I readily agreed, because the speakers are unreal talented (Joe Trippi, Aubrey De Grey, Dr. Ben Goertzel, Dr. Philip Steven Low, and Jen McCabe).  The schedule today opened with Dr. David Rosenman from the Mayo Clinic Center for Innovation and closed with me.  Yep, that’s how I like to roll.  :)

Lately, when it comes to healthcare, I’ve been thinking a lot about Dr. Jay Parkinson’s focus on creating a market-based solution for better doctor-patient relationships without accepting the handcuffs of working with insurance companies. He seems to have given up on public reform — in face of the immensely bad odds public reform faces, I don’t blame him, but I have arrived to the conclusion that public reform is still necessary.  This presentation is my effort at exploring both of those tracks (private market solutions and public reform) and figure out how they work together.  I’m still learning this stuff, so please give me your feedback!

We agreed that no one’s going to beat the established players in search, and if/when an entrant does beat Google, it will be with a disruptive technology that uses a very different method of information discovery. Executives at Google have all read Innovator’s Dilemma and they are rightly concerned that real-time search and social search (and soon, geotagging) could represent this disruptive technology within search. The company is focused on how those movements might interact with search and have experimented with including real-time content in search results.

I’ve got several ideas on how real-time and social data could affect search, in particular, the conversation reminded of an email chain I had contributed to this summer; I’ve pasted my bit below:

Here’s a more complete description of the search idea I mentioned to you today.  Aside from some of the interesting strategies available to the big 3 search providers, I think Facebook has an opportunity to play an interesting role in search by offering a service adding social data to search results.

Facebook could offer a Facebook Connect implementation specifically for search engines that allowed them to check URLs against a database of friend’s posted links.  This would allow the search engine to enhance relevancy. Think of it like this (forgive the quick/ugly mockup):  http://skitch.com/tylerwillis/bswcr/presentation2

This could help Facebook move the needle on three strategic goals: increase engagement, increase ubiquity of graph availability (connect), and user growth.
- Offers a quick/easy way to gain influence in a new area of user’s habits, namely search.
- Easily the biggest Connect implementation to date if done with Bing, Yahoo, or Google. Huge legitimacy marker for Connect’s capabilities.
- It offers a large, visible step towards FB becoming ubiquitous, which would have a positive effect on new user signups.

It would be great to make a launch partner of a top-notch engine (Bing or Google). Biggest problem would probably be building something that served results fast enough for Search Engines to actually use.  Only real question I can come up with is whether Facebook would be willing to be part of a search solution of companies they see as competitive (Google specifically) – IMO, the benefits laid out above outweigh the costs of propping up a future competitor’s current solution.

Bottom line: John Borthwick sees an oncoming verticalization of search; my answer to Borthwick’s claim is the part of my argument I hold most tenatively, but, for most people, I believe that content isn’t interesting just because it is now, social, or nearby; our information discovery platforms must still apply good filtering and context to it’s content/results to meet a user’s needs. Anderson’s Vanishing Point Theory alone isn’t enough to build a universally interesting news application — one has to apply other metrics to judge it’s interest to a reader. Innovator’s Dilemma has shown us that the disruptive technology will get there soon enough (Individual services building upon their success with consumers who care a lot about now/social/nearby and getting better and better at relevance for the mass market), but it’s also shown that large organizations can adapt to disruptive technology by either buying a smaller organization that’s kept independent and encouraged to continue growth (Youtube, attempted with Twitter) or by pushing an corporate shift despite likely stiff internal/organizational resistance. Google failed to buy twitter, therefore it has to push forward with the latter option.

Using the type of UI displayed in the rough mockup I included in the email (link), Google could add social (or realtime or location) data as a contextual meta-layer. I can tell that Google is already thinking of this meta-layer, because it’s exactly the layer that sidewiki is writing to (conversations occuring about information found at a website address). But, Google has misstepped with Sidewiki by trying to own the input. Our conversations are fractured, and occur all across the web, Google should instead focus on indexing and storing data from other services (Twitter, Facebook, etc.) and using that information to display that content as a meta-layer on top of search results and/or to reorder search results. Luckily for the goog, they’ve got some experience with indexing and displaying content from disparate locations.

This idea is complimentary to my opinion about bit.ly being a great asset for a search engine to pickup.

1. If the job listing gives a specific way to contact the company, follow it to a tee. The more specific the instructions, the more this applies. ~50% of applicants are “spray-and-pray” job hunting. I want to avoid hiring these people at all costs. This is as simple as throwing a very easier curveball into standard application procedure (my favorite is to ask for PDF attachement of resume and the cover letter printed in the body of the email with a specific subject line such as “EA Position Inquiry.” Miss any of those? You will not be getting an interview 99.999% of the time.
2. Always, Always go above and beyond if you think of a way to be helpful to the hiring manager. I had a candidate recently say “I know you requested a resume, and you may find it attached, however I’ve always found LinkedIn profiles to be easier to read than attached PDFs, so I’ve included that as well: www.linkedin.com/in/yadayadayada.” This let’s me know the person thinks beyond instructions (yet still follows directly laid out commands), and is capable of placing themselves in others shoes.
3. Don’t show off flowery writing. I’ver written published poetry, I have a love for witty turns-of-phrase, and I’ve read some beautifully written cover letters that I stopped reading halfway through. The world of business rewards clear, succinct communication. Save the pontification for your blog (why do you think I write this damn thing?)
4. The previous point is if you are a great writer. If you’re a mediocre writer DO NOT try to use large words or clever phrases to prove your intelligence. Be thankful that, in most cases, the business world only requires general clarity and not fanciful method. With all the time you’ve saved looking up words in the Thesaurus, go back and delete 30-70% of the words you wrote without altering the meaning.
5. Answer any questions clearly and upfront in the cover letter (eg “I know I’m over/under-qualified, but here’s why I am applying”).
6. List relevant skills/positions (no more than 2-3) in the cover letter.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

I moderated a panel on this two weeks ago and I WISH it was this good. I give myself a B, this gets an A. If it had less emphasis on search, it would be an A+.  Anyone who was at my panel and now reads my blog, consider this a good followup!

Here’s the description (which I’ve edited):
Social media and online marketing tools are fast becoming the most efficient tools to market and communicate with constituents/customers/members. But it’s not as easy as it seems. Learn the most common mistakes and prime opportunities in the social media world. How can your company use networks like Facebook, Google and Twitter? Come hear the leaders in this contemporary marketplace reveal the secrets of small-business success.

It’s worth the hour, go listen.

disclosure: it features a friend who really rocks that panel. You’ll figure that out in the first 5 minutes, after 30 minutes you’ll really be glad he’s there. That friend is Jeremy Toeman, and I didn’t know he could speak that well. Fantastic!

Before I head out to do just that, I wanted to share something with you. Over a year ago I made a film that should never have seen the light of day. Countless near misses with City Officials ($4000+ filming fees, mountains of permits/etc., police harassment), hours of footage accidentally and irrevocably deleted, and almost unusable sound. Add those issues to the fact that I started and shuttered a company and started full-time with Involver less than 2 months after shooting was wrapped on this film and you can see why I’d buried this as the project that was destined to remain unfinished.

Due to some encouragement from the lead actress, and countless hours of basically pro-bono work from the film’s editor, it is actually going to get a shot at being seen. Can’t tell you how happy I am for this.

This film was written at a dark point, a place where I was unhappy with almost everything other than my art (and even then I was mostly unhappy about that). Looking back on it from today, I think it contains a valuable message, an idea that one can cling to in hardship and float to safety on.  Your road may not be well-marked or well-understood, but you can still take it.  Remember: “highways lead to where you don’t wanna be.”

I hope you’ll enjoy this *very rough* clip of Divergent Roads that I submit for your viewing pleasure: