Tyler's Toolbox

I’m speaking at 1:30pm today (Tuesday, Oct. 6th) on how to build kick-ass Facebook Pages. I’ve pasted the slides here for reference and would love to hear what you think:

I’ll update this post with my notes after the conference.

I’m sitting in the conference room of the Courtyard Marriott in LA after my presentation to the International Professionals Network, I met some great members of the LA community and loved my time here (the hospitality of IPN:LA should go down in the history books as the greatest of all time, even Kanye West agrees with me)  –  I got to trial-run a new idea that I’m working on that is focused on the mindset of the small business owner and how they can analyze their opportunities in social media.

The presentation covers the opportunities, fears, definition, history and types of social media. Pay special attention to the end of the presentation, where I highlight a new analysis of social media channels. My thinking on this is rough now, but expect more on it to come — I’d love your feedback on this early iteration.

Here’s the talk, let me know if you enjoy it:

I’ll try to get video or audio for this, so you can hear the entire conversation.

If you were able to attend, welcome to my blog! Here are the references I mentioned during the talk and in the panel following.

Measuring Social Media:
- We need to focus on measuring engagement. Here are two great thoughts on this: Social Media Saber Metrics by Ian Schafer and Michael Brito.

Planning for success — check out the Air Force’s example [PDF].

Resources for finding niche groups: Meetup and Ning.

Good platform for private, safe, internal social communication: Yammer

Resource for small business owners to meet other small business owners who are trying to figure this out: Social Bees Network

My closing remarks focused on remembering that you aren’t alone in not understanding this stuff — no one does, it’s too young to be understood, we are still exploring it. This means it’s ok for you to ask questions, and be open with your audience that you’re still figuring it out. I’ll end with these directives: Be open. Be yourself. Be courteous. Be curious. Engage.

There’s a pretty big kerfuffle going on about marketing guru Seth Godin’s recent launch of Squidoo brand communities.

Godin launched a service that aggregated the conversation occuring about companies in the social space and provided the brands a sidebar next to the content to address the various statements made.

Someone tweets badly about your brand? Just write next to the entry on squidoo that you’re working on the issue, or that this individual is a looney tune.

Pretty good idea, if you ignore that you are responding in a different medium than the complaint was filed in, on a site that has no third party validity, and that is an excercise in futility. But I will ignore that, primarily because Godin probably could have pulled it off and created a site third parties used to validate information.

Godin launched this program with a business model (companies pay $400 to own the sidebar next to all of this content and be able to respond to issues), and that was his fundamental problem. He realized the validity of his value prop and created the project, but missed the fact that we would view this fully baked idea as exploitation rather than participation in the community.

To see how Squidoo brand communities could have been a massive success, one just has to look at Get Satisfaction. Here’s the model:  1) find a massive need that consumers of companies have, 2) build an amazing application for it and get consumers to use and like the solution, and 3) charge companies for it.

Do all three, in order, and you are a hero of the next web, ushering in the future — skip number 2 and you are a brandjacker, preying on the fears that large companies have of not being able to control the conversation. Sad, but this is the case, even if you know what your business model is likely to be, it still pays to release your MVP early, for free, and get customers used to the service while learning from their interactions.

Godin should have published the brand communities feature with an ad-supported sidebard and then rolled out the solution for companies to buy that sidebar from advertisers. He would have had a much bigger winner on his hands had he done that.

Seth’s backed off, and that’s a bummer, because aggregating comments and sentiment about brands is a valuable service. I wish him the best of luck in continuing to innovate in this space and hope that through direct outreach he’s able to get many brands involved, because this service is only massively interesting if it can serve as the consumer’s one stop shop to get information about all brands it is thinking about doing business with.

Twitter’s foray into search (through last year’s acquisition of Summize) has been commented on by every pundit under the sun. Twitter Search is has proved the benefits of real-time search — namely quicker access to feedback, which gives the ability to respond and steer the person’s experience.

Businesses have found this useful, the limitations of real-time search (RTS) have kept it primarily out of consumer search habits. Twitter today could make a lot of money by sitting as the platform for feedback and service between businesses and consumers, but to justify their recently rumored $1B valuation, you can bet solving the limitations of real-time search (RTS) as it applies to consumer search is on their radar.

The big problems with RTS revolve around the inability to distinguish noise from signal in the short term. Just being the most recent doesn’t make you the most interesting, but it does make you more interesting. The hard problem to solve here is how to factor timeliness into the algorithm for search relevancy. Twitter Search currently understands timeliness, and understands the basics of how people are voting with their actions (although, trending topics is just scraping the top layer of something that needs rich click AND publish data to be interesting), but it doesn’t quite have the larger search algorithm game figured out. Twitter has to internally solve the problem of bringing in more standard search knowledge and expertise.

Bit.ly, a startup that shortens links for use in micro-updates, has developed an incredible (and timely) database on how many people are posting links, how many of those people are unique or simply reposting from someone else, and how many people are clicking them. That data could be very interesting to Twitter as a way to dig deeper on trending, but it could be even more interesting to someone who is trying to work real-time information into an existing search algorithm. Do we know any companies that are very concerned about making sure they are on top of the next innovation in search? Google comes to mind; Microsoft Bing should be paying attention too.

Twitter could benefit from bringing bit.ly in house, but I don’t think they’d benefit as immediately from acquiring bit.ly as Google or Bing would. Not that bit.ly has to sell, but, they’ve only raised 2M, could likely get a large sticker price, and could get to help reshape a search service relied on by hundreds of millions of people. If I were BD at GOOG or MSFT, I’d be starting conversations.

Bonus: Twitter, I’m not just dishing out free BD advice to the big guys, you get some too! Buy or build a service similar to Blippr and automatically give feedback on products based on what people are saying on your service, then, license this rich “micro-review” data to companies like Amazon and RichRelevance.

Come see me speak, Oct. 6th in Sunnyvale

The sub-title to this piece is “Patient-Advocates as Harbringers of Hope in the Health Care System.”

Disclaimer: I am a Libertarian-Progressive. I generally trust markets more than I trust government, primarily because I think it’s easier to inspire real change and harder to make massive mistakes in the free market — however I think government must harness the power of markets and put bumper-rails in to protect the masses from greed overdoses. I supported Barack Obama in the 2008 election and continue to do so. In advance of his healthcare speech, and at the tail-end of a lengthy vacation where I discussed my views, I decided to pen the following missive.

This post is about 1250 words, if, like most, you are far too lazy to read something of that length, here’s a good summary:  

Today, doctors are manipulated by the fear of malpractice into recommending unnecessary procedures that individuals accept because of an information disadvantage. We have little compulsion to overcome this disadvantage because we are not the primary buyers of our own health care. The current position is untenable, and it’s in our interest to influence change with the free market. There are models we can build off, and in the future, it seems likely that patient-advocates will possess the medical knowledge and fiduciary responsibility to allow their clients to decrease their personal costs and increase their quality of life despite a broken system, beating the path down good health reform.  I’ve called this new industry “FutureHealth” in my own thinking, but I don’t like the way that sounds. Can you suggest a better name in the comments? 

OK, that wraps up the word sushi, on with the more gluttonous show…

I backed Obama for his strength in foreign policy and the economy, on those fronts he’s made careful and reasonable decision –curbing a massive economic decline while positioning the US well abroad (specifically regarding War in the Middle East and the Iran Election). He’s done us one better and placed his political chips on the table of the most pressing economic issue today: health care.

People often take issue with framing health care as an economic issue — at it’s core it deals with the life and well-being (or lack there-of) of human beings, so it’s clearly a social issue, and yet — 20% of total government spending is on medicaid/medicare and both government and personal health spending are rising at rapacious rates (2 to 3 percent faster than inflation). If we don’t fix health care, it will bankrupt well before it kills.

There have been a series of fascinating articles this summer exposing the perverse economics of health care — two stand out: Atul Gawande’s watershed piece in The New Yorker, “McAllen, Texas and the high cost of health care” and, more recently, David Goldhill’s piece in the Atlantic Monthly, “How American Health Care Killed My Father.” Both conclude the incentive structure of the medical system is broken. The Doctors, fearing malpractice suits, recommend unnecessary procedures. Patients, at a severe information disadvantage and with little skin in the game perceived when it comes to payment, accept this recommendation. Insurance foots the bill and in search of greater profits tries to shirk as many payouts as possible and, if faced with an inability to do so, raises rates (making it harder for individuals to maintain health insurance).

The heart of the health care problem therefore seems to be unnecessary procedures (estimated at 30% of annual medical costs) and lack of innovation in the patient experience.

To solve both issues, patients must become the central focus of the system. By creating strong financial incentives for patients to judiciously use health care you would create a health services industry that must curb costs and cater to the patient’s experience, improving care, along with an information industry that will eliminate the information disadvantage that allows patients to be easily manipulated today.

Unfortunately, a quick, sweeping change (legislative or otherwise), requiring individuals to foot more medical bills is unlikely (at best) to happen when one of the largest industries is involved, people’s pocketbooks are at stake and there’s no existing use to defend that this system will be preferable in the long-run. Our brains are bad at evaluating risk-reward when the status quo is an option (for however briefly) and the risk involves our health and our savings account.

This means the change must happen gradually, and likely (at least initially) through market forces rather than legislation.

Luckily, there is already a subset of early adopters that care aggressively about health and patient experience and have been spurring innovation on both fronts: the wealthy.

The wealthy have developed a tool that helps them navigate the complexities of health care, enjoy a better patient experience, and obtain the information and access required for better preventive care: concierge doctors. Concierge (also known as “boutique”) doctors require extra cost from a more limited subset of patients who receive expiriential perks like same-day appointments and higher levels of access to their doctor. These can range from the expensive MD2 (24K/year for a family) to the relatively inexpensive (I pay $150/yr to a concierge practice in San Francisco), but access and benefit tends to flow linearly across that range (at the end of the day you’re buying time from highly skilled, valuable people).

Boutique medicine puts the patient in the buyer’s seat and creates an opportunity for the patient to take much more control of their health and utilize preventive care to decrease health needs. Once the patients health costs are more predictable (and probably far below the average), the concierge relationship helps the patient gain information advantage to increase confidence in making alternative purchasing decisions, perhaps self- or co-operative insuring.

So, there’s a clear path to improving health care, and the first hurdle in our way is visible and defined. A company that can accomplish the same (or similar) effect as boutique doctors for the rest of us will create the passage point to the future of health care.

At the highest level, this new class of doctors need not be doctors at all, but rather “patient-advocates” that maintain enough medical knowledge to ensure proper care and are capable of supporting and helping patients through both simple and complex medical situations. At the lowest levels, this function may be a game or service that encourages more healthful activity (think DailyMile, tweetwhatyoueat, FourSquare, or others).

There are many people in this FutureHealth industry, but one seems particularly well-placed to bring about the next step in the industry’s evolution, a small company called HelloHealth (disclaimer: Jay Parkinson, CEO of HelloHealth, is a friend). They are creating a platform where doctors can interact with patients in a more traditional primary-care role: hands-on, preventive care administered in a personal fashion. To the extent that HelloHealth can create technical tools that help their doctors save time (like automated paperwork, electronic patient interactions, and more), they can lower the cost of access for patients into a realm affordable for the average joe (they seem to have already gotten into the high-end of this range).

Finally, I’ve dubbed this new industry “FutureHealth” in my head, but I don’t like the way that sounds. Can you suggest a better name in the comments? 

Edit Notification: I published the first draft of this on my blackberry without review; I have sense gone back and fixed any typos and lack of links I could find. I have sent this to a few knowledgeable friends for feedback. I may edit again for clarity based on their suggestions.