facil­i­tate col­lec­tive action and com­mu­nity? Do social net­works allow for new forms of pro­duc­tion (ie., “non-market peer production”)?

Ses­sion 11 March 31, 2010 — Cloud com­put­ing, SaaS, open source, browsers, and standards

Overview of open source cul­ture and soft­ware. What fac­tors lead to suc­cess? What moti­vates contributors?

Does most of your data reside on your hard drive, or in the cloud? Which data is where? Why? Which fac­tors lead to greater migra­tion of data online?

Does the desk­top mat­ter any­more? How does the browser con­tinue to change, and why? What about new desk­top (and mobile) clients? Also, we take a look at browser extensions.

Overview of soft­ware as a ser­vice providers and plat­forms, for pri­vate, per­sonal busi­ness, and cor­po­rate use. What are the busi­ness models?

Ses­sion 12 April 7, 2010 — The chang­ing role of PR and marketing

How has online par­tic­i­pa­tion in social media affected brand, posi­tion­ing, adver­tis­ing, and pub­lic rela­tions? What role for community?

We explore case stud­ies of suc­cesses and fail­ure in social media com­mu­ni­ca­tions by brands. Are com­pa­nies hav­ing a hard time adjust­ing, and if so, why?

Guest speaker: PR 2.0 guru / expert

Ses­sion 13 April 14, 2010 — Cit­i­zen journalism

What are the mod­els for jour­nal­ism online? How do they lever­age the com­mu­nity? What are the ele­ments of cit­i­zen jour­nal­ism sites? How is the infor­ma­tion struc­tured? In which ways do read­ers and the com­mu­nity par­tic­i­pate? How to main­tain rel­e­vance and qual­ity? If you could build a cit­i­zen jour­nal­ism site, what would it look like?

Ses­sion 14 April 21, 2010 — Cit­i­zen jour­nal­ism, part II

What are the mod­els for jour­nal­ism online? How do they lever­age the com­mu­nity? What are the ele­ments of cit­i­zen jour­nal­ism sites? How is the infor­ma­tion struc­tured? In which ways do read­ers and the com­mu­nity par­tic­i­pate? How to main­tain rel­e­vance and qual­ity? If you could build a cit­i­zen jour­nal­ism site, what would it look like?

Pos­si­ble guest speaker: direc­tor of a cit­i­zen jour­nal­ism website

Ses­sion 15 April 28, 2010 — Social media and real life

How do our online social activ­i­ties affect our lives per­son­ally and pro­fes­sion­ally? What con­trol do we main­tain, and what have we given up? What fur­ther changes might we expect?

How might this course work better?

Ses­sion 16 May 5, 2010 — FINAL EXAM

Retrospective of South Florida’s startup community

July 14, 2009  |  Events  |  , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,  |  View Comments

RefreshMiami's monthly meetups gather 130 participants on average and have become a hub to meet new people, create friendships, and find new job opportunities.

Read More View Comments
« Older Entries