Author: Lee Aase

Husband of one, father of six, grandfather of 15. Chancellor Emeritus, SMUG. Emeritus staff of Mayo Clinic. Founder of HELPcare and Administrator for HELPcare Clinic.

Buy a Vowel?

In the past couple of years I’ve given presentations on “new media” or social media to several marketing-oriented health care organizations.

At Monday’s meeting with FSHPRM (Florida Society for Healthcare Public Relations &Marketing), I began to notice a pattern. Some other similar organizations to which I’ve presented:

  • MHSCN (Minnesota Healthcare Strategy and Communication Network)
  • WHPRMS (Wisconsin Healthcare Public Relations and Marketing Society)
  • FHS/FCBMS (Forum for Healthcare Strategists 12th annual Forum on Customer Based Marketing Strategies)
  • SHSMD (Society for Healthcare Strategy and Market Development) – that one was in my pre-blog days, and was just  a presentation on media relations.

I was struck by the complete absence of vowels in any of these acronyms, and the resulting difficulty in pronunciation.

First Rule of Word of Mouth: To have word of mouth about your organization, people need to be able to pronounce its name.

Possible reasons for the completely consonant acronyms:

  1. They were created by committee. PR needed to be included in the name. So did Marketing. With a letter to represent the state name, you have four consonants, including a P and an R that need to be together, and everyone gave up on the possibility of pronouncability.
  2. They want to keep the organization secret. Maybe they don’t think marketing, public relations and health care go together — or are concerned that other people might have that opinion. So by choosing a vowel-less acronym they are sabotaging word of mouth about their organization, to keep a lower profile.

What do you think? Is it #1 or #2, or is there some other explanation? And do you know of any health care PR/marketing associations for which the acronym contains a vowel and is able to be pronounced?

(Organizations from Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, Idaho, Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon and Utah don’t count, since their state names begin with a vowel. But it would be interesting to know whether they still managed to avoid a catchy acronym.)

“Please breathe slowly into the brown paper bag…”

There’s been a bit of hyperventilating today about a change in Facebook’s Terms of Service (TOS). For example, Stan Schroeder says (on Mashable):

Yes, with Facebook Connect in place, it’s likely that Facebook simply must do this in order to avoid possible lawsuits over content that isn’t even stored by them anymore. However, the same commenter rightfully notices that “…yes, it also means they can sell your photos or use them in advertising with no recompense to you.”

It’s not just your stuff, it’s everyone’s stuff

The possible implications of this TOS change go beyond these concerns. Sure, you can choose not to use Facebook at all, but that doesn’t mean a thing. Someone can still take your photo, slap it on Facebook, and now neither you nor the author of the photo can stop Facebook from using the photo in whichever way they please.

Looking at it globally, millions of people are uploading bits of information on everyone and everything, to a huge online database, and by doing so they’re automatically giving away the rights to use or modify this information to a private corporation. And not only that; they now also waiver (sic) the right to ever take it back from it.

Facebook should take a long, deep look into how it treats its users. Until now, users had options with regards to how the data they generated on Facebook was used. Now, they have no options whatsoever, rather than quit the service altogether. It’s a major difference; I’m not going to take it lightly, and neither should you.

Actually, Stan’s take is a bit less extreme than some I’ve seen; at least he recognizes the need with Facebook Connect for Facebook to protect itself from lawsuits.

But for the others who are expressing such extreme distress over the change, I have one main question, and a few related thoughts:

Do you really think the photos of you are that interesting?

Facebook users upload nearly a BILLION PHOTOS A MONTH! I overstated that a bit; it’s really 850 million, but I rounded up for effect.

If you were to decide to delete your photos, do you think Mark Zuckerberg & Co. will forage through their digital trash so they can show your picture to some user from China?

This language change seems to me to be strictly about preventing frivolous lawsuits. If I delete a photo, I’m betting it will stay deleted. No one else cares about it. This new language just says I can’t sue if it does somehow surface.

Maybe professional photographers who make their living from photos would possibly have some concern about the change. But for us run-of-the-mill amateurs, I don’t think we have any cause for distress.

Meanwhile, here’s a good article from Time you should check out (hat tip: Daniel Rothamel): Why Facebook is for Old Fogies.

Dueling University TV Ads

A couple of weeks ago I introduced the SMUG Super Bowl TV ad:    

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9_WIBoEf730] 

This morning I saw a commercial that captures some of the same rationale behind SMUG:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e50YBu14j3U]

But I’ll bet Kaplan actually charges tuition!

I know they paid a lot more both for production and distribution.

Education needs to be more about learning what you need, when you need it. That’s the SMUG (and apparently Kaplan) philosophy.