Editor’s Note: This is a guest post by Brian S. McGowan, PhD, is a research scientist and author of the forthcoming fall 2012 release of #SOCIALQI: Simple Solutions for Improving Your Healthcare.

Healthcare in the U.S. is provided across a frighteningly broken and fragmented system of providers and institutions. As a result, the quality of American healthcare is consistently ranked among the worst in the developed world, and costs incurred per patient are 2-5 times higher than in comparable countries. Our problem isn’t that we’re incapable of providing high-quality care – in pockets throughout the country, we provide the most effective care in the world. Our problem is that for every five-star healthcare system we support, there are a dozen systems struggling to stay up-to-date.

Our healthcare system is broken because it’s fragmented. Information fails to flow freely, and best practices are treated as competitive, proprietary elements. In a healthcare culture that spends millions advertising “We’re #1,” it comes as no surprise that someone else has to be #2, #3, or even #50. This is entirely intentional. This situation is created by the restriction of information – and it can be salvaged, in turn, by improving information flow. This is where social media can pay big dividends.

The Value of Social Learning

If you ask physicians what they like best about the continuing education courses they take, they’ll tell you that they enjoy engaging with other doctors in the hallways; they love the interactivity of the sessions. If you followed those same physicians back to their workplaces and asked how they answer the questions that are raised over the course of a normal workday, they’d tell you that they consult with a colleague. What they won’t say, probably because they lack the perspective, is that the majority of learning that occurs over a medical career is social learning. My proposition is that social media applications, like Twitter, are the natural evolution of the social learning that takes place in hallways and lecture halls throughout the country. The added benefit is that social media can extend learning across time and space so questions can be posed, and answered, by broader audiences of healthcare professionals.

How Should Medical Practices Utilize Social Media?

Social media applications have three primary uses for physicians and healthcare systems. The first is the provision and coordination of patient care. Here the general, open applications like Facebook and Twitter should not be used, or should be used only in very narrow circumstances, because of issues pertaining to privacy and liability. There are new enterprise platforms being developed that add a social layer to the workflow of healthcare professionals to enable a collaborative care model. The second use is as a vehicle for engaging the public in a broad conversation about preventative health and disease management. Here the general, open applications like Facebook and Twitter are the perfect vehicle to disseminate new information about health and wellness. These channels also help the practice or institution promote itself across the community. The third use is as a vehicle for education and staff development. Here a combination of general, open applications and enterprise platforms ensure that information flows across the organization and that novel best practices and latest advances are integrated quickly and effectively into the organization as needed.

Of the three uses, it is the first that offers the greatest upside, but also the greatest challenge; the second may not have the greatest return for the effort. For this reason I advise organizations and healthcare professionals to embrace bucket #3 – to implement a model for effective learning and professional development through social media. This is a safe and relatively simple first step to extract the greatest value from the first and second buckets.

How Should Patients Use Social Media?

Patients’ perspectives on health are, understandably, very different from their doctors’. One of the first questions that patients ask themselves after being diagnosed is, “Am I alone?” Being a patient is frightening, and feeling isolated in your diagnosis makes the experience much, much worse.

Image via CrunchBase

Social media ensures that patients can find one another, they can offer support, and they can offer counsel. Facebook groups allow patients to support a cause. Hashtags and tweetchats on Twitter allow patients to share, to curate, and to engage in dialogue. Platforms like ACOR and CaringBridge allow for more in-depth conversations when Twitter character limits just won’t suffice. Importantly, patients may just want to lurk or they may want to remain anonymous in their plight or affliction, and many social media applications have been developed with that need in mind.

In closing, I offer a few words of caution: what you share online may never be truly protected. Data breaches happen, and information can live in “the cloud” forever. Regulations have been slow to protect health-related information that’s shared through social media channels. My advice is to be protective of your personal information, but to not be paralyzed – the benefits of supporting health and wellness through social media far outweigh the risks.

Brian S. McGowan, PhD, is a research scientist who has worked as a medical educator, mentor, accredited provider and commercial supporter. McGowan is author of the forthcoming fall 2012 release of #SOCIALQI: Simple Solutions for Improving Your Healthcare. Connect with Brian on Twitter: @BrianSMcGowan

• Posted By Jason Falls
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A number of my friends either are, or plan to soon be, writing their first books. I’m really excited for them. I was in their shoes a year ago, plowing through writes, rewrites and edits, putting thoughts on paper and hoping someone out there would think the topic was interesting enough to plop down $24 for a book about it.

All of the folks I’m referring to, in addition to several others, have asked me if writing a book is worth it. While there are few thrills for someone who classifies themselves as a writer more pleasing than seeing your name on a real, hard-bound piece of literature on the shelves of a real bookstore, I thought it appropriate to share a few thoughts with you on the value of writing a book.

The Book-Only Perspective

From a strictly business perspective, and looking at the book project as a singular business venture, writing a book is a horrible idea. This doesn’t mean it’s not worth doing … keep reading. But the simple math looks like this (based on my experience as well as conversations with other author friends):

• The average book advance for a first-time author is probably $10,000 to $15,000.
• The average time it will take you to research and write your first book (assuming it’s a 300-page, business book) is probably about 100 hours.
• The average time it will take you to edit your first book (same assumptions) is probably about 25 hours.
• The average time it will take you to plan the marketing and promotions of your first book, including booking speaking gigs and the like, is probably about 10 hours.
• The average time you will spend on the road promoting and speaking about your first book, provided you want to aggressively sell the bejeezus out of it and perhaps even hit a few best-seller lists, is about another 100 hours (and that’s conservative).
• So let’s say you get paid a $15,000 advance and put in 235 hours. You’re basically getting paid about $64 per hour.
• The $15,000 is an advance on your royalties. So you don’t actually get paid more than that until your book sells enough copies to account for $15,000 of your cut. This is probably going to be about 10,000-12,000 books. Most modestly successful business books sell about 5,000-8,000 copies. So, chances are, you’re not going to see a dime beyond the $15,000.

I don’t know about you, but my hourly rate is a bit north of $64. So looking at a book deal alone, it’s a no-brainer: Go do something else.

Bookshelf (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Honestly, if you self-publish, you can earn far more than the $2.00 or so per book you’ll get with a publishing company. But you don’t have distribution channels like Barnes & Noble, etc., to help you, so you’re sacrificing reach for per-book profit. While many, like Mark Schaefer, have self-published very successfully, I can tell you from personal experience that Scott Stratten could never have texted me from Melbourne, Australia, to say he just saw No Bullshit Social Media in a store had I not been with a legit publisher.

I’m sure Mark and several other self-publishers have made more than $15,000 on their books. But you’re going to need a large online audience and a hell of a topic for your book to be able to hit that number. For me, self-publishing is not a smart route if you don’t have a built-in audience of 50,000 or more blog readers, Twitter followers and the like that can account for buying 5,000 or so books. No, the numbers don’t sound high on what you need to sell, but it’s harder to get people to buy that many than you think.

And depending upon your content, maybe a paid e-book or even a “report” is a better option. Social Media Explorer is about to launch our first market research report, The Conversation: What Customers Are Saying About Banking. It will be priced at around $300 (for an approximate 100-page report) and focused on a narrow industry. But if we sell just 50 of them, the revenue will greatly exceed what I’ve made from my first book, thus far.

The Book-Plus Perspective

The reason you actually write and publish a book is not to make money from sales. Unless you’re Stephen King. You write and publish a book for credibility. That credibility allows you to charge more for what you did before.

As a social media marketing consultant, my hourly rate increased. As a professional public speaker, my fee increased. In a matter of days (on or around Sept. 15, 2011), my hourly rate jumped $50 per hour (which was conservative … I could have gone up $150). My speaking fees almost doubled. (I’m still one of the cheapest social media keynote speakers on the market, though.)

As a result, I’ve probably pulled in about $40,000 in additional revenue from September 15, 2011 until now. When you look at that perspective, writing a book is a no-brainer: Write your ass off!

But Honestly …

The worst thing I could do here is mislead you. There’s a lot more that goes into the Book-Plus perspective than just getting a book published. I know a number of people who have published books who didn’t already have an established presence or professional public speaking career to speak of and, thus, weren’t able to capitalize on the opportunity.

Sure, they raised their rates, but a book alone isn’t going to allow you to go from charging $100 per hour to $200 per hour. You’re going to need a sizable online following or audience, some strong client pedigree and the drive to go after clients willing to pay more for your services. You’re not going to be able to go from charging $2,000 for a speaking engagement to $5,000 without that same sizable audience, some really crisp keynote talks and some word-of-mouth buzz that you’re good at holding a room and delivering a great talk.

Having a book brings you credibility, but it’s not going to close the deal for you. You’re still going to have to be a stud at lots of other things before you can make “published author” translate to more dollars.

There are lots of other secrets and insights I could share about being an author, the book writing process, the book publishing world and the like. But those are for another time. (Not to mention, I don’t want to make my publisher any more freaked out than they are that I wrote this. Heh.) This gives you what I think is an honest look at what the business of writing a book is really like. Hopefully, it will help you figure out whether or not you want to dive in and get published.

Good luck!

• Posted By Jason Falls
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Next Tuesday I’ll help Spredfast kick off a neat webinar series that is focused on helping you “Spruce up your Social This Spring.” The social media management solution provider has gathered myself, Michael Brito, Jeremiah Owyang, Kristen Sussman of Social Distillery, Amy Kalm from Intuit and Tom Carusona of Aramark, along with Spredfast’s awesome team of social strategists and marketers to help you learn more about three key topics over the course of the next five weeks.

Tuesday, I’ll co-host the opening webinar on Creating and Using Great Social Content with Sussman and Spredfast’s Ellen Westcott. We’ll talk about content strategies, how to repurpose content and go through the list of questions and ideas you can use to inspire yourself to produce content that produces natural engagement from and with your audience. Sign up for Tuesday’s opener and join us!

On June 5, Brito, the EVP of Social Business for Edelman Digital and author of the book Smart Business Social Business, Kalm and Spredfast’s Director of Social Media Jordan Slabaugh will tackle the topic of knowing and delighting your customer. This webinar will be focused on helping you consistently produce a compelling social experience for your audience, to keep them hooked and your brand top of mind. Register for that session and learn!

On June 26, Owyang, Carusona and Spredfast CMO Jim Rudden will dive into Organizing and Creating Social Program Processes. This will help you take the theory to activation and show you the steps to help guarantee success in implementing your social programs. Register for the June 26 webinar as well!

All the sessions are free and open to anyone. For registering, you’ll also get a copy of Spredfast’s 7 Whiteboard Sessions for Every Social Strategist whitepaper.

Go ahead, register and join us so we can all Spruce up our Social!

• Posted By Jason Falls
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We have been working on a couple of interesting start-up ideas at Urbane Media that have mushroomed into companies. The idea stage is much safer, in that we can vacillate for hours on end about this and that. It makes us feel good. It is exciting to talk about our ideas. Actually launching your idea is a bit scarier because the stakes are higher. It is no longer just verbal masturbation, you have likely plunked down some dough to get started, either yours or someone else’s.

Must Do

One of our Must Do Exercises with our companies that we own and operate is to create a new value curve. We spend a lot of time on the following four questions:

A New Value Curve

1. Reduce - Which factors should be reduced well below the industry standard
2. Create - Which factors should be created that the industry has never offered
3. Raise - Which factors should be raised well above the industry standard
4. Eliminate - Which of the factors that the industry take for granted should be eliminated

Create Your Niche

Question mark (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Getting really clear with the above four questions has helped us carve out niche businesses. Many times the things that separate one company or business from another are not large single items, but a series of small, but radically different, things. A great place to start is your policy and procedure manual. It is likely slam full of stuff that no longer applies or never worked well from the get-go.

Have You Answered Why?

This is a tricky one, we tend to race to What we do. That is much easier to identify. We gravitate to How we do it. The question of Why we do it only gets answered by the remarkable brands. If we reverse the order, and start with why we are doing this and keep that at the core center of our culture, we are heads above the rest.

Why People Buy

People buy from companies because of why they do, not what they do. That is one of the explanations as to why great brands exponentially lead the pack. Many times their competitors actually have a better product. Many times the competition is better capitalized. Yet the company who best identifies what motivates them, and why they are doing what they are doing run circles around the pack.

We suggest that you take some time to identify the Why, way before you get to the What and the How. Your result will be diametrically different.

For more inspiration on the same topic, check out Simon Sinek’s awesome TED Talk:

• Posted By Eric Brown
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Every day in business, I wear two hats (metaphorically of course).  The first hat is in the agency world as the Chief Marketing Officer at Rockfish.  The second hat is in the start-up investor world, both as the co-founder of The Brandery and as a partner at Brand Ventures.  While these two professions have more differences than similarities, I know I am better at both jobs because of the other.

On the agency side, each day is spent uncovering the marketing and business pain points of our clients.  These pain points create opportunities which start up companies can capitalize on by providing the solution.  As an investor, I often have one of the first opportunities to evaluate the start-ups that are looking to provide that solution.  Well before they hit the pages of Mashable or the New York Times, many of these start-ups are pitching investors.  In the investment world, venture firms often talk about “proprietary deal flow” where they get a first look at investment opportunities.  In much the same way, being involved directly in the start-up investment space gives Rockfish proprietary deal flow to bring digital innovation to our clients.

Being a practitioner in the world of marketing helps me be a subject matter expert when it comes to brand marketing.  In turn, I become more valuable as an investor because of the subject matter expertise I can bring to start-ups.  And ultimately, the value comes full circle as I can better help the digital innovation strategy of my clients to identify opportunities.

Wearing two hats in your professional life definitely requires double the work.  But at the same time, the return you get for both jobs clearly proves the old saying of “one plus one equals three.”

• Posted By Dave Knox
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Brands shifting all or most of their digital marketing and social media marketing efforts to Facebook are going to lose and perhaps big. Yes, there are 900 million users there. Yes, the IPO is coming and an influx of cash and becoming a publicly traded company will bring with it many benefits that will strengthen what Facebook is. Yes, Facebook will continue to be an ever-present social utility for years to come.

But there are more concerns than cocktail parties on the horizon for the behemoth, I’m afraid. And those concerns directly effect brands investing their time, attention and dollars in Facebook. The problem is now that Facebook must make money to sustain its investor’s satisfaction, it must rely on its only scalable and reliable business model: That of a media property where brands want to advertise.

Image via CrunchBase

Rebecca Greenfield’s piece for The Atlantic spells it out pretty nicely. She writes that there are two kinds of Facebook advertisers: the ones that want metrics and the ones that want attention. The problem for both is that Facebook’s Zuckerberg-inspired ethos doesn’t care if either gets what they want.

Facebook has built a 900-million person gorilla, so they know advertisers will flock to them. Marketers always want a piece of the action when eyeballs are involved. But Zuckerberg’s philosophy is that advertising should be more organic, relevant and unobtrusive. Their new advertising options herd marketers to buy sponsored stories and softer appeal opportunities. While one could argue this might be a better way to get in front of people’s attention, it’s also less definitive on value.

Facebook wants advertisers to share good content, not good deals and discounts. Advertisers are generally very bad at content and just want to plaster coupons all over the network. Even if advertisers were good at content, the audience-centric nature of good content means there are fewer calls-to-action, fewer direct benefits to the company and, thus, metrics that leave a lot to be desired compared to what companies have seen in other mediums in the past.

The other type of advertiser Greenfield outlines — the one that wants attention — is just S.O.L. Facebook is so big and funded and ready to cash in on the next week’s big IPO, they don’t care to answer the phone. If you’re not already in touch with an ad rep there, good luck finding one. They don’t need you right now.

But that attitude is going to befell them soon.

With organic content not delivering the metrics brands want, the ones that are paying now will stop. With Facebook acting as if they don’t need to be responsive to those calling wanting to place media buys, the ones not advertising now won’t likely want to much longer. Sure, 900 million people can’t be wrong and someone will throw their money at Facebook once given the opportunity, but it’s not a long-term, sustainable way of doing business.

Facebook’s users, meanwhile, are generally averse to advertising, like they are everywhere else. Facebook ad click through averages are half of typical online advertising and less than 25% of what most SEO experts would recommend as a target for Pay-Per-Click advertising on search engines. The sponsored stories aren’t going to change that much. Zuckerberg will have created a fantastic social network and utility that everyone wants to use, but one that can’t sustain advertising revenue.

The do-advertising-our-way effort won’t work if Facebook cannot either A) Help advertisers see positive metrics and returns on their advertising investment or B) Suck up to anyone willing to spend money with them.

But then there’s the simple fact that people on Facebook are not interested in your ads. They’re not going to be interested in your sponsored stories, either. People don’t go to Facebook to engage with your brand. They go to Facebook to see pictures of their grandchildren, stalk their exes and play Farmville. A select few seek out a higher purpose and participate in groups, have conversations and the like, but advertising is noise among the signal. And Zuckerberg’s ethos won’t change that.

Facebook is a great place for a brand to facilitate customer service, engage customers or prospects in research and development-type conversations and perhaps even share some coupons or discounts from time-to-time. It can be a place where positive, measurable outcomes occur. But that is going to be a challenge for any brand simply because people don’t want to engage with companies, logos or buildings. They want to engage with people.

There are far too many companies putting all their eggs in Zuckerberg’s basket right now. From advertising to building brand pages and running promos, everyone wants a piece of that 900-million-person pie. Never mind that email marketing produces over $40 per dollar spent return on investment. Never mind that a strong corporate blog with keyword-rich posts helps you drive organic search results that send 8-12 times as much traffic as pay-per-click ads. Never mind that mediums like radio and television still produce higher sales and awareness results in shorter times than social media can even hope for.

Marketers are helping Facebook build a modern day Tower of Babel, hoping to touch the face of the revenue gods. And soon, the revenue gods will become angry and everyone, including Facebook, will suffer.

Don’t put all your eggs in that basket.

Related post: SEO Implications of Reduced Corporate Blogging – by Scott Clark, BuzzMaven.com

• Posted By Jason Falls
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• Posted By Kevin Dugan
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• Posted By Kevin Dugan
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John Jantsch is flat brilliant. This time, he’s developed a webinar series that solves a major problem we all have with learning new ideas in the marketing world. He’s developed a webinar series that forces you to commit to act on what you’ve learned. It’s even called Commit2Act.

I’m speaking in the webinar series (so it’s virtual) along with Ann Handley, Chris Brogan, Brian Clark, David Meerman Scott, Guy Kawasaki, Amy Porterfield, Lee Odden and Jeff Walker. We’re charged with giving you five actionable ideas each month that you then commit to trying, testing and reporting back on.

The series would be free, but John wants to make sure you’re committed to do it, so it’s going to cost you $5 to join. Five whole dollars! But that holds you accountable for showing up and doing the work, right? It commits you. Told you John was brilliant.

You can still join, though the first two webinars are completed. Don’t fret! There are recordings.

You’re going to get great ideas that you can implement in your marketing almost right away. Then you try them and report back. Rest assured, you’re going to walk away having done something to improve your marketing.

My talk is Tuesday (again, it’ll be archived) and I’m sharing five things you can do to get more out of your social media marketing. They’re not meant to be deep changes or ideas, but little things that can make you more productive and profitable. It’ll be a lot of fun talking shop with John. You should certainly join us!

Go ahead. Make the Commitment! Commit2Act.

Note: Links are of the affiliate kind.

• Posted By Jason Falls
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Social networking and the marketing and technology world’s response to it is quite amusing. To network socially is to connect with people of like mind and interest to have a group of individuals you can relate to when you choose. It’s about having a group of buds to watch the game with or girlfriends to meet for lunch … in a manner of speaking.

While Internet-based social networks are built for scale, people are not. Dunbar’s number says we can’t maintain more than 150 stable relationships at once. Hence the appeal of applications like Path — I don’t want to friend everybody. I want to “friend” the people that are my friends. Sure, many of us can stretch that 150 to a few more, but let’s be realistic. If you’ve got 500 people in your friends circle on a given social network, you aren’t really maintaining a relationship with them. You’re just catching a random update from time to time. That’s far from personal. It’s also far from social.

But because marketers, technologists and gamers were at the helm of many social networks, it became a game: How many friends can I get? Every social network I’ve ever joined as immediately told me I needed to add friends and then slapped a big badge on my profile telling me, and sometimes the world, how many people like me enough. This gamification trigger made people want to add more friends.

A social network diagram (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Suddenly, it was a race to 10,000 on Twitter, then 25,000 and so-on. LinkedIn developed the LION designation for people who had lots of connections and were open to connecting with anyone, even those they don’t know. From a marketing, gaming or ego perspective, it made sense: Whoever has the most friends wins.

But from a human social capacity perspective, it’s just plain dumb.

I have 50,000+ followers on Twitter. I probably average around 175 public “@” replies on a slow weekday. Mind you, I don’t sit on Twitter all day. If I have time to look, I look. If I’m busy, I’m busy. Yet, I’ve been accosted by people THAT I KNOW for not responding to a public tweet — One that I didn’t even see. (I know, first world problem. But it’s easier to reply to every message when you have significantly less of them. And keep in mind, that’s Twitter … not primary communications like emails, phone calls, meetings, etc.)

Yet, we still think more is better. We have to have more Twitter followers, more Facebook fans, more LinkedIn connections, more people have to circle us on Google+ … the list goes on.

Complicating matters is the emerging world of online influence measurement. Klout, Kred and the like are starting to have serious implications for mainstream consumers. Even if it is just perks and coupons, when the Sunday ad-clipping nutters figure out they can game Twitter to get followers which then gives them free stuff from Klout … watch out!

Whether you’re building online influence as an individual or as a business, there are way too many reasons to aim for more, rather than less, followers. But what we marketers need to consider as we try to communicate our messages to all the other users on social networks is that they just might not be like us. They may not want 3 bazillion followers. They may just want to chat with their friends, stalk their ex or see pictures of their family from time-to-time.

You may not be able to market to those people here. And by those people, I mean most people.

Have You Registered For Explore Minneapolis?

Don’t miss two days of intensive learning with some of the leading thinkers and practitioners in the digital marketing and social media marketing space. Join SME’s Jason Falls and Nichole Kelly, The Now Revolution co-author Jay Baer, Edison Research’s Tom Webster, Ad Contrarian Bob Hoffman, Neil Patel of Kissmetrics and more at one of the leading digital and social media marketing events of 2012, August 16-17 in Minneapolis, Minn. DON’T WAIT TO REGISTER! Seats are filling fast! Reserve yours today!

• Posted By Jason Falls
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