Nice video on the rise of social networking and communities led by patients, featuring the US-based CureTogether as a prime example. It’s a patient-led site where you can: “Compare your symptoms, choose treatments and uncover triggers that might be affecting you. Get ideas you can bring to your doctor. Track your progress toward feeling better and connect with others working on the same health issues.” Wonder if there’s anything as empowering as this in the UK?
After reading a blog about burnout the other week I’d been thinking about how to help community managers avoid the same problem, faced by pressures from managing difficult issues online to getting buying from across their organisation. The issue came back to me today after reading FreshNetwork’s Holly Seddon ask how to best deal with burnout in the Community Manager group:
Being immersed in the details of people’s lives, and often their traumas and upsetting experiences can take it’s toll on moderators and CMs. I know on previous communities I’ve been affected by some things I’ve read and have had to take five minutes, have a cup of tea away from the screen or talk it through with a colleague… What do you do to avoid emotional burnout?
I confess I have both a professional and a personal interest in this subject having been a community manager (CM) helping to set up an award-winning professional community at the ICAEW, and as a consultant working in a mentoring capacity with other CMs. Speaking on a professional level was I found useful recently was a discussion I had with Rachel Happe, one of the founders of the Boston-based Community Roundtable (CR), a new community for CMs to learn from each other, including accessing mentoring. Or to use its tagline: “A peer network for community managers and social media practitioners”.
Rachel started off by saying that in the US companies were despite the downturn starting to increasingly invest and hire people for community roles, but (in what was no doubt one of the driving forces behind setting up the CR) often they failed to hire senior enough people. The problem is that CMs in this position are being asked a lot, not just ‘running a community’ but dealing with crisis management issues for instance, which means a lot of pressure when such hires may not be trained strategically or have much experience in how to manage a business. This of course itself raises the question of whether companies considering hiring CMs for such pivotal customer facing roles should look to get help in defining early on what such a role should include. That’s a consultancy service we offer at Sift Groups, just to get the plug out the way!
Rachel’s informed view was that this not surprisingly put a lot of strain on people hired, faced with high expectations, and lack of experience at a senior level in knowing how and when to push back organisational demands. She said a lot of such CM roles did not come from a management background, did not have the skills and experience to operationalize such the role (see Rachel’s recent post ‘Eight Competencies to Socializing your Organization’ for example), which meant effectively what the know-how to help change the business were back to ‘square one’.
In particular the role of the CM in a profit-driven organisation where the culture maybe particularly corporate in style was highlighted by Rachel; this is set against the pressure from customers who (as Clay Shirky recently pointed out in his example of the UK bank HSBC’s climbdown in the face of a student revolt over bank fees hike — see Suw Charman-Anderson’s paraphrased account of his RSA talk) who can increasingly organise to put pressure on companies without the need for the efficencies of command and control at the disposal of the average corporate. In conclusion Rachel advised was that CMs in such a position need to have a core team around them to help operationalize the community within the business. Otherwise the problem of burnout, coupled with lack of senior level leverage and inexperience in strategy and operationalizing the role, could mean CMs walking away and leaving an online space which fails to deliver the ROI everyone wants to see it deliver.
PS: Maybe using the acroynm ‘CM’ for community managers is a bit jargonesque, what do you think? If you are looking at the demands of this role it ‘s certainly worth reading the 35+ comments to Jeremiah Oywang’s post ‘Job Hazard’s of the community Manager’.
Congratulations to Big White Wall which has won the 2009 MediaGuardian Award for Innovation for Community Engagement.
Good to see the National Equalities in Mental Health Programme on Twitter — cheers!
A few years ago I wrote a brief paper on empowerment. Here’s the paragraph on mental health groups; it’s only got five points:-)
Non-linear empowerment for self- help/consumer-run services
1 Strengthen consumer group leaders by empowering them with greater self-confidence.
2 Support and strengthen consumer group leaders by enabling them to use those new found skills and confidence to help empower individuals greater self-confidence regardless of gender, race, sexual orientation, age etc.
3 Promote greater individual participation in groups at all levels as a result of individual empowerment.
4 Enable groups to participate more widely in their communities, encouraging further individual self-empowerment with the support of group leaders.
5 Support efforts to change communities’ perceptions/actions regarding people with experience of mental distress, and in encouraging reflection on their own experience.
Thought I’d share the benefit of my experience in the NHS/healthcare e-commerce & web 2.0 with the following quick & dirty guide to promoting your healthcare product using web 2.0 tools:
Say your product currently already has a product site which has tons of great information about the product. Without too much time/effort the information could be lifted for pages to sit on a new blog. Product information would included along with independent sources such as the Mayo Clinic to ensure all medical issues and good practice is covered to help establish the blog’s credibility.
The marketing aim of this customer-centric blog would be to engage customers into giving reviews of the product, a well-documented highly trusted source of product information for customers. Your existing product video on YouTube would be embedded on a blog post, with a link from the current YouTube comments section to the blog. The idea would be for the UK-centric blog to have a mixture of customer video testimonials, and expert content on the proper use of your product. The RSS feeds off this blog could then be syndicated to websites and blogs to help bring in traffic and raise page rank.
Key is the fact that customers can post questions and queries in the comments, and see them answered by a moderator. They would also be encourage to post their own testimonial videos, pending approval of course.
This blog would then include the clear opportunity to social bookmark pieces to Digg, Stumble, and Twitter from each post, which would help SMO for the site.
To track conversations use Twitter search engine and pick up the RSS feed, to keep an eye on relevant key word terms and collect these in your RSS aggregator. This would also collect Google blog/news/Technorati conversations. These would then feed blogs to target as appropriate for link swops/rss syndication/comments/forum discussion involvement. You might also establish a twitter account such as twitter.com/myproduct to also take part in discussions with customers too, and invite them to the blog and Facebook Group via this route.
More importantly there would be a clear banner link through to a Facebook Group branded as per the blog, which would also include much of the same content as the blog (you can use the api which allows blog post to be posted automatically into Facebook for example).
The Facebook Group would nicely serve as a parallel marketing arm, seeded with group members, who in turn on joining would auto-alert their friends to the group’s benefits. Initially this would involve a search for existing UK Facebook Groups currently focusing on your product, and an appeal to their members to join. The Facebook Group would also include a clear banner link back to the blog. Facebook works via linking through profiles to make network marketing success, blogs work through conversations. This neatly divides the two arms of the campaign, though obviously there is cross-over.
I would start looking to see what’s listed as links for your healthcare product on a key public site such as NHS Choices, and therefore likely to be gaining significant traffic. Clearly those sites with discussion forums are most useful.
As stated above very quickly other blog & sites would be identified for involvement in discussion.
Plus a PPC/online advertising strategy could be considered for Facebook and Google Adwords based on identified ‘hotspots’ for likely customers. To back this up there’s this remark from Headshift’s Cybersoc from the new media event in Dubai via Twitter: “The guy from Microsoft advertising seems to be recommending advertising on Facebook. Odd. Probably true though.” On the other side of the debate check this out, though it does say Facebook CPM is cheaper than Google, there’s a reason for that: essentially that Google users are on a specific search page for a search-related reason, whereas for Facebook the prime reason is visiting a friend:
“Facebook impressions run 13 to 16 cents CPM. For comparison, our clients in aggregate pay $10 eCPM on Google, and $6 eCPM on Yahoo. The fact FB can’t command higher CPMs speaks volumes to how advertisers value those impressions.” Also see Bryant Urstadt’s Tech Review piece (Social Networking Is Not a Business*) from which this insight is taken from on the challenge of turning a profit from social network sites.
In the longer term would look to contact patients support societies to ensure factual info on your product plus web links are included in their ‘patient pack’.
TOWARDS A WORKING NON-LINEAR SCIENCE OF EMPOWERMENT
Stuart G. Hall, m-power
A paper for presentation during the Ninth Annual International Conference of the Society for Chaos Theory in Psychology and the Life Sciences in Berkeley, California, July 23-26, 1999
Abstract: This paper is based on the believe that people have an intuitive ‘chaos’ understanding of the world in which they live. This understanding is comparable to non-linear science. “The two productions of knowledge differ only in their argumentation premises, methodology, and consequently in their distinct manners – both valid – of reading the world.” (1)
Educationalist Paulo Freire found that by teaching illiterate people using a theory and action based on love, they learned to read and write by overcoming the cause – powerlessness. I have harnessed Freire’s approach in developing a non-linear science of empowerment based on people’s intuitive ‘chaos’ understanding. The aim is to help people to overcome their fears and lack of confidence.
Keywords: chaos, consciousness, empowerment, envionment, love, metaphor, non-linear science.
CONTACT INFORMATION: Stuart G. Hall, 12 Cross Rd, Leicester, UK LE2 3AA; Tel: 00 +44 (0)116 2707586. e-mail: stuarth@dircon.co.uk www.m-power.org.uk
Introduction
“The deepest error of modern biology is the entrenched belief that organisms interact only with other organisms and only adapt to their material environment. This is as wrong as believing that the people of a village interact with their neighbours but merely adapt to the material conditions of their cottages. In real life, both organisms and people change their environment as well as adapting to it.” (5)
In ideal terms people are equal to other organisms in the ability to change the environment. We are different from other organisms, from animals, by virtue of our consciousness. We are different from other people for the same basic reason. The problem is that the environment in which we live is organised according to need, not love. Consequently we can easily grow up in an environment colonised by contradictory values. For example Darwin in his ‘Descent of Man’ attempts to confront the contradicatory values of Victorian England by arguing that human evolution is based on love. (6)
All people have the ability to change their environment, but not equally. While ‘most people’ appear to simply adapt in order to survive, conversely: “The educated individual is the adapted person, because she or he is better ‘fit’ for the world.” (5) Both have been colonised by the values of the powerful, argues Freire, utlising psychiatrist Franz Fanon’s observations of the effects of French colonisation in Algeria (6).
Understanding is Survival
The idea that there could be a people’s knowledge substantially equivalent to educated knowledge is acknowledged by Edwin Lazlo in terms of “the growing convergence between the mystical worldview (predominantly, but by no means exclusively Eastern) and the emerging paradigm of reality among scientists at the cutting edge of contemporary knowledge”. (7) It is rare to find anyone arguing this kind of equivalence in the West, and for good reason, the colonisation of consciousness by the values of need and knowledge has had longer to run: “European mathematics is mathematics: all other mathematics is anthropology. That explains why this other mathematics belongs to what has been called ethnoscience.” (19) Consequently people’s collective silence is correlated with stupidity, when it is first and foremost an adaptive response to an environment where people perceive they do not have a ‘voice’.
Labov makes this point in his study, The Logic of Nonstandard English in refuting educational psychologists who argued that Black speech patterns were unable of logically (logic=linear=standard) expressing abstract concepts. He examines a statement about the non-existence of heaven by a boy called Larry to illustrate his point:
Non-linear:
“’Cause you see. doesn’ nobody really know that it’s a God,
y’know, ‘cause I mean I have seen black gods, pink gods, white gods. all
color gods, and don’t nobody know it really a God. An’ when they be sayin’
if you good, you goin’ t’heaven, tha’s bullshit, ‘cause you ain’t goin’ to no
heaven, ‘cause it ain’t no heaven for you to go to.
Linear:
1 Everyone has a different idea of what God is like.
2 Therefore nobody really knows God exists.
3 If there is a heaven, it was made by God.
4 If God doesn’t exist he couldn’t have made heaven.
5 Therefore heaven doesn’t exist.
6 You can’t go to somewhere that doesn’t exist.
That is an example of non-linear understanding in expressing an abstract concept. If you need more proof of people’s intuitive understanding of chaos, of its equivalence to knowledge, how about in survival? An example of what I’m trying to say is provided by a recent study of drug users from the late 1970’s New York, and their response to the emergence of a fatal new illness:
“In the period from 1976 to the early 1980’s, seroprevalence in New York rose from zero to about 50%…The epidemic then entered a period of dynamic stabilization…Although mathematical models have suggested network saturation may have been an important part of the stabilization process (Blower, 1991), the sociometric analysis of drug injectors’ networks conducted during the research for this volume suggest that the extent of network saturation may have been quite limited.
“Behaviour change probably made a major contribution to the stabilization of seroprevalence. In spite of a popular image that would suggest that either “slavery to their addiction” or “hedonistic, selfish personalities that ignore risks and social responsibility,” drug injectors in New York (and indeed, throughout the world) have acted both to protect themselves and others against the AIDS epidemic. Thus, by 1984, before there were any programs other than the mass media to inform them about AIDS or to help to protect themselves, drug injectors in New York were engaged in widespread risk reduction…Furthermore, observations on the street confirmed this by showing that drug dealers were competing with others for business by offering free sterile syringes along with their drugs as AIDS-prevention techniques.” (10)
Understanding unpredicatability is key to survival. “Case study after case study of the human rather than the chemical level reveals our capacity – by no means 100% reliable, but to a higher degree than present chaos theory dictates – to predict the future in situations of extreme instability.” (11)
Before the advent of meterology people’s understanding of the unpredicatbale behaviour of weather was key to the success of their harvest, and hence their survival. Fifty years ago a panel of US scientists was set up to examine the validity of 153 traditional weather sayings: “The panel found that at least 80 of them were sound. The early weather forecasters had come to the same conclusions about what they saw in the sky as have today’s experts with modern knowledge and scientific principles to help them.” (14) Typically people’s understanding is expressed in metaphor – a powerful tool in simply communcating the principle that simple laws can result in complex results for example (15: schroder-quote in previous text):
“For want of a nail, the shoe was lost; For want of a shoe, the horse was lost;
For want of a horse, the rider was lost; For want of a rider, the battle was lost;
For want of a battle, the kingdom was lost!”(Gleick)
Towards a working non-linear science of empowerment
Non-linear empowerment works by working with people’s understanding of chaos and change, often understood in spiral metaphor: “The desert is not a circle. It is a spiral. When we have passed through the desert, nothing will be the same.” (18) In other words: “The psychology of the mature human being is an unfolding, emergent, oscillating spiraling process marked by progressive subordination of older, lower-order behavior systems to newer, higher-order systems as man’s existential problems change.” (19)
As an example of how non-linear empowerment would work in practice I provide the following model I designed where the goal is to supporting consumer group leaders:
Non-linear empowerment for self- help/consumer-run services
1 Strengthen consumer group leaders by empowering them with greater self-confidence.
2 Support and strengthen consumer group leaders by enabling them to use those new found skills and confidence to help empower individuals greater self-confidence regardless of gender, race, sexual orientation, age etc.
3 Promote greater individual participation in groups at all levels as a result of individual empowerment.
4 Enable groups to participate more widely in their communities, encouraging further individual self-empowerment with the support of group leaders.
5 Support efforts to change communities’ perceptions/actions regarding people with experience of mental distress, and in encouraging reflection on their own experience.
I believe Paulo Freire’s pedagogic model based on love is useful here, as he emphasises the importance of ‘student’ and ‘teacher’ working on an equal level – despite their obvious differences in power. To paraphrase Freire, both must be ‘co-intentional’, as both are subjects in the task of unveiling reality (21).
—————————————————————————————————————-
References
(1) Freire, Pedagogy of Hope, chap 6. Or to put it in more intuitive language: “These peasants know more than we do.”.
(2) Lazlo, The Whispering Pond, Foreward. “Perhaps the most significant development in recent times… is the growing convergence between the mystical worldview (predominantly, but by no means exclusively Eastern) and the emerging paradigm of reality among scientists at the cutting edge of contemporary knowledge .” For mystic I use the phrase intuitive chaos understanding – a phenomena hidden to most academics in the West because they have been educated to see the world along linear lines. Not surprisingly therefore the orientation of current non-linear psychology is ‘top-down-linear’, as its aim is essentially improved control of the human environment, rather than to attempt to work with it.
3. Hall, Chaos & Love: A non-linear model of empowerment in philosophy and action for self- help/consumer-run services/programs, workshop to be presented at the International Association of Psychosocial Rehabilitation Services Conference, Washington, May 2000.
Loye, Darwin’s Lost Theory: A New Grounding For The Chaos Revolution
Introduction
1. See ‘Chaos and Crime’, T.R.Young, in ‘Chaos, Criminology and Social Justice: The New Orderly (Dis)Order, Ed. by Dragan Milovanovic, 1997 for the inspiration for this distinction. (SPIS 364)
2. ‘A Way of life for Agnostics,’ James Lovelock, Gaia Circular, Summer 1999.
3. See Eric Fromm, ‘The Art of Loving’.
4. Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed; Pedagogy of Hope.
5. ibid, Pedagogy of the Oppressed.
6. Franz Fanon, Wretched of the Earth
7. See my web site: www.m-power.org.uk for further proof. The web designer was my father, Dr Bob Hall.
People’s Knowledge
8. The Logic of Nonstandard English, William Labov: cited in Sociology: Themes and Perspectives: M.Haralambos/R.M.Heald.
9. Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of Hope.
10. Friedman SR, Curtis R, Neaigus A, Jose B, Des Jarlais DC, ‘Social Networks, Drug Injectors’ Lives, and HIV/AIDS,’ 1999. New York, Kluwer/Plenum.
11. James Gleick, ‘Chaos: Making a New Science.’
People’s knowledge of chaos: ‘It’s raining by planets’
12. Jonathan Wilshere, Leicestershire Weather Sayings, 1980.
13. Ibid.
14. Weather Wise, Reader’s Digest publication, 1980. Folk sayings even recognise the dangers of correlation: “The moon and the weather may change together, But change of the moon does not change the weather,” in W.G.Willis Watson, ‘Calendar of Somerset Customs, Superstitions, Weather Lore & Popular Sayings’’, 1920.
17. Jonathan Wilshere, Leicestershire Weather Sayings, 1980.
Interaction between the two sets of chaos knowledge.
18. Ervin Laszlo, The Whispering Pond: A personal guide to the emerging vision of science. I include ‘people’s knowledge’ with the mystical, and in connecting it with Freire’s point about people’s knowledge contained in metaphor, it is worth citing Julien Green, “Suite Anglaise,’ 1972: “It is tempting to believe that mystics lack intellectual clarity, and that they easily confuse one thing with another. It is the symbolism they use which explains this mistaken view: a careful reading of the writings of the saints dealing with their visions, shows that once the transition is made from the tangible to the symbolic world, they never mix their images, but consistently adhere to the proportions they have chosen. Why is this? The answer is these images are the exact representation of the truth which they contemplate. In fact no-one is more precise than a mystic, and the mystic is not a dreamer.”
19. Thomas Crump, ‘The Anthropology of Numbers’, 1990.
20. Jurgen Habermas makes a call for an equal discourse in his philosophic writings. However, his idealistic approach fails to recognise the material & power differences between participants. CHECK.
21. Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed.
Hmm, interesting piece in the NY Times, while this applies to older people and how they think differently its a way of mentally approaching the world which I kind of like myself, though it’s taken some hard work to get there, I’m looking forward to my ‘early retirement’ so to speak.
Older Brain Really May Be a Wiser Brain
When older people can no longer remember names at a cocktail party, they tend to think that their brainpower is declining. But a growing number of studies suggest that this assumption is often wrong.
Instead, the research finds, the aging brain is simply taking in more data and trying to sift through a clutter of information, often to its long-term benefit.
The studies are analyzed in a new edition of a neurology book, “Progress in Brain Research.”
Some brains do deteriorate with age. Alzheimer’s disease, for example, strikes 13 percent of Americans 65 and older. But for most aging adults, the authors say, much of what occurs is a gradually widening focus of attention that makes it more difficult to latch onto just one fact, like a name or a telephone number. Although that can be frustrating, it is often useful.
“It may be that distractibility is not, in fact, a bad thing,” said Shelley H. Carson, a psychology researcher at Harvard whose work was cited in the book. “It may increase the amount of information available to the conscious mind.”
For example, in studies where subjects are asked to read passages that are interrupted with unexpected words or phrases, adults 60 and older work much more slowly than college students. Although the students plow through the texts at a consistent speed regardless of what the out-of-place words mean, older people slow down even more when the words are related to the topic at hand. That indicates that they are not just stumbling over the extra information, but are taking it in and processing it.
When both groups were later asked questions for which the out-of-place words might be answers, the older adults responded much better than the students.
“For the young people, it’s as if the distraction never happened,” said an author of the review, Lynn Hasher, a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto and a senior scientist at the Rotman Research Institute. “But for older adults, because they’ve retained all this extra data, they’re now suddenly the better problem solvers. They can transfer the information they’ve soaked up from one situation to another.”
Such tendencies can yield big advantages in the real world, where it is not always clear what information is important, or will become important. A seemingly irrelevant point or suggestion in a memo can take on new meaning if the original plan changes. Or extra details that stole your attention, like others’ yawning and fidgeting, may help you assess the speaker’s real impact.
“A broad attention span may enable older adults to ultimately know more about a situation and the indirect message of what’s going on than their younger peers,” Dr. Hasher said. “We believe that this characteristic may play a significant role in why we think of older people as wiser.”
In a 2003 study at Harvard, Dr. Carson and other researchers tested students’ ability to tune out irrelevant information when exposed to a barrage of stimuli. The more creative the students were thought to be, determined by a questionnaire on past achievements, the more trouble they had ignoring the unwanted data. A reduced ability to filter and set priorities, the scientists concluded, could contribute to original thinking.
This phenomenon, Dr. Carson said, is often linked to a decreased activity in the prefrontal cortex. Studies have found that people who suffered an injury or disease that lowered activity in that region became more interested in creative pursuits.
Jacqui Smith, a professor of psychology and research professor at the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan, who was not involved in the current research, said there was a word for what results when the mind is able to assimilate data and put it in its proper place — wisdom.
“These findings are all very consistent with the context we’re building for what wisdom is,” she said. “If older people are taking in more information from a situation, and they’re then able to combine it with their comparatively greater store of general knowledge, they’re going to have a nice advantage.”
Google’s long-awaited attempt to manage your medical records is live.
Google Health launched today in what could portend a far more personal, digital future for health-related data.
“It’s a really exciting day for us. We’re really happy to be able to offer this service to all our users,” Marissa Mayer, the Google executive overseeing the health project, said in a webcast to mark the launch.
Proponents of Google Health and Microsoft’s similar Health Vault say they could make medical data more accessible for patients, enabling them to take control of their health care. Opponents worry that putting the information online is a threat to privacy and unlikely to make much of a difference in how doctors treat their patients.
Early testers like ZDNet’s Garett Rogers weren’t shy about remarking on the limited nature of the offering. “Basically, Google Health is what I expected — an enhanced way to search for health-related material. Lots of people were hoping for a more feature-rich product (including myself) but that’s not usually how Google operates,” Rogers wrote.
Call me old-school, but I fall into the second camp. Seeing “alexis.madrigal” next to my body’s stats makes me uncomfortable. Slowly, I’m being imported into virtual space, and this creature alexis.madrigal is becoming more and more fleshed-out. Are they going to start recommending medium shirts or products based on my BMI?
I’d probably feel better about giving up this data if Google Health actually did something. Right now, I can’t imagine how I’d use the app and yet Google has managed to find a way to bring information about my body into their data-crunching fingers’ reach.
Bertalan Meskó notes on ScienceRoll, “I hope I will never get pharma ads or spams from doctors based on my Google Health profile.
Anyone want to put odds on whether Google Health information will eventually be used for targeted advertisements? Is anyone planning to use Google Health to manage the metrics and tests for your real-life avatar? I’d love to hear your stories.
NY Times piece that reveals hard work can kill you (the perils of blogging as a profession). Hmm, I’ve worked somewhere a bit like that before. But hey isn’t being compulsive considered kinda normal?
Now that I finished at MDX I’ll remember all the people, and a few achievements including:
1. Encouraging the use of blogs and wikis both internally and in medical imaging. Particularly good for keeping in touch with CN.
2. Making a connection with open access publisher BioMed Central.
3. Developing a good relationship with Reuters (nice working with Jeremy Snelling in Reuters Health).
4. Writing a handful of keynote articles (eg below).
5. Campaigning on the EU EMF Directive which effectively would have banned the use of MRI.
6. Social media optimization: using newly introduced Google News comments to good effect (not to mention persuading them to list our new RSNA community in News after first being turned down).
Not to mention gets Reuters in China to talk to Medicexchange in China about content.
I guess you could say I cared about content.
Would have been good to see a link up with the healthcare technology rating website KLAS, though I appreciate that business strategy certainly wasn’t my job. Anyhow now I’m working on a new social networking site, with backing from Microsoft UK, so I hope some of that MDX experience will come in useful. Finger’s crossed!
Anyhow enough of my perspective, having just racked down (21 May) compete.com its nice to see how MDX has fared against its principal rival Aunt Minnie, over the year. It looks good. Nice to be part of bringing a PLC to life.
