Social Media University, Global (SMUG)
Suus Non Ut Difficile • Home of the SMUGgles
[ratings]
I’m attending a conference in Bloomington, Minn. this morning, called “Closing the Gap: Innovative Strategies to Patient Involvement,” sponsored by ICSI, Institute for Clinical Systems Improvement. I’m doing a presentation on…you guessed it: Social Media.
Here are my slides:
I’m encouraging participants in the conference to get involved with the discussion through the #ICSIgap hashtag on Twitter.
I’m honored to be leading a conference call this afternoon with representatives from local chapters of the American Heart Association, discussing how they can use social media to spread the word. The conference call runs from 1-2 p.m. CST, and we’ll be using the #AHAchat hashtag for discussion.
The slides for my presentation (which will be about the first half or so of the discussion) are embedded below. They’re based on my 35 Theses, but I’ve incorporated some examples from AHA and their existing use of social media, and I’m not including the Octogenarian Idols section. If you want to contribute to the discussion via #AHAchat on Twitter, I’m sure you’d be welcome. Otherwise, please feel free to join in the comments on this post.
If you’re not sure how to participate in a Twitter chat, check out Twitter 115 and Twitter 116 for tips.
Here is the Twitter search widget so you can track the conversation, even if you haven’t yet joined Twitter:
Malcolm Gladwell is a great writer, which is why he has his own section among the SMUG textbooks. His latest book, What the Dog Saw: And Other Adventures
I listened to What the Dog Saw over the Thanksgiving weekend, and here are a few snippets of his provocative thinking:
It’s almost impossible to predict which college quarterbacks will make it in the NFL because there is nothing “like” being an NFL quarterback. The defensive players are so much faster in the NFL, and therefore the offensive schemes must be so different, that success in college isn’t a good predictor of pro prowess. A college star can be a complete bust. This, Gladwell says, is “The Quarterback problem.”
There are certain jobs where almost nothing you can learn about candidates before they start predicts how they’ll do once they’re hired. So how do we know whom to choose in cases like that? In recent years, a number of fields have begun to wrestle with this problem, but none with such profound social consequences as the profession of teaching.
Thus, Gladwell observes, advanced teaching certificates (or Master’s degrees) don’t correlate at all with student outcomes. And yet, there is enormous variability in teacher performance: the best teachers can get through a year and a half of content in one year, while those at the bottom end of the curve only cover a half-year’s worth of material. Gladwell suggests that the reason why “book smarts” don’t guarantee good outcomes is that there’s nothing “like” being a teacher. And he has some interesting ideas for how teacher hiring and compensation could be changed if we were really serious about striving for excellence in our education system.
Among Gladwell’s strengths is that he questions commonly accepted truisms and brings research data to bear on the issues. In another of the essays, he looks at proponents of the so-called “War for Talent” and asks, “Are smart people overrated?”
The management of Enron, in other words, did exactly what the consultants at McKinsey said that companies ought to do in order to succeed in the modern economy. It hired and rewarded the very best and the very brightest—and it is now in bankruptcy. The reasons for its collapse are complex, needless to say. But what if Enron failed not in spite of its talent mind-set but because of it? What if smart people are overrated?
…
The broader failing of McKinsey and its acolytes at Enron is their assumption that an organization’s intelligence is simply a function of the intelligence of its employees. They believe in stars, because they don’t believe in systems. In a way, that’s understandable, because our lives are so obviously enriched by individual brilliance. Groups don’t write great novels, and a committee didn’t come up with the theory of relativity. But companies work by different rules. They don’t just create; they execute and compete and coördinate the efforts of many different people, and the organizations that are most successful at that task are the ones where the system is the star.
I would just add from personal experience that I work in just such an organization, at Mayo Clinic. Don’t get me wrong: we have a lot of really smart people working at Mayo. But it’s the way we work together in teams, and the systems that enable us to do so, that set Mayo apart. As Gladwell says, the system is the star.
In other essays, Gladwell examines FBI profiling, the Popeil family of pitchmen, why Grey Poupon mustard was able to make inroads into the French’s mustard market while Heinz continues to dominate ketchup, and several other interesting issues. You can read much of Gladwell’s New Yorker archive here (including the one Seth Godin and I disagree with), but I strongly suggest you go ahead and buy the book. It will be one of the best investments you’ll make in improving your critical thinking skills.
[ratings]
Note: This post is part of a series providing fuller discussion for my 35 Social Media Theses. I welcome your feedback and comments to challenge and improve them.
In Thesis 1, I discussed how social media really aren’t completely new, since air was the original social medium. This leads us, however, to what is new:
What these electronic tools like Facebook, YouTube and Twitter do is not different in kind from what has happened with word of mouth since the dawn of civilization.
They just make it a whole lot easier.
People have always talked with friends and family about their experiences, including those with merchants and service providers. From which blacksmith did the best job with horseshoes a century ago to which dentist is best able to prevent pain, a huge portion of our “purchase” decisions have been and remain significantly affected by word-of-mouth.
As I mentioned in Thesis 1, word of mouth from patients and their families has been the top source of information for people who prefer Mayo Clinic, and it’s been that way for more than a century.
Now that word just spreads a lot faster.
So when someone writes on our Mayo Clinic Facebook wall, it’s available for the world to see…
…but more importantly, it may show up in her friends’ news feeds.
Social tools just mean that people are sharing with a lot more people, with a lot less effort.
Offline word of mouth is still more prevalent and more powerful than online, even with the new tools. Hearing a friend talk in person about an experience makes a deeper impression. And if a person, let’s call him Bob, is telling his friend Carl about his mysterious illness and his frustration that it hasn’t been diagnosed, if Carl tells him right then, at the point of need, about his good experience and recommends that Bob try Mayo, that’s obviously going to have deeper impact than a wall posting on Facebook.
But social media can have a broader impact. In the example above, Shannon’s wall posting was potentially visible to 300 million Facebook users, and the sharing she did with her Facebook friends was effortless. The act of writing was the act of sharing.
Likewise, when Rhonda King told the story of bringing her son Trevor to Mayo Clinic for a second opinion on the Mayo Clinic YouTube channel:
…It was seen by many more people than she could have spoken with personally. As of this writing, in fact, it’s been viewed more than 4,400 times. And while nothing is as powerful as face-to-face dialogue, I would argue that the impression Brenda made via video is both broad and deep, for those who have taken time to listen to what she had to say.
So while social media really are as old as human speech, as Thesis 1 says, there is something new and exciting about the ease with which messages can spread with social tools.
I say “merely” in Thesis 2 to emphasize the continuity of social tools with offline word-of-mouth. But don’t think that “merely” minimizes their impact. As we will discuss in the next two theses, social media tools are revolutionary in what they are doing to the anomalous mass media era of the 20th century.
The Innovator’s Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail
Clayton Christensen is amazing. I got to hear him speak in person at our Mayo Clinic Transform symposium in September, but I was a fan long before that. In The Innovator’s Dilemma he lays the groundwork for a way of understanding disruptive innovation and why successful incumbent businesses and market leaders are so bad at adopting disruptive technologies.
It’s not because they’re stupid, lazy or unwilling to take risks. Christensen argues that they’re simply making decisions in keeping with sound management practices, and focusing on their most profitable lines of business.
Here’s my simplified version of the product progression Christensen describes. I will illustrate it using video cameras as the example.
This is a simplified overview, so you should read the book for a fuller explanation. But It’s amazing when you see how this same model has played itself out in countless other industries.
The Innovator’s Dilemma