chimoose talks nonsense

Livestrong CEO Doug Ulman - the LiveFromStubbs Podcast

2012-01-11T07:00:00.001-06:00

This article was originally posted as "Social Innovation in Healthcare – LiveFromStubbs with Doug Ulman, CEO of Livestrong" on WCG's Common Sense blog.

The 3rd edition of the LiveFromStubbs podcast was a special one for me for more than one reason. First, it was my first on-camera episode – and I’m always happy to share a stage with regular hosts Aaron Strout and Kyle Flaherty. But more importantly, the subject of our interview was Doug Ulman, the CEO of the Livestrong Foundation. This is a big deal for me not only because of who Doug is – the CEO of one of America’s most remarkable and forward-thinking non-profits, and the man Fast Company has called “The Most Savvy Health Care Leader in Social Media” – but also because of how we came to be where he is.

A 3-time cancer survivor, Doug was forced to a difficult realization at a young age:

“[After being diagnosed with cancer,] All I wanted to do was connect with other individuals who’d been down the same path … I could not find them. I thought I was the only one. I felt all alone. I knew all the statistics but I could not easily access other people.”

- Doug Ulman, CEO of the Livestrong Foundation at Social Health 2010 (SxSH.org)

Livestrong has dedicated itself to improving the lives of people affected by cancer worldwide. And a big part of their strategy involves connecting cancer patients and their families with the resources they need … which often means helping to connect them to people like themselves – people who “have been down that road before,” as Doug puts it. Over the last two years, Facebook and twitter have become the largest source of referrals of survivors to Livestrong.

One of the really unique ways that Livestrong helps people who approach them is to offer the services of a “Navigator” – a person who can help point them directly to the resources they need (and 90% of whom use twitter to interact with participants). Increasingly, those resources either leverage the principles of social media (the groundswell vs. top-down, corporate hierarchy) or are literally built on social media platforms. LiveStrong has positioned itself not as a be-all, end-all source for information or a lone behemoth, but as a “catalyst and convener” of all those who share an interest in living with (and ultimately beating) cancer. Just a few weeks before our interview, Doug and his team hosted an event in Austin called the LiveStrong Young Adult Alliance – more than 200 organizations focused on helping young adults dealing with cancer. That kind of crowdsourcing is a natural way to ensure that the best ideas bubble to the top, and that the right people are in the right place to make those ideas real. And it’s use of Facebook has been particularly remarkable – operating separate communities that focus not only on different geographic regions, but also different types of cancer … whatever can deliver the most value to the audience it’s there to serve.

With that kind of thinking, it’s easy to see why Livestrong has made the transition from being a cause into a movement. Enjoy the video, follow Doug on Twitter, and be sure to check out the great work that Livestrong continues to do. For more LiveFromStubbs podcasts, click hereand subscribe!

A new video podcast for Social Media, Music and Barbecue - @LiveFromStubbs

2011-12-02T07:00:00.002-06:00

I'm really excited to announce that the Live From Stubbs video podcast is live! This show is the brainchild of my friends Aaron Strout and Kyle Flaherty - and is the follow-up to their highly successful Quick and Dirty Social Media Podcast.

The Quick and Dirty podcast, originally created by Aaron along with the lovely and talented Jennifer Leggio, was a tremendous success. 100 episodes in, the Q&D show was heard by about 5,000 people every week. I've been really pleased to be associated with both shows ... as an early guest and semi-regular-backup-guest host on the QnD, and as the cameraman on this first episode of Live from Stubbs.

There are some notable format changes in the new version. One is fairly obvious - the show has moved from pure audio on BlogTalkRadio to a video format on YouTube. Eventually, the goal is to have the show taped in front of a live studio audience at the legendary Stubbs Bar-B-Q restaurant. [Note: Stubbs is a client of WCG, my employer] The second major format change is that rather than a thirty minute show, each show is now a YouTube-friendly 10 minutes or less. The third change is that, rather than a pure digital/social media focus, every other show will be focused on music and barbecue ... reflecting the show's home base in Austin. Look for some terrific guests coming up as we branch out into those new worlds.

I encourage you to take a look at this first episode. Aside from my ham-handed camera work (I have subsequently been replaced behind the lens), I think it's great. The first guest, Andy Sernovitz, was brilliant as usual. Andy is the CEO of SocialMedia.org and the founder of the Word of Mouth Marketing Association (WOMMA). I'd love to get your feedback on the show, the new format, and anything that you'd like to see featured on upcoming episodes. In the meantime, if you like the program, be sure to subscribe to the LiveFromStubbs YouTube Channel - and tell all your friends!!

Final note: Terrific job by Brad Mays, the show's executive producer, and Naimul Huq, whose editing was brilliant.

Co_Health Recap: The Social Wellness Episode 2011

2011-10-27T12:58:00.004-05:00

UPDATE:
Bob Merberg (@wellwork; the Employee Wellness Network) was kind enough to create and share a MindMap of the last #co_health chat ... If you're a visual learner, you'll want to check it out. Thanks, Bob!!
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It was a freewheeling time on last week's #co_health chat. After a pretty solid series of "special guests," Fran and I decided to return to our usual format - focusing on the "social" aspects of wellness in the workplace. As an overall summary, I'd go out on a limb and say that making wellness social is still high on the priority list of our members, but that we're still in the very early stages of true innovation in this space.

Fran was driving the @co_health account this month, and kicked things off with the first question:

T1: How are you making wellness social?

@jmcnichol led us off by noting that her organization has begun to use facebook as the center-point for sharing wellness info with their employees and their families. This is pretty significant, as it's one of the rare corporate wellness initiatives I'm aware of that has recognized the importance of their employees' families in carrying wellness through to all aspects of their lives. She also encourages employees to guest-post on her blog about their wellness experiences - which allowed them to share their experiences with family and friends inside and outside the organization.

Fran indicated that her clients were using, at various times and measures, offline social challenges, blogs, podcasts and twitter on behalf of their wellness programs ...

@michellewjames noted that within her workplace (Intel), employees were using an internal social networking tool focused on wellness ... but reminded us that the wellness+social equation doesn't necessarily revolve around technology - and that one of the most popular social wellness initiatives were employee walking groups - delightfully low-tech!

@MarkFrisk also noted that, no matter how you're approaching wellness, it's more important to focus efforts on improvement rather than just participation.

We then moved on to

T2: For those using social media tools, which are you using? And how did you decide which one(s) to lead with?

Fran noted that most of her clients tended to look at where employees were already congregating and interacting - often facebook or twitter - and start from there. Not surprisingly, the group's consensus here was around the fact that social wellness is a new enough topic that we're in the "low-hanging fruit" stage ... that our initiatives were focused on the places where we can get the most impact for the least investment and risk.

T3: How have leaders supported your efforts? Have they embraced them or been skeptical (or worse)?

@FitnessFleet noted that in his/her experience, leaders had been extremely supportive, and focused on working in partnership with others to bring wellness solutions into the workplace. There seemed to be a pretty big variety of experiences here, though, with leadership ranging from active engagement (executives visibly joining walking groups and funding special wellness initiatives) to generally ignoring wellness ... thereby allowing it to "fly under the radar."

The conversation then evolved into one about metrics ... which at this point seem to be almost exclusively based either a) # of participants and/or b) number of reads/listens of wellness materials. Most agreed that these are necessary baseline metrics, but expressed desire to become more sophisticated over time to actually measure changed behavior and improved health in addition.

T5 (Fran skipped T4): Have you segmented your audience, using different tools and approaches for different groups?

Much of the "segmentation" that's been employed to date seems to revolve around special program offerings for people with specific chronic conditions (e.g., diabetes) or lifestyle choices (e.g. smoking cessation). And there was interest in using a Prochaska-esque model of readiness for change to use different messaging and programs - but I don't think that any of our members were doing so at this point.

There was also a divergent conversation thread that emerged and is worth noting related to the linkage (or not) between open enrollment and wellness programs. A number of our members have begun to use social media and collaborative tools around open enrollment and benefits choices, and fran suggested that OE might make a good gateway to start using social tools and methods for wellness also. As @jmcnichol astutely noted, though, open enrollment is a once-a-year thing ... and wellness is 24/7. The implication being that the messaging around them is just different.

We closed with T6: What roadblocks to Social efforts are you experiencing?

The biggies that I called out were that, in many cases, employees were pretty sensitive about any health data being shared on open channels, and perhaps more damaging, that corporate digital security practices caused most social channels to be blocked. Fran noted that many employers were battling with the "where do we begin" question as well as a concern about how much of a time commitment would be involved. And @jmcnichol noted that her biggest challenge was just in getting people's attention - they're subject to a veritable firehose of data every day.

To close: It should be noted that we're in the midst of a very interesting opportunity with MeYou health. As you know, we believe very strongly in the smarts, passion and commitment of the #co_health gang ... and we'd like to parlay that aggregation of awesomeness into something really special for our members. We'd like to see this group weighing in on new programs, new services, new technologies and new business models focused on wellness in the workplace. We've had a number of opportunities in our nearly two years of existence (including a rather successful foray into crowdsourcing innovation led by CoHealth-er @CarolHarnett (BodyShocktheFuture Contest).

We've now found another opportunity that we think is worth our (read: your) time with MeYou health. As you learned if you tuned into our September episode (Health Games) with Trapper Markelz, there are some potentially paradigm-shifting activities going on that we'd like to be a part of. MeYou has a health program that they're allowing us to pilot - LEARN MORE AND SIGN UP HERE NOW! MeYou Health/CoHealth Social Health Pilot

CrumpleItUp Redux: Dr. StrangeFit || Or: How I learned to stop worrying and love conference calls

2011-10-01T18:19:00.002-05:00

As noted last month, I am re-publishing some of the "greatest hits" from CrumpleItUp. This one came to mind as the Healthy Back Store randomly used a quote of mine that I gave to Steelcase in 2008 about their (absolutely brilliant) Walkstation product.
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Dr. StrangeFit || Or: How I learned to stop worrying and love conference calls
from Crumple it up! blogs by Greg Matthews (Originally posted on May 15, 2009)

Meetings - and their cousins, conference calls - are a big part of life in corporate America. Yet I don't know anyone who really likes most meetings. There are some exceptions in my own life: I love our Social Media Chamber of Commerce meetings, for example. And I like the weekly meeting that my peers and I have with our boss. [Note to self: Daily suckup - CHECK.]

And conference calls are even worse . . . they're just not a very human or engaging way to interact. But, like most of the clouds in life, I've found a silver lining in this one. And its name is Walkstation.

Last week my colleague Laura Tabler wrote about her incredible success in fitness and weight loss that's centered around walking during her favorite shows. I was seriously inspired. I mean, losing over 23 pounds in 8 weeks while making minimally invasive life changes is really impressive. So while Laura does her walking as she feeds her passion for reality TV, I am going to do MY walking while I'm on conference calls. In fact, any call that lasts for more than 5 minutes is going to see me aboard the walkstation.

I've got about 15 lbs. that I'd like to lose . . . let's see if Laura's method works as well with me.

What are the little things that you could change to make your normal routine healthier?

[Editor's Note: For those of you to whom this title is pure gibberish, please click here]

Photo by Shane "the Pain" Regala

When was the last time you looked at your facebook settings?

2011-09-15T08:59:00.000-05:00

As you're probably aware, facebook has made some subtle but important changes this week to the way that people can share information on its platform ... see this article from Mashable for details. I generally am a pretty transparent guy, but facebook is, for me, a walled garden. Only for people I know and am friends with "in real life." I therefore wanted to make sure that, with the changes to facebook, that I knew exactly how they'd impact me. I wanted to be sure that my facebook status updates would continue to be for my friends, and ONLY for my friends.

As I was poking around on the site, though, I discovered that over the last 4 years, I have given about 14 million apps access to my data. This is bad. The reason it's bad is that many of the companies that made these apps don't even exist anymore, and each one is a potential security risk. So I'm writing this post to encourage you to prune your facebook apps, and make sure that the only ones with access to your account are the ones you WANT to be there. Here's how:

In the upper-right corner of your facebook page, select "ACCOUNT" and then "ACCOUNT SETTINGS." On the left-hand menu bar, you'll see "Applications" as an option. Select it ... and prepare to be blown away by how many apps have permissions on your facebook account. Facebook makes it easy for you, and shows you the ones that access your account most often ... so my advice is to scroll to the bottom, and start deleting anything you aren't using anymore. [Superpoke? Are you kidding? I installed that in 2007 and haven't seen it since!]

Lastly, given facebook's new capabilities for sharing status updates: If you're like me, and only want for your friends to see your status updates, you can change the default settings for all status posts: In the upper right corner, select "ACCOUNT" and then "PRIVACY SETTINGS."Click the gigantic radio button in the middle of the page called, "FRIENDS" and you're good to go. I'm going to get in the habit of updating my facebook settings every six months or so ... just to be safe.

Managing Twitter Followers

2011-09-03T16:24:00.004-05:00

Today Chris Brogan unfollowed me on Twitter, and it made me sad.

That sentence probably needs some unpacking; let me start from the beginning.
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Twitter has been really important for me in terms of building a career. It's connected me with business partners (like Jennifer McCabe), community co-founders (like CoHealth's Fran Melmed) and even potential employers (before I joined WCG). But more importantly, it's started literally hundreds of really great relationships. It has enhanced hundreds more existing relationships. In fairness, most of my really strong twitter relationships have a real-life component (although not all do). But that doesn't lessen the impact of the tool in terms of my general connectedness.

So when people follow me on twitter, I take it really seriously. That's harder now than it was a year (or two) ago because there are so many more spammers and 'bots out there who are either a) trying to sell you something, b) trying to hack your system, or c) trying to build an attractive-looking number of followers for one of the reasons above.

I follow people on twitter because I am interested in what they're saying ... or what it's likely they'll say, based on their bio, the lists they're on, or people we know in common. By following them, I'm making an investment in them. Whenever I follow someone, I always hope that they'll follow me back ... because that opens the possibility that we'll form a relationship, and begin to get to know each other. It doesn't always happen (in fact, it's a relatively rare thing), but if we *don't* follow each other, there is no possible way for that relationship - or value exchange, call it what you will - to happen.

Anyway, for the last couple of years, I've been using a tool called contax.io to manage my followers (it used to be called MyTweeple; it's recently been revamped and rebranded by its very clever creator Shannon Whitley). Contax.io makes it really easy to go in and look at the people who've started following me that week, and to decide whether I want to follow them back (sometimes), "hide" their profile from my contax.io list (so I won't have to sort through them again next week - this is what I do with bots) or block them (which is what I do with pornographers and obviously malicious spammers). It works really well for me.

And because of the proliferation of accounts that are NOT designed to allow a relationship between two individuals, one of the ways I spot the bots and spammers is to use a tool called twunfollow, which tells me who has unfollowed me that week. You see, bots and spammers like to follow an account, hope to get a follow-back, and then unfollow after a few days. When I see that's happened, I know I don't want to follow them.

But every once in a while, a friend unfollows me. And that always makes me a little sad. And it brings me back to the fact that my friend Chris Brogan was on that list today. To be fair, Chris and I are not bosom friends ... but we've broken bread and shared drinks together on multiple occasions, so even though we haven't seen each other for a while, I was sad to be losing the ability to stay in tune together on twitter. I was curious to see if Chris was unfollowing others as well ... and saw that he had unfollowed practically EVERYBODY (over 100,000 people for him). That was curious enough that I went out to look at his blog, and discovered his post, The Great Twitter Unfollow Experiment of 2011. And that made me feel better. Social media is like real life ... you make friends; you drift away from friends. Sometimes you have to disconnect in order to get closer. But the point is ... if you value the channel, and the relationships it brings, don't be lazy about managing the people who've "invested" in you by following you ... do them the courtesy of at least considering whether they're somebody you'd like to follow back. As I've found so often, it's worth the effort.

ADDED NOTE:
Want to be sure I am clear ... I mentioned Chris here because he was helping me to make a broader point, not because I'm concerned about him unfollowing everyone. On the contrary, I think that Chris is one of the most generous, likable guys in this business ... and he's doing what he needs to do (please read his blog post, linked above, for an explanation). He's a prince of a guy, and he takes a lot of unwarranted abuse. Want to be sure this post isn't interpreted like that by anyone.

Facebook Will Kill Photo Filters for Everyone

2011-08-30T10:45:00.001-05:00

via gizmodo.com

Great, thought-provoking article from Sam Biddle on Gizmodo ... definitely give it a read if you're into a) Instagram; b) facebook; or c) the relationship between the elitist digerati of the former versus the swarming masses of the latter.

On one hand, I agree that Instagram is special for two reasons ... it gives me, an amateur photographer, the tools to create photos that don't suck without investing thousands of dollars and hours to do so. Second, it give the the opportunity to share those photos with friends ... and in turn, it gives me a window to understand and appreciate those friends more deeply through the photos that they create and share.

On the other hand, I see here much ado about nothing. If, as Mr. Biddle asserts, Instragram will go on about its business; immune to facebook's copying of its service ... and if facebook users start using filters to make crappy photos crappier ... who cares?

What people do behind their own backyard fence is no business of mine - I don't see it, and I couldn't care less. For that reason, this article feels more like elitist claptrap than any kind of real social commentary. But I do thank Mr. Biddle for the thought-provoking piece, and Grant Harrison for sharing it.

The evil of food labeling

2011-08-18T07:00:00.001-05:00

Today's trip down memory lane is another post from Grant Harrison on the lamentably lost CrumpleItUp.com. Grant's wry wit is clearly displayed here; you'd never know that his ancestors were shipped from Millbank Prison to Australia generations before. [Note: This is not true. Not every Australian emigrant was a criminal. Especially the ones from New Zealand.]
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The evil of food labeling
By: Grant Harrison. Originally posted on December 7, 2008

the evil of food labeling

by Grant Harrison

If you’ve ever studied any foreign languages it will probably have dawned on you that there’s a link between the language itself and the character of the peoples who use it.

German is a very structured and precise language and breeds a very structured and precise population. People we want to build our cars and nuclear reactors. French is very lyrical and beautiful language but you can’t tell what they mean till they get to the end of the sentence. Even the varieties of English around the world can tell us about the character of the speakers or users. George Bush relishes his capability to present every idea using only ten one-syllable words. We can see how this simplicity has been reflected in US foreign policy!

My point is that the language used affects the ideas that tend to be generated by it. Take this thinking and apply to food labeling. Have you noticed that water has no nutritional value at all? Zero percent of what you need daily in carbohydrates, protein and fat.

So water doesn’t really matter?

Well…er...no actually, according to the Feinberg School at NorthWestern.

“Water is considered an essential nutrient because it must be consumed from exogenous sources to satisfy metabolic demand. Water constitutes approximately 60% of adult body weight. It is a catalyst for a majority of enzymatic reactions including those involved in nutrient digestion, absorption, transport, and metabolism. It is also required for facilitating excretion of metabolic waste by the kidneys. Inadequate intake of water compromises cell functions by contributing electrolyte imbalances, contraction of plasma volume, and inability to regulate body temperature”

It seems to me that water is an important part of nutrition. In fact we should be consuming approximately 2.5 to 3 liters (10.4-12.5 cups daily) to be healthy.

I suggest that our food labeling is not working right. The nutrition facts on my bottle of water (Im recycling the bottle as a Christmas decoration) says there are zero grams on trans fat and sodium – that’s good news. However, given that the water gives me 0% of what the label says I need in my daily 2,000 calorie diet I have to question why I'm bothering.

I just checked my Czechvar beer bottle – while it has 5% alcohol, it says nothing whatsoever about nutrition values. I have to assume it’s similar to water. Hurrah!http://www.chimoose.com/2011/08/remembering-crumpleitup.html

2011-08-17T07:00:00.001-05:00

Welcome back to "The Best of CrumpleItUp.com!" This was my second installment recounting how I started out in social media ... fun nostalgia time.

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Greg is Having Eggs for Breakfast, Part II

Originally posted on December 10, 2008

Greg is having eggs for breakfast - Part Two

by Greg Matthews

This is the second of several posts (click here for the first) about my plunge into the deep end of the social media pool. In addition to being wonderfully self-indulgent, I hope that it'll be instructive (and soothing) to anyone who's as cautious as I was about social media.

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Once I was up-and-running on my blog, it was time to turn my attention to Facebook. I changed my name from Elmer Fudd to Greg Matthews, posted a picture and a few likes-and-dislikes, and went searching for friends. I was and am fairly careful about who I “friend” in Facebook. As a general rule I only friend people whom I actually know. When possible, I restrict the list to people I’m actually interested in, although I have another rule: Don’t refuse people just because they’re boring. It’s mean. [NOTE: It is perfectly acceptable to de-friend boring people who are also loquacious; nobody wants to have their newsfeed filled with drivel, after all! In fact, I had to de-friend several people during this year’s political campaigns; there are just so many Sarah Palin parody videos you can watch without feeling nauseated.]

When I jumped into Facebook, I jumped in with both feet. By this time, exploring social media had become part of my job, so I made it my business to take that exploration seriously. I was updating my status 3 or 4 times a day, searching for friends regularly; adding applications that made my page more fun and interesting (cool! A movie compatibility test!) and posting pictures of myself. I found myself getting hooked on being able to check in with old friends and acquaintances I hadn’t seen in years . . . and yes, there was definitely a voyeuristic element to the pleasure in reading their correspondence and looking at their pictures.

I still have fun with Facebook, but I am a lot cooler now. I don’t really care about applications anymore; most of them are pretty stupid, filled with bugs, and send your personal information to God-knows-where. [NOTE: Any application WE develop will be cool, unintrusive, and lots of fun.] I like to use Facebook as a way to share cool pictures of places I go (in real time, thanks to iPhone’s brilliant Facebook app), to create clever status updates, and most of all to exercise my rapier wit with funny comments on my friends pictures and posts.

I should note here that my wife has played an important role in my development as a social media creature . . . and the best way to describe that role would be “wet blanket.” My wife is still very much where I was a year ago in terms of her distrust of social media. When I dive into something, I dive in all the way. So when I started spending too much time on Facebook (especially at home, especially after the kids were asleep) we had a big conversation about keeping Facebook in perspective. [NOTE: Conversation is a diplomatic word for this exchange, as my contributions consisted primarily of, “yes, dear.”]

In our next installment . . . Greg tells the world what he is having for breakfast using Twitter.

Wellness in the news - August's CoHealth Tweetchat

2011-08-10T17:19:00.000-05:00

For those of you who don't know, I co-lead a workplace wellness community called CoHealth (#co_health; @co_health on Twitter). This group meets once a month to talk about how to help people be healthier at work. You can learn more on my co-founder Fran Melmed's blog, free range communication. The next CoHealth tweetchat will be at noon EDT on Wednesday, August 17.

CoHealth is nothing if not topical. We've been super-focused on some big topics for the last few months (Employee benefit trends in July; Jamie Oliver's workplace nutrition initiative in June; Health incentives at work in May). Next week is going to look a little different for two reasons:

First of all, I'm going to be "going solo" - Fran is going to be on a well-deserved vacation. The second is that we're not going to have one huge topic to dive into ... instead, I've combed the world of wellness (OK, Fran did 99% of the work) to find the hottest topics in health and wellness. Welcome to the first Wellness News and Comment show!

Here's what I think we should delve into:

I. There are two conferences coming up in Philly in September - Social Health and the ePatient Conference. Who's interested?

II. Fowler and Christakis (the authors of Connected. Don't tell me you haven't read it.) are being questioned by the health establishment. Do you see aspects of health or unhealth as shared between your employees?

III. An Israeli study claims that your coworkers can kill you. Do you see aspects of better or worse health in various groups of employees? How can you reverse this trend if you can spot it? http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/08/are-your-co-workers-killing-you/

IV. Walgreens is widely reported to be offering a health insurance product in the future. What plans is your company making in the run-up to 2014 when health reform has its deepest impact? http://theweek.com/article/index/218134/walgreens-unusual-plan-to-sell-health-insurance

V. TOP SECRET HIDDEN TOPIC

If there are new stories that come up next week, we may build them into the schedule ... or if you've been intrigued by a new story, article or trend that isn't mentioned above - let me know! This is your big chance to shape the agenda for the tweetchat! ;-)

Just comment below, or tweet your idea out using the #co_health hashtag. Can't wait to see you next Wednesday at noon eastern ... and the third Wednesday of EVERY month.

CrumpleItUp Redux: Is Consumerism Making Us Sick?

2011-08-03T07:00:00.005-05:00

Another early post in this series of "The Best of CrumpleItUp" ... this time from Grant Harrison. Grant was never one to mince words (and still isn't). He's still shaking up the health establishment at his health design firm called The Future Well that he runs with Dr. Jay Parkinson. If you asked Grant today, I'm guessing he'd tell you that this post is truer than ever.
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Is Consumerism Making Us Sick?
By Grant Harrison - Originally published on CrumpleItUp.com on November 26, 2008

A Sport and Recreation Active New Zealand survey released a few days ago showed that more than 50 percent of people do 30 minutes or less "exercise" a week. Where "exercise" is a "noticeable increase in breathing and heart rate'. This is pretty bad. It is also unchanged from 1999 despite an estimated $900 million dollars spent per year (more than $200 per man, woman and child per year). They must be disappointed.
And this is not just a small pacific island thing. The UK is just starting a similar program which I fear will have the same level of success.

Why has this happened? I don't know. But let me share an argument with you.

Let's say there are 2 key factors behind so little sport, recreation and fitness:
1. people are lazy
2. our world economy is built upon consumption

The entire engine is built on all of us spending more money, buying more stuff - food, entertainment, things to take the effort out of daily life. As we learnt in the US after 9/11, a major act of patriotism is to shop. The dollars or pounds spent on promoting consumption are monumental. No one is selling self control.

Is there an answer?

Here's a "starter for 10". If people don't pay for it, it's not valuable. If it's not marketed (a lot), it won't be bought. I truly believe the answer will be a pill or some form of nanotechnology. Something that involves us reaching into our pockets, not strapping on our running shoes.

So what does this mean for all of us?

We'd better build a compelling health entertainment industry. Cos no one's buying "keep your mouth shut and go for a walk"!

Do you think I'm on to something here?
grant

CrumpleItUp Redux:Greg is Having Eggs for Breakfast, Part I

2011-08-02T07:00:00.004-05:00

Per yesterday's post, I am re-publishing some of the "greatest hits" from CrumpleItUp. This was my very first blog post on CrumpleItUp.com, the internet hub of Humana's Innovation Center, back in 2008. Seems pretty basic now, but back then it was pretty "big stuff" for a health insurance company to be publishing a health innovation blog! This post is recounting my first experience with Twitter ... fun to look back on now.
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This is the first of several posts about my plunge into the deep end of the social media pool. In addition to being wonderfully self-indulgent, I hope that it'll be instructive (and soothing) to anyone who's as cautious as I was about social media.
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Greg is Having Eggs for Breakfast, Part I
By Greg Matthews. Originally published on CrumpleItUp.com on November 21, 2008

When I joined Twitter in late 2007, I did it out of obligation. Everyone in business – at least our business – had started talking about social media. But most of us had done nothing more than read about it in Fortune or Fast Company.

It was starting to look pretty hypocritical. But I can tell you that I was not the least bit interested in making "friends" on Facebook or MySpace with total strangers. I didn’t have the energy to be interesting enough - often enough - to be a blogger. And I certainly didn’t care to tell anyone – whether I knew them or not – what I was doing every minute of the day on Twitter.

Up 'til that point, I had guarded my online identity with great care. My Yahoo profile page (way, WAY before real social media) said my name was Herve Villechaize (bonus points to anyone who can tell me who THAT is). My identity on Facebook and MySpace was Elmer Fudd – a 72 year old polygamist from Arkansas (most of those identifiers are not accurate). I had to introduce myself to the 1 or 2 friends I had in each place by stating that I was really Greg Matthews.

By the end of 2007, I decided that it was time to come out of the social media closet and put myself "out there" if I was ever going to have any real hope of understanding the phenomenon I was reading about. I started a blog. You can still find it at http://chimoose.blogspot.com. It was about whatever I felt like writing about – and it still is. It is composed mostly of updates on my family (lots of pictures and videos of my daughters that I still don’t feel comfortable posting to YouTube) but was interspersed with my commentary on whatever issues are on my mind . . . usually around politics and religion (and the separation of the two), health and health care, cool technology and IU basketball. My only regular readers are my immediate family, and I rarely say anything interesting to any group of people beyond that. I may someday, but I've decided that it's just not worth forcing. My little blog has served two nice purposes. 1) It got me out there testing stuff out. I know how blogger works, I know how to use Google Analytics to track traffic on my site, and I can even write simple HTML code to program buttons and links on my site. I also learned the art of the link, which was the beginning of my education about the new currency of social media.

You see, while there are a few people who are making money blogging, there are millions and millions more who are blogging because they have something to say, and they can always, ALWAYS find someone to listen if they try a little bit. After I'd been blogging for a couple of months, I noticed that other blogs I liked had "blog rolls" on them – links to other blogs that were relevant (or not) to the author. I decided that I might as well start a blog roll of my own as another way of sharing a little bit of myself – in this case, things I was interested in. What I didn't realize is that I was giving "link-love." What most bloggers want is an audience. And having other sites that link into your own is a great way to accomplish that – particularly because Google searches take the number of relevant links into consideration as their algorithm orders search results.

I had discovered a site called "Inside the Hall" – a blog about Indiana University basketball written by a group of young amateurs (by which I mean that they're not professional journalists - yet). I loved this blog because it was insightful, funny, and updated almost daily with good new material. In fact, it became my primary source of information about my favorite team very quickly. Since my family (the main readers of my blog, if you'll recall) are also Indiana fans, it was only natural for me to provide a link to Inside the Hall on my blog roll.

After doing so, it took about 12 hours for me to get a thank you note from one of the ITH bloggers. He had tracked back to my blog, read it, and realized that I was an IU fan living in Louisville. We sent a few emails back and forth, and formed a relationship of sorts. I am still a regular reader of and commenter on his blog. And I'd learned a great lesson about how to grow a network in the web 2.0 world.

Coming up next, Part 2 in the series: How I overcame my fear of Facebook, and what I've learned as a result

Remembering CrumpleItUp

2011-08-01T07:00:00.008-05:00

In 2008, I had the honor to lead the team that created one of the healthcare industry's first (if not THE first) innovation blogs. As the "face" of Jack Lord and Grant Harrison's vision of health innovation, CrumpleItUp.com wound up being talked about in places as diverse as the Wall Street Journal, John Moore's Chilmark Research blog and Fred Wilson's Google Talk on Innovation and Disruption.

In that mass of links, you'll probably notice that there isn't a link to the subject of this post - CrumpleItUp.com. The reason is that Humana's innovation team has gone a different direction, and elected to take the site down. You can find more about their current innovation efforts on the front page of Humana.com. Because CIU was a team blog, I elected to pipe the RSS feed into my Google Reader - which means that although even the Wayback Machine doesn't have archived copies of those original posts, I do. And believe me, when I discovered that I had an archived copy of every single post, I felt as if I'd just found the dead sea scrolls. Those posts document our journey towards truly transforming the healthcare industry to a health industry. For the next few weeks, and as often as I feel the urge, I will be re-publishing the best of those original blog posts, sometimes with my comments and annotations.

I'll share the first of them here with you ... written by Grant Harrison, who was at the time the VP for Consumer Innovation under Jack Lord, the Chief Innovation Officer and founder of the IC. Hope that you enjoy this trip down memory lane as much as I plan to.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

CrumpleItUp
By Grant Harrison. Originally published on CrumpleItUp.com on November 21, 2008

Welcome to crumple it up. It's our experiment to involve people from all over the world in healthcare innovation. As you explore you'll notice that we are linking across the web to YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Flickr. We are trying to make as many connections as possible.

Hopefully crumpleitup.com will become a health innovation hub - sharing ideas and developing inspiring health experiences.
We are passionate about bike sharing and social networking, the link between personal and planetary health, the potential for exergames and virtual worlds to entertain people to greater health and the potential of laughter to make people happier and healthier.

If you are passionate about this stuff, please let us know, tell people about us, reach out to us. Thanks for reading.

Grant Harrison
VP Consumer Innovation
Humana Inc

CoHealth Recap - Designing Incentives for Health and Engagement

2011-05-21T10:13:00.002-05:00

A Recap of the CoHealth Tweetchat (#co_health) from May 18, 2011

We were joined this month by Paul Hebert (aka @incentintel). Paul is the managing director and lead consultant for I2I. he’s been interviewed by the BBC, quoted in USA today, and writes for various blogs and HR publications. he’s also a member of the cohealth community, chiming in with wisdom on incentive design from time to time. As it turns out, there is no shortage of opinions in the CoHealth community about incentives and rewards programs in wellness ... which kept Mr. Hebert very much on his toes!! This turned out to be one of our most engaged chats ever - and we're grateful to Paul for guiding us through the tricky business of wellness incentives.

We started the chat (with Fran - @femelmed - driving the @co_health account) asking the group their favorite thing about spring ... turns out that there are a lot of baseball fans in the wellness business. Who knew?

Q1: @incentintel, give us a sense of you. What’s your general incentive philosophy?

Quoting Paul directly, "incentives should be used sparingly and with great care. They don't "make" folks do anything - simply give them choices. Incentives are blunt instruments - be careful... incentives in wellness are tough - we want quick results for breaking long-term habits - not always possible"

Our friend Janet McNichol (@jmcnichol) also chimed in: "I have a @incentintel quote on my wall, "a good incentive program involves many behaviors rewarded quickly in small amounts over time accompanied by genuine recognition & demonstrable progress toward the goal."

With that as a "warm-up", we dove right in to the meat with Q2: Knowing that, what’s critical to make an incentive actually do what you intend it to do?

There was a general sense that "rewards" and "recognition" serve very distinct purposes, and we began to explore that theme. Our group agreed by-and-large that incentives work first (and perhaps best) as attention grabbers:

"incentives should peak interest - get ppl to listen and pay attention - then you drive the changes in behavior thru education"

- Allison Kohler (@amkohler)

"incentives break inertia (because they are so strong) recognition maintains it (because it's more subtle)"

- Paul Hebert (@incentinel)

We also started to broach the subject of control and empowerment, with both Paul and Carrie from Ergotron (@giveafig) recognizing that 1) it's best to focus incentives on things your subjects can control; and that b) a sense of control over one's own space and time can actually be an incentive in and of itself.

We then decided to get a little bit more specific, and look at Q3: Lots of companies and partners are using financial incentives to get people participating. What are the risks?

Bob Merberg (@WellWork) shared a nice resource article from an unusual source (for this group, anyway!): Money over Matter: Can Cash Incentives Keep People Healthy?: Scientific American http://ow.ly/4Xu29

Paul introduced an interesting concept here ... the danger of using cash as an incentive creates a relationship that becomes transactional (in an escalating fashion over time). This can be powerful, as people "do the math" and think about "is this worth it to me?" But that kind of transactional relationship almost never touches the more significant and lasting psychological triggers associated with behavior change.

@DialDoctors characterized the role of cash incentives as a "front end" of behavior change as follows: "Incentives should act like the 1st 5 lbs you lose. They keep you pumped to maintain a healthier lifestyle."

And Paul, in making the point about the kind of incentives people really respond to, introduced an analogy that resonated with a lot of people (including me): "think of asking you buddy to help move you - offer them 6-pack vs. offering them $12 - one would insult them right?" That's a subtle difference, and also brings into question the nature of the relationship between the rewarder and the rewardee: Is it paternal or fraternal? The indication seems to be that a fraternal (perhaps more accurately, collegial) will be more effective in terms of actually producing desired behaviors.

Paul also introduced another important concept: that of timeliness of rewards ... noting that we tend to discount rewards that are further out in time. Today's reward now has much more value than a (less tangible) reward later - e.g., a burger today -> health tomorrow.

Q4: So, getting a sense that money isn't great for all. Where does it work and where should we use non-financial incentives?

Ray Goldberg (@raygoldberg) framed the question as one of gratification - and the power and challenge of delaying gratification. And it prompted one of our really interesting side conversations, concerning individuals' motivation for change. It started with a quote from Janet (@jmcnichol),

"Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels. -- A fav delayed gratification quote." A lot of folks chimed in that this was a favorite quote from them, but there was another (smaller, but noticeable) group that felt turned off. [Personally, I think a cheeseburger tastes awesome, and can't even remember what it feels like to be "skinny" ;-)]

Another idea that divided the group was about competitions (a la Biggest Loser). They are certainly popular in corporate wellness programs today, and some of our members swear by them (@dialdoctors is training every day after work and maintains a "challenge board" in the office). But I always found them a little uninteresting ... especially since (in my experience) when they get big enough, people always cheat. Paul (@incentinel) also noted that competitions have a dangerous side effect: They have losers. And we don't want to create losers.

We closed out by getting to the heart of the matter. Q5: What would you advise companies considering their incentive design? About outcomes and design?

An important debate sprang up about reward and incentive programs being based on behaviors vs outcomes. In the short term, focusing on outcomes seem both better and easier for the company ... if a company is trying to contain costs, for example, they might want to reward people who have a BMI in the "normal" range ... or for dropping X number of pounds. This has the added benefit of reinforcing norms as "goals." HOWEVER, this approach is fraught with difficulty, and many felt that outcomes-based incentive programs are eventually doomed to fail.

Behaviors are much better as a basis for incentive programs for several reasons:

- You can reward in a more timely basis, associated with seeing and reinforcing new, healthier behaviors

- The reality is that there is no "norm" and health looks different on different people. Focusing on outcomes is going to alienate or render ineligible a significant portion of your population.

Timeboxing incentive programs is also a fairly well-established best practice ... in other words, don't plan on having incentive programs that are open-ended and just go on forever; programs need to be evaluated for success and refreshed regularly. This is a lot easier when you know up front that you're operating a 90-day program, for example.

Another important element of incentive design is that it can't stand alone ... it has to be associated with recognition and support programs, training, and some level of company support. [Re: support, some in our group felt that having senior staff "bought in" and demonstrating wellness behaviors was critical, while others felt that it was a "nice to have." What we all agreed on is that that company at the very least needs to not put up obstacles to healthy behavior in the workplace.]

There were a TON of questions posed on that chat that the group (and especially Paul, in spite of Herculean efforts) wasn't able to get to, so look for follow-up next week on Fran's blog (http://www.freerangecomm.com/).

WRAP

While @incentintel massaged his weary typing-fingers, Fran wrapped us up, and reminded us about the next chat. As always, it'll be on the 3rd Wednesday of the month at noon EDT ... and in June that happens to be June 15. And we are incredibly excited to be featuring the program that IDEO is running with chef-turned-health-activist @jamieoliver, "Cooking & Company." Not to be missed!

Thanks again to Paul Hebert (@incentintel) and to all of our participants for a lively, envelope-pushing discussion ... and I'm sure it won't be long before incentives make another appearance on the show. If you have ideas for an upcoming show, just let Fran (@femelmed; fran@contextcommunication) or I know ... we'd love to hear from you.

CF = Cured Forever

2011-05-18T06:32:00.001-05:00

As many of you will remember from last year, one of the causes that I'm truly passionate about is finding the cure for Cystic Fibrosis.

Cystic fibrosis (CF) is a devastating genetic disease that affects the lungs and digestive system of tens of thousands of children and adults in the United States. Research and care supported by the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation is making a huge difference in improving the quality of life for those with CF. Help is needed now more than ever to ensure that a cure is found. To learn more about CF and the CF Foundation, visit http://www.cff.org.

I've had the opportunity to see first-hand how recent advances in treating CF can make an enormous difference in the lives of CF patients ... along with the amazing dedication of their families. The extended Matthews family has made a commitment to doing all we can to stop CF forever ... my parents, my brothers and their families will be walking for CF this weekend. I'm supporting them ... and I hope that you can too. Donations of even a few dollars can make a great difference. If you'd like to donate, I attached a link to my brother, Andy's donation page here.

Happy Mother's Day!

2011-05-08T06:02:00.000-05:00

Digital ecard created with Smilebox

My mom has changed her hairstyle once or twice since this photo was taken. Ironically, however, I have returned to my true "original" style ... which is to say, none. Happy Mother's Day, mom!

My favorite company video is ... WCG's

2011-04-28T07:00:00.004-05:00

I've always admired companies that had the guts and the smarts to try to capture their essence in video. And I've never worked for a company that did it really, really well. I've seen some great videos, though, and envied the companies that made them. Hubspot has done a few good ones; this one being the best of them:

My favorite company video, though, was Digg's version of Groove is in the Heart. Awesome stuff.

Digg Dubb: Groove Is In The Heart from Trammell on Vimeo.

But ... WCG's new company video has taken over the top spot in my heart. For those of you who know me, but don't necessarily get what my company does ... watch this. And you'll know why I love working there.

By the way, we're always looking for the very best, smartest, most creative and successful people in the world to come and join us. If you're interested, let me know via any of these channels:

Email
LinkedIn
Twitter

Sharing the Nonsense

2011-04-23T10:45:00.000-05:00

I've been playing around a bit more with my blogs (I'm trying to stay up-to-speed on Wordpress, Blogger and Posterous), and just found a feature that I love. As most of us know, the Big 3 things to remember are to make your content easy to:

Find
Consume; and
Share

I'm not going to address the first two here, but the third one is critical. I've been using an "addthis" button for years, but the truth of the matter is that most of the time, people don't want to push more than one button to share content. I knew that I wanted to make it easier to share the content on this blog (and I know that all five of my readers have been clamoring for the same thing) but have been having trouble making it happen. I'm not really very confident with my html skills, and I was having a hard time finding a sharing widget that was a) easily customizable and b) easy to get into the html code for this site. Well, I found one. Share This has created a sharing widget that is super-easy to customize, and so easy to get into your code that a moron could do it (one just did, obviously).

All you have to do is to pick your blogging service, select the display you'd prefer, pick the services you'd like to highlight, and then click a button to add the code to your blog. Voila! As you can see below, the Nonsense is now easier to share than ever!

CoHealth Recap - The mHealth Episode

2011-04-21T10:21:00.005-05:00

The post below is a recap of the workplace wellness tweetchat (#co_health) that I co-founded with Fran Melmed. For more information, background and history on CoHealth, see the CoHealth page on Fran's blog and our page on the Employee Wellness Network.

Today, Fran and I were honored to have one of the country's leading experts on mobile health as our co-host and content developer. Andre Blackman, whom I've known since my early days in Humana's Innovation Center, has become one of the greatest advocates for mobile health applications - especially as they impact public health and underserved health communities. Andre wears a lot of hats, but you can find him most of the time in one of these roles: the Director of Digital Communications and New Media at the American Heart Association, a member of the advisory board at the Mayo Clinic Center for Social Media, and blogger at Pulse + Signal. Fran and Andre did a terrific job researching and preparing for today's chat ... which wound up being one of our liveliest ever. After our introductions (which included several new and notable participants*), Fran kicked off with question one - a foundation for the rest of the chat:

Q1: What IS mHealth, anyway?

Andre responded: "mHealth is the use of mobile communications/devices for health services and information (apps, mobile sites, etc.)." He also added the first of what would turn out to be a treasure trove of links: This time to one of the most popular mobile health blogs; MobiHealthNews. He also referred us to a compilation video of what others think mHealth really is.

"mHealth is the fastest moving, most exciting segment I've ever worked in"
- Kathy Mackey

Q2: What's the value proposition for mobile health?

Andre noted that the great thing about the mobile opportunity is that instead of having people search for information or resources, it can come directly to them. He also pointed out that the number of people using mobile/smartphones has increased dramatically over the past few years, so there is a critical mass of users. For more information and statistics relative to mobile phone usage, Andre referred us to the Pew Internet Project and Susannah Fox's research as a leading example: http://bit.ly/ed4uQ4. Fran also noted that mHealth was "squashing the digital divide; [offering] simplified tracking [and] immediate access to information at point of need." When Kathy Mackey questioned whether there was really a digital divide in the workplace (e.g., company use of mHealth technology for wellness), Fran clarified that there are many people without smartphones in the corporate world: retail, manufacturing, etc ... and was backed up by Sarah Monley.

Fran then posed Q2a: "The growth has been tremendous, yet smartphone adoption still lags. Does that make SMS the better solution right now?"

Andre answered in the affirmative - that SMS is still the most available form of mobile communication, whether you have smartphone or not.

"Also key, the personal connection people have w/ their cell phones. As BJ Fogg says, 'we don't adopt mobile devices, we marry them.'"
- Carol Torgan

Q3: How have you seen SMS used to better public health that we in workplace wellness can benefit from knowing?

This prompted a flood of examples of SMS being used to successfully impact health and healthy behaviors. Andre: "a great program likeText4Baby which is aimed at expectant mothers, is a great example of how workplaces can show support; also initiatives like @Medic that focus on empowering community health workers make use of public health and mobile." Fran pointed to http://healthtxts.com as an interesting SMS-based behavior change support which is currently being researched.

Matt Pepe added that SMS has been shown in numerous studies to increase medication adherence, which in turn saves the healthcare system money. There were a couple of cautionary notes raised, though ... first from CTorgan: "Re SMS, etc, must remember issues with health literacy - see recent IOM report http://bit.ly/eA1h1H." Chia Hwu also noted some of the shortcomings of SMS: "SMS is powerful in a lot of ways but it's hard to track outcomes. Smartphones can push AND pull information." Along those lines, Jane Sarasohn-Kahn and Kathy Mackey pointed to some excellent studies on how smartphones are changing face of health http://bit.ly/ejlurX.

Dr. John Lapuma posed a question about whether Jamie Oliver uses SMS or #Likes with LA schoolkids, as it seems a perfect noncorporate public health fit. We all agreed, although nobody knew whether SMS was a part of his #foodrevolution program. Fran did note, though, that Jamie Oliver does have a new corporate venture: cooking & company, started with IDEO. We may be featuring some of the folks from that program as future co_health guests.

To close out the SMS question, Sarah Monley asked intelecare matt about what kind of 2-way SMS interactions were happening;perhaps texting with a personal coach? Matt responded affirmatively: "As well as automated systems which record what someone texts in and replies depending on the message." And LukeLibrarian painted a picture of a program in which a patient wears pedometer, and is reminded daily to text in their number of steps walked that day. Those texts then could populate a database, which can be analyzed in the context of monitoring overall health. And while it didn't come up in this week's chat, I wanted to be sure to give a shout out to "friend of the show" Chris Hall, whose SMS-based program, Mood 24/7 has shown real promise in treating and managing depression.

Q4: Let's talk about some examples of mobile-ready sites, another form of #mhealth - and more relevant to many right now.

This one prompted a flood of examples of mobile-enabled sites that our crew felt were innovative and/or particularly useful:

Kathy Mackey: "Humana & Walgreens have excellent benefit related sites & apps; MedPage Today has mobile ready site & popular app"

Andre: Example of a great mobile website is MedlinePlus and companies like Blue Cross of NC and Aetna have great mobile information applications. The HealthNAV app for @BCBSNC and AETNA site for apps. Another great org in the Maryland area that I just found out about, @Nexercise working on mobile for #co_health http://wapo.st/f0w3GH; SMS Best Practicse - Lessons Learned from a Text Messaging Pilot at CDC (webinar recorded, slides)http://1.usa.gov/hR4NcU

Fran Melmed: County Health Rankings has an interesting app: county health calculator: http://bit.ly/gk6uWp

BlausenGroup: Blausen healthcare apps are in over 12+ languages at 6-7 grade level on web & mobile to help w literacy

CTorgan: Another example, Keen doing a 15 min recess challenge: http://actbolder.com/challenge/113/

Q5: How can companies take advantage of all of these available tools, apps -- even if they're not producing them?

This one brings it all together. Fran noted that Companies can share recommended, vetted sites and tools with their employees. And let employees review their own favorites. Kerry Johnston felt that companies need to aggregate relevant information, provide links from intranet sources; and most of all let employees know it's OK to use them.

PFAnderson couldn't have been more clear about what role the company ought to be playing relative to mHealth: "CURATION! Collaborate with libraries & experts on assessment http://is.gd/R7xKjJ". Andre pointed to GE's @gehealthy (Healthymagination initiative) as a source of "a fantastic array of smartphone apps that companies should look at." Carol Harnett noted that yesterday's JAMA featured a great article on games in yesterday's JAMA http://bit.ly/eGGEwv.

To that end, I noted that I was really interested in how to build some mHealth games into my company's wellness arsenal - and that I am particularly intrigued by qubop's new iPhone 4 augmented reality game, "TapCloud." I had a whole bunch of folks who were ready and eager to brainstorm some workplace use cases for games like tapcloud; I'll be getting together virtually soon with Kathy Mackey, Jody Schoger, Janet McNichol and Chia Hwu to bang out some ideas. If you're interested, drop me an email at chimoose@yahoo.com or DM me at @chimoose. Whichever method you choose, be sure to let me know your email address and twitter handle.

Fran capped off the discussion by noting that there is a significant gap between the consumer health market and the company-provided health effort - and that it's time to close the gap! I think that we can all get behind that one.

This chat was chock-full of resources and links ... but there is no better source than all of you who were on the chat. Particularly notable experts are @mindofandre, @healthythinker @mobilehealth and @ctorgan; be sure to connect with them to stay in tune with all the latest.

CoHealth tweetchats occur on the 3rd Wednesday of every month at 12:00 noon EDT, so our next chat will be May 18th. We have a lot of exciting guests coming up in the not-too-distant future, including the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, MetLife and IDEO. As always, if you have ideas for topics or guests, please contact Fran or I and let us know!

* Jane Sarasohn-Kahn (who I FINALLY met in the flesh last month at SxSW) was in the house; Fran correctly pointed out Jane's web site as a wonderful resource for our group; http://healthpopuli.com. We were also honored to welcome new (or newish) participants Carol Torgan, P.F. Anderson, Brian Dolan, baciagalupe, Matt Pepe, Luke Rosenberger, and Paul Jacobs.

Slaying the Four Horsemen of the Social-Media Apocalypse

2011-04-14T09:07:00.002-05:00

via schedule.sxsw.com

Unbeknownst to me, the good people at South by Southwest (SxSW) recorded some audio from my "Core Conversation" - co-facilitated with my friend Jaime Punishill at Thomson Reuters - at the conference.

I loved doing this - largely because the crowd (and it was crowded there!) was so engaged in the conversation. If you have doubts about how your heavily regulated company can make use of social media, you may want to check this out.

Posted via email from chimoose is (pre)posterous

The magic of bit.ly

2011-04-06T08:53:00.001-05:00

I have used both bit.ly (a nice URL-shortener) and Tweetdeck (a nice place to manage your twitter accounts) for a long time.

But I was surprised this morning by a couple of features I wasn’t previously aware of:

First, bit.ly has a nice little tracker showing which platforms are most likely to drive click-throughs to the links I post. Given that I post probably 5-10 times more links on Twitter than on any other channel, I was surprised to learn that a majority of my clicks over the last two weeks have come from LinkedIn. It’s a good lesson for me to start posting more often in LinkedIn’s status update section!

The second surprise was in regard to the links between bit.ly and tweetdeck. I always knew that bit.ly was the default URL-shortener for Tweetdeck (BTW, this is a great feature; Tweetdeck will auto-shorten your links without leaving the tool). What I didn’t know is that I could enter my bit.ly API code into tweetdeck, and import all of those shortened links into my bit.ly account so that that can be included in my analytics reports. I’ll be curious to see how that impacts the metrics above over the coming weeks.

Greg Matthews

Group Director, Interactive and Social Media

North American Agency of the Year
— The Holmes Report

WCG
direct 512.236.5996
Twitter / skype chimoose
email gmatthews@wcgworld.com
LinkedIn gdmatthews

101 W. 6^th Street, Suite 330, Austin, TX 78701

• • • • • • • Go. Ahead.

Posted via email from chimoose is (pre)posterous

Facebook's new Privacy Pop-up

2011-03-20T07:50:00.001-05:00

Kudos to facebook for becoming more transparent and proactive when they introduce new privacy features ... as you can see in this image, facebook proactively notified me that some of my pictures and videos were available to those outside my circle of friends (something I have been proactively conscious about limiting). I was able, with a single click, to go to my relevant privacy settings page and adjust them to my liking.

I'm glad that the message about privacy is finally getting through.

To change your privacy settings, just:

Go to Account -> Privacy Settings
Under "Sharing on Facebook", click "Customize Settings"
Adjust each setting according to your preference ... and while each of us is different, my advice is to ratchet everything back to the "Friends" level ... if you find that too restrictive, you can always ease off a little later on.

Greg Matthews

@chimoose

my blog: chimoose.com

Posted via email from chimoose is (pre)posterous

Austin - Social Business Capital of the World

2011-03-09T10:56:00.008-06:00

When I first came to Austin, one of my friends (and now colleagues - Aaron Strout) held an informal little gathering to welcome me and several other social media folks to Austin. It was pretty amazing to see all of the smart people who had decided - all at once - to make Austin their new home base. I think that we all sensed that something special was happening here, but it was Peter Kim who first put a specific purpose around it for us, and identified our call to action. Austin is becoming the social media capital of the world.

As the South by Southwest Interactive Festival (SxSWi) begins, a few of us agreed to go public with the message ... in addition to my personal missive below, you can also link to several sister-posts all linked at the bottom.

----------------------------------------

Ever since moving to Chicago after college, I've found myself in a love affair with cities. After living there for the better part of 17 years, my wife and I have been moving steadily south ... first to Louisville, Kentucky (another great town, where I worked for Health Benefits company Humana) and in the middle of 2010 to Austin. Part of that has been climate-related ... I have a family that likes doing outdoor stuff, and it is a LOT more pleasant to be outdoors when it's in the 60s and 70s for fall, winter and spring. Part of that is urban-related; Austin is a city that's very easy to live in, even for families with kids. But it's also been, to a large degree, job-related. As a part of the Innovation team at Humana, I was privileged to come to the South by Southwest (SxSW) interactive festival twice (in 2009 and 2010). And even though SxSW is hardly "the real Austin," the character of the city can't help but shine through. And the fact of the matter is that I met a lot of really smart people in my business (social media and communications) who were either living in Austin or moving there.

The concept of geographic "talent centers" is one that intrigues me. Richard Florida wrote about it in his 2008 book, "Who's Your City?" The book advances the theory that certain kinds of talent - particularly what Florida calls (rather pretentiously) the "Creative Class" - tend to identify with the cultural vibe of certain cities or areas. Florida's conclusions may be controversial, but I think that there is at least a nugget of truth in their underlying premise ... that there is something about cities like Austin that is particularly appealing for people who are into creativity and innovation ... a couple of factors that are clearly driving the "consumer revolution" or the "collaboration economy" or [choose your macroeconomic buzzword]. The irony is that this principle seems directly opposed to the conventional wisdom about social media and its association with Thomas Friedman's theories about the decreasing importance of place.

Whatever the reason, it's clear that there has been a steady-and-growing influx of people (and companies) who thrive on innovation, creativity and technology - into Austin. There's something about the city that's at once edgy but unpretentious; passionate but relaxed; reflective but action-oriented. And it's incredibly exciting to be a part of its ascendancy as a destination for innovators and entrepreneurs - the kind of people who create energy.

-------------------------------------------
Peter Kim's post is here.
Virginia Miracle's post is here.
Kathy Mandelstein's post is here.
Aaron Strout's post is here.
Spike Jones' post is here.
Kate Niederhoffer's post is here.

Peter said it best in his closing:

"Our town will soon welcome 15,000+ visitors for SXSWi. You might be one of them. If so, while you're here I encourage you to think about the nice people, great weather, low cost of living, live music, nationally recognized public schools, BBQ and breakfast tacos, and the growing community of your peers that call this town home."

My company, WCG, grew by 37% last year, and 2011 is off to an amazing start. If you'd like to be a part of what we're building, read more about us and tell us about yourself at WCG World and and the WCG World's Common Sense Blog.

Come join us in Austin - the social media capital of the world.

The new Google Profiles - a review

2011-03-05T09:29:00.001-06:00

I've been a big fan of Google Profiles for a long time ... and that was before my friend Rick Klau started working on it. So I was pretty excited to see on Rick's blog this morning that there have been some pretty significant upgrades to Profiles (The New Google Profile is Here!). A few things that I was particularly excited about:

Design. The old "Profiles" was kind of all over the place ... with the new version, someone has obviously paid attention to how the page looks, and how its features flow together.
Images. The new "Profiles" allows you to handpick 5 images to adorn your page ... and makes it easy by allowing you either to upload from your computer, or to easily link them to your Picasa or Blogger files. Right now, I have pics of me in my profile ... but I'm kind of wondering if I might want to use images of "5 things I care about" or some other thematic link. At least I have the choice!
Buzz. This is the big one. My feelings about Buzz have always hovered between neutral and strong dislike ... so I was always annoyed when my Google Profile defaulted to showing my Buzz feed rather than my actual profile. NOW, the Profile IS the default, and you can actually make Buzz disappear entirely if you like. I haven't done that yet, but it may be in the cards.

The last thing I want to do is to be able to create a mini-profile widget from my Google Profile that I can display on my blog. I have a (badly) hacked frame on my page at chimoose talks nonsense now; am hoping that the new Profiles will make it easy for me to make a nice-looking one ... if that is a new feature, I haven't found it yet.

Congrats to Rick and his team for taking a good feature, and making it much, much better! You can check out my Google Profile here [chimoose' profile] and create your own at https://profiles.google.com/.

Greg Matthews

@chimoose

my blog: chimoose.com

Posted via email from chimoose is (pre)posterous

Is your Atari 2600 ready for a Slow Ride?

2011-02-25T10:41:00.001-06:00

via vgg.com

I don't think I even need to tell you how awesome this is. Thanks to www.vgg.com for sharing the image!

Posted via email from chimoose is (pre)posterous

The insider's guide to major league baseball stadiums

2011-02-21T12:11:00.001-06:00

via sports.espn.go.com

There's a web site that needs to exist (or, if it exists, I need to find it!).

When I lived in Chicago, 4 blocks from Wrigley Field, I knew exactly how and where to go to get the best tickets at the best price. At the time, all of the tickets that were being held by the ballclub for VIPs would be released to a certain ticket window, exactly one hour before the game.

That meant that you could show up at that window exactly one hour before any ballgame - no more, no less - and get great tickets to any game. At face value. Unfortunately, it doesn't work that way anymore at Wrigley. But there are a dozen other secrets like that for EVERY ballpark.

Real fans know what section to sit in. They know which concession stands have the shortest line. They know the only place in the ballpark to buy freshly roasted peanuts in a brown paper bag.

And there is no reason that everyone shouldn't have access to their wisdom. I travel the country going from ballpark to ballpark, and that kind of information would be incredibly valuable! So here's my suggestion for an enterprising entrepreneur out there:

Take the ESPN stadium guide linked above as a starting point. But turn it into a park-by-park wiki, topic-by-topic that can be contributed to by fans. And monetize it by letting a ticket broker sell seats from the site ... but DON'T let them spam the site. They get to sell tickets, but no messaging. Only real fans get to post ... just like wikipedia.

Ready? GO.

Posted via email from chimoose is (pre)posterous

What employee wellness means to Intel

2011-02-16T09:07:00.003-06:00

I'm always fascinated by innovations in the field of community and collaboration. Tweetchats are a growing phenomenon that have enabled pe0ple who share an affinity to connect with one another online - in real time - to learn from one another. Just over a year ago, Fran Melmed and I started a tweetchat based on an area of passion for us: wellness in the workplace. We wanted to create a platform for people to come together and talk about how health and wellness could be best used by companies to advance their business strategies.
The result was CoHealth - a monthly tweet chat about workplace wellness that's hosted by Fran (@femelmed) and I (@chimoose). It’s open to anyone interested in the intersection of individual and company health and well-being. Current members include wellness managers, communication professionals, wellness providers, physicians, insurers and researchers, bringing a broad perspective to any topic up for discussion.

Chats are held every third Wednesday of the month from noon to 1 p.m. (ET). After each episode, we post a transcript and wrap-up on The Employee Wellness Network. This week, we are introducing a new feature of the chat: a featured guest. Michelle James, the Health Communication Manager at Intel. After hearing Michelle speak at a recent conference, Fran knew that our community would love to hear about the work that Michelle has done - and is doing - at Intel to make wellness a reality inside the company. She is going to be answering the following questions - along with any other questions that the community poses for her:

1. how does your health strategy fit into your business strategy?
2. what are the goals of your health promotion strategy?
3. who are your target audiences?
4. what tactics do you use to reach them?
5. what data do you use to direct your health promotion efforts?
6. how do you measure the effectiveness of your strategy?
7. whom do you look to for guidance, information and advice?

If you're new to the concept of a tweetchat, this would be a great one to start with ... here are some simple instructions to get you up-and-running:

Logging in to a tweet chat is easy:

Sign in to twitter
Go to Tweetchat.com
Enter the name of the chat you'd like to follow; in this case it's "co_health"

You'll then see the entire stream of relevant tweets, and whenever YOU send a tweet (which you can do from the same tweetchat page), the site will automatically append the appropriate tag (#co_health).

Click here to find more detailed instructions on How to Participate in a Tweetchat.

Join us on today, february 16 at noon ET. See you there!

Wellness meets South by Southwest Interactive (SxSWi)

2011-02-07T13:02:00.002-06:00

As many of you know, the legendary South by Southwest Interactive (SxSWi) festival added a health track for the first time this year – I was lucky enough to be a part of the advisory board that helped to pick the panels that would be presented there. And I was thrilled to see that a wellness panel created by Fran Melmed, my co-host on the cohealth workplace wellness tweetchat, was selected. I find it even more exciting that Fran will be co-hosting her “core conversation” – entitiled “Employee Wellness: Farce or Untapped Potential?” – with the delightful Michael Samuelson, the founder of the Health and Wellness Institute (and now the CEO of Samuelson Health and Wellness). I use the word “delightful” to describe Michael because although we only met once, he made a very lasting impression on me. His attitude, filled with humility and grace, can’t help but endear him to you … and makes his message that much more powerful. If you’d like a “taste,” just watch his presentation from the Business Innovation Factory in late 2009 – it’s … delightful.

And of course it’s easy for me to sing Fran’s praises. As the co-host and co-founder of the cohealth tweetchat (that’s a lot of “co’s” for one sentence, isn’t it!), she and I have been through a lot of fun together and built something that I’m really proud of. And the funny thing is that even though we’ve worked closely together for well over a year, we’ve never met face-to-face. That meeting will happen sometime around Fran’s SxSW presentation (March 15 at 3:30 CST). So for me, and hopefully for many of you, this panel is a can’t miss. I’ll see you there!

Posted via email from chimoose is (pre)posterous

Another approach to micropayments: Go on, Flattr yourself | The Economist

2011-01-28T08:26:00.001-06:00

Flattr functions like a cross between the Facebook "like" button and a flat-rate PayPal, with a bit of StumbleUpon thrown in for good measure.

via economist.com

I just learned about this internet micropayment service on the Economist newspaper's Babbage podcast. It's certainly intriguing in that it seems to address a couple of concerns about the future of content publishing:

1) It allows an easy way for authors/outlets to be paid for content without necessarily establishing a "walled garden" subscription model
2) It allows consumers of content an easy way to access the content they want - for a very low fee - and without the hassle of managing a series of payments that might equal a tenth of a cent

Aside from the obviously attractive connection to the moneymaking scheme in Office Space, this sounds like a pretty good idea. The one thing I can't get over is that the *amount* paid for each piece of content is predicated on a) the amount that each payor puts in their account each month and b) how much content they consume during that month. And that seems to be about as close to "random" as you can get ... not exactly something a content creator could plan or budget around.

Anyway, it's interesting to explore ... let's see if blogger or wordpress like having a "flattr" button plugged in to them!

What do you think - has anyone tried flattr?

Posted via email from chimoose is (pre)posterous

LinkedIn Labs | InMaps - Visualize your LinkedIn network

2011-01-25T11:28:00.001-06:00

via inmaps.linkedinlabs.com

I'm truly amazed by this graphical visualization of my 1,000+ person LinkedIn network ... produced by InMaps. Very curious about who InMaps is! Seems to be a part of LinkedIn, but haven't quite figured that out.
The thing that's most remarkable is how accurate and tight the grouping is ... with the exception of the group I called "Miscellaneous." Fascinating.

Posted via email from chimoose is (pre)posterous

Brand Haiku: Dominos

2010-11-15T06:00:00.003-06:00

After YouTube vids,
New attitude; great pizza
Surprise! Dominos.

Follow along on twitter at #brandhaiku - and be sure to follow the next link to the brilliant Jake McKee from Ant's Eye View

Oh, and if you'd like to know what this is all about ...

A strange idea
From Aaron Strout, mad genius
Welcome: #BrandHaiku

Aaron Strout's Citizen Marketer 2.1

Happy Movember!

2010-11-13T13:31:00.008-06:00

About Movember:

Each year, Movember, the month formerly known as November, is responsible for the sprouting of thousands of Mo's (Australian slang for moustache, where the movement began) on men’s faces around the world, raising vital awareness and funds for men’s health, specifically for cancer affecting men.

Men who grow moustaches for the month of Movember, called Mo Bros, become walking, talking billboards for the cause, raising awareness by prompting private and public conversation around the often ignored issue of men’s health.

- The Movember Foundation

Those of you who've seen me since March will know that I've been experimenting with my first facial hair ... which actually fits in a lot better at WCG than it did at Humana! But I have to tell you that I was both excited and daunted when my friend Aaron Strout asked me to be a part of the illustrious Team Austin for Movember.

You see, I have several factors working against me in the facial-hair department. The first is purely biological; my face just doesn't grow hair in a way that is at all attractive or appealing. It's not that I'm totally hairless, but that I am patchily so. Which tends to make any kind of beard/mustache combo look extraordinarily ridiculous; it gives me a kind of deranged-hillbilly look that is both laughable and frightening.

That brings me to the second negative factor for me; namely, self-preservation. You see, I'm married. 'Nuff said? We tried a test-run for a few days, and Amy just wasn't down with Mo.

This left me with an interesting dilemma; support awareness for men's health (a sadly neglected field) or heed the threats of my better half. So I've come up with what I hope is an effective solution. Rather than looking ridiculous in real life (like these guys), I have elected to make myself look ridiculous online. Therefore, every day, I will be daily updating my profile pictures on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn ... my friend Karen Gahafer, photoshopper extraordinaire, has created a variety of "looks" for me to use during that time, and I hope in that small way to show solidarity with my mo-bros and mo-sistahs on Team Austin.

I also hope that you'll help me in supporting this incredible cause ... my team already has ~150 members and has raised over $12,000, but we're hoping for much more ... to grow to 250 members and raise an enormous big pile of money by the end of Movember. Just click the button below to make your tax-deductible contribution .... my fake facial hair thanks you in advance.

The role of volunteer employee champions in workplace wellness programs

2010-11-10T09:53:00.005-06:00

As many of you know, I co-founded the CoHealth workplace wellness tweetchat nearly a year ago with my friend Fran Melmed of Context Communication. We're getting ready to host our 10th chat (if you're wondering what a tweetchat is, check this out), and we'd love for you to participate!

Join us on November 17 at 12 noon EST as we talk about the role of volunteer champions in workplace wellness programs. During the chat (follow hashtag #co_health) we'll be talking through the following topic areas:

What's the role of employee champions in workplace wellness programs?

- Formal

- Informal

What traits make a successful champion?

Have you spelled out the nature of the commitment? What does that look like?

Do you actively recruit employee champions? How?

Do you offer them incentives? Why or why not? What incentives are appropriate/effective?

How do you support your champions?

- tools/materials

- training/orientation

- communication platforms

- context-specific messaging (e.g., Fran's shift-break script/message wheel/handout)

Can you measure the effectiveness of a champion? Any anecdotes/best practices to recommend?

Don't forget the value of The Experience

2010-10-04T14:13:00.011-05:00

I recently had a great reminder about how powerful consumer experience can be terms of engaging people and creating lasting impressions ... and it was an experience that was created more or less by accident. I was in Boston presenting at the Community 2.0 conference [LINK] and had had to get back to Logan Airport from the Seaport Conference Center. Anyone who's spent any time in Boston knows that there's a minor obstacle between the city and the airport known as "Boston Harbor." It's certainly not hard to jump in a cab and drive through the Ted Williams Tunnel, but I've never been a huge fan of tunnels - there's just not much to see! However, I remembered several years earlier taking a water taxi to the airport.

As a midwestern guy, I jump at any chance I have to get on a boat, and from a "view" perspective, it's as direct an opposite to the tunnel as you could get. However, I couldn't remember how to find the water taxi, or get it to meet me at the conference center. Eventually, I asked a policeman how the whole process worked, and he pointed me right back to the conference center - he said there'd be a callbox there that I could use.

I have to admit that it seemed odd to me, in this age of ubiquitous mobile phones, to have to use a "callbox" to get in touch with a water taxi dispatcher. But, since I really wanted that boat ride, I followed his direction back to the conference center, and came upon the contraption pictured above. As I read the instructions, I was a little incredulous that they were for real, and feared that i might be in the middle of some prank. I glanced around the busy street to see if anyone was giving me funny looks or behaving suspiciously. Nope, seemed that the coast was clear.

Anyway, I picked up the mic (like the kind you'd have seen attached to a CB radio in 1979) and made my call - "pickup at stop 1!" Lo and behold, a voice came back right away (brilliant New England accent, by the way) saying, "Sit tight theh, sir, I'll be 'round to collect yeh in foive-a-ten minutes. It's eight dawlahs, cash only." [Translation: "Please remain where you are. I will adjourn to stop 11 immediately; my estimated time of arrival is between five and ten minutes. Please be aware that neither credit cards nor personal checks are accepted; my fee is $8 in cash."] Sure enough, it was the captain himself! Why mess with a dispatcher when you can just call the boat captain directly? I dutifully waited on the pier, and in 7 minutes the water taxi showed up to "collect me." There were already two bored busienssmen on board, who kept their heads buried in their cellphones the whole trip. I, however, enjoyed the views of harborfront Boston for the entire 12-minute trip to the airport.

And that's when it sunk in to me how much more had just been added to my day than just transportation from downtown to the airport ... I'd engaged in something mysterious, novel and fun - while also being functional. It made me think about how many mundane activities and transactions we engage in every day. Every one is an interaction with a person ... a customer, a supplier, a co-worker. They all have a functional purpose, but each one also contains an opportunity to dreate a deeper level of intimacy and relationship. Companies spend so much time trying to have more interactions with customers, but how many are really getting everything they could from the interactions they do have? What interactions could you make more memorable today?

Foursquare and the Beer Rule

2010-07-08T19:36:00.004-05:00

Techcrunch published an interesting article on the growth of Foursquare and Gowalla today ["Foursquare is 5 times larger than Gowalla and growing 75% faster each day"] that's worth a look if you're into such things (mobile, location-based games and applications). I happen to think that they're pretty important - and pretty fun as well. I've been using both services for some time, but I tend to spend most of my time in Foursquare ... because I have a bigger, more active group of friends there. For the uninitiated, here's how it works:

Either sign up online, or download the foursquare app for your mobile device
Find your friends; it'll allow you to connect to both your twitter and facebook accounts to find active foursquare users. Highly recommended (for reasons you'll see below).
Whenever you go somewhere (with the important exceptions of your home and anywhere your kids go on a regular basis) you use your mobile phone to "check in." By doing so, you alert your friends to where you are; earn points; and move towards becoming the "mayor" of the location (by checking in there more than anyone else).

Although some businesses are getting smart and offering free or discounted stuff to their mayors (imagine how much extra traffic this drives for people trying to take over the mayorship!) I can take or leave the points, badges and mayorships. What I like about foursquare is that it allows me to a) stay in tune with and b) connect with my friends. And that's where the "beer rule" comes in.

Foursquare, still in its early days, is a lot like facebook in its early days in one key respect: People who are complete strangers try to connect with you. This is not only inadvisable in my opinion, its also creepy and potentially dangerous. That's why I have a beer rule, which is as follows:

If I randomly found myself in the same town as this person, would I want to have a beer with them?

If yes, then I would accept a foursquare contact from them (or offer one of my own). If not, I just decline and go about my business. It actually does work (I've met up with foursquare friends in various cities on numerous occasions), which, in my opinion, makes it a good rule. What are YOUR rules for accepting someone's offer to connect on foursquare? Twitter? Facebook? I'd love to know; leave me a comment!

Hello, WCG!

2010-05-31T07:25:00.008-05:00

Six years ago I moved to Louisville to take a job at Humana - pulling up roots and leaving my beloved Chicago behind. I was joining a company that had begun to establish itself as a leader in innovation, and was about double in revenue and size. I still remember the line that hooked me:

"Come and join the department that's transforming the company that's transforming the health insurance industry."
- Carleen Haas, VP Human Resources

It was as true - and as compelling - then as it is now. And it's a big part of the reason that I'm moving on six years later. Not because the transformation at Humana has stopped - but because there is a bigger transformation in the business world that is picking up speed and getting ready to explode.

Over the last 10 years, we've seen traditional business models change forever in publishing, music and entertainment - and they are just the harbingers of what people like Don Tapscott, Steve Rubel and Jeff Jarvis refer to as "the Collaboration Economy." I've had the good fortune to be able to explore what that means for Humana. And now I'm headed to WCG - a global communications firm - to help their clients to define its meaning for themselves.

It's hard to sum up what the last six years at Humana, and in Louisville, have meant for me and my family. I've worked with brilliant, passionate people. We've made friends for life in our neighborhood and in our church. I've also had the opportunity to work for some true visionaries - like Jack Lord and Grant Harrison - who helped give form to a few key fundamentals in my professional outlook:

Don't accept the unexceptional - It's really easy to do things the way they've always been done. It can be really efficient to follow optimized processes. And thinking inside the box is usually a way to have things "accepted" inside a corporation. A lot of the time, that's fine ... but you should never stop thinking about whether, if something was done differently, it might open up possibilities you never dreamed of. And at a minimum, it'll get you noticed and help people think differently about YOU.

If you don't like reality, change it - "Do the best you can with the resources you've got." A fine motto. But sometimes you don't know what's possible until you try. When we built TPS, it was because we didn't like any of the publically available twitter monitoring and analysis tools. And we were prepared to make the best of it, and temper our expectations about what we could achieve with the existing toolset. But when we tried to bend reality to create what we really wanted, it opened up new doors for us ... and as a side benefit, completely changed the way that we started thinking about interactive development in the innovation center.

Know when to jump the curve - This is where the wisdom to decide comes into play. Sometimes, the best move is to make incremental improvements on what already is ... sometimes, it's time to do something completely new. The knowing when comes with experience - and working with people who have done it successfully for years.

I believe that following those principles as best I could led to the opportunity before me at WCG - and I can't wait to get started. Please keep my family and I in your prayers as we go through this period of big transition - and I'd love to hear from you. Feel free to use the comments on this post, or connect with me on LinkedIn (professionally), facebook (personally) or twitter (everything!).

65 Roses

2010-04-27T06:00:00.005-05:00

"65 Roses" is what some children with cystic fibrosis (CF) call their disease because the words are much easier for them to pronounce. Mary G. Weiss became a volunteer for the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation in 1965 after learning that her three little boys had CF. Her duty was to call every civic club, social and service organization seeking financial support for CF research. Mary's 4-year-old son, Richard, listened closely to his mother as she made each call.

After several calls, Richard came into the room and told his Mom, "I know what you are working for." Mary was dumbstruck because Richard did not know what she was doing, nor did he know that he had cystic fibrosis. With some trepidation, Mary asked, "What am I working for, Richard?" He answered, "You are working for 65 Roses." Mary was speechless.

He could not see the tears running down Mary's cheeks as she stammered, "Yes Richard, I'm working for 65 Roses."

- From "65 Roses"

This is a first for me, and it's appropriate that my first online fundraising attempt would be for a cause that is dear to me. Cystic Fibrosis is a disease that affects relatively few people directly - approximately 30,000 children and adults in the United States have cystic fibrosis. But an additional ten million more—or about one in every 31 Americans—are carriers of the defective CF gene, but do not have the disease.

Someone I love has cystic fibrosis. I'm not going to name him here because he's too young to decide to be a spokesperson. But I've learned enough about CF to know that we can do something meaningful about it. There is no cure - yet - for cystic fibrosis and the disease generally gets worse over time.

The life expectancy for people with cystic fibrosis has been steadily increasing over the past 40 years. The numbers can easily make you sad - but they can also inspire. This timeline shows how incredible the advancements have been in treating CF ... just imagine what could happen in only a few more years if we were able to focus on it!

GREAT STRIDES is the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation's largest and most successful national fundraising event. My parents, brothers, and their families will be participating in the GREAT STRIDES walk at the Batchelor Middle School on May 1, 2010.

Please help us meet our fundraising goal by supporting Team Matthews. Your generous gift will be used efficiently and effectively, as nearly 90 cents of every dollar of revenue raised is available for investment in vital CF programs to support research, care and education.

Making an on-line donation is easy and secure. Click the "Click to Donate" button on this page to make a donation. Any amount you can donate - even a few dollars - is greatly appreciated!

Research and care supported by the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation is making a huge difference in improving the quality of life for those with CF. Help is needed now more than ever to ensure that a cure is found. To learn more about CF and the CF Foundation, visit http://www.cff.org.

We believe we can make a difference in the lives of those with CF! Thank you for supporting the mission of the CF Foundation and GREAT STRIDES!

Photo courtesy of Pittsburgh's 50 Finest

one checkin to rule them all

2010-04-07T11:57:00.001-05:00

via check.in

My team and I have been fiddling around with a lot of different location-based applications recently, and have developed what I think are some pretty good use cases for our company. During the course of that process, we've gotten to know a few things ...

- It's amazing how many apps are out there; we've found at least 20 that fit the bill
- A few, including some of the biggies, have open APIs
- Very few are really interested in partnering with businesses yet on anything; there are too many product-related and competitive hurdles to clear first.

My iPhone was starting to get crowded with location-based apps, and every time I'd walk into a restaurant, my wife wanted to kill me because I'd have to check in using at least four different apps. So as we were fiddling with APIs, we started thinking about how to create a single check-in service that would report your location to all of your apps.

Lo and behold, not even a week later I got an invitation to check out the beta version of check.in, a new mobile app from the guys at brightkite. At the moment, it allows you to check in to brightkite, foursquare and gowalla with a single click. I just tried it at one of my local favorites, and it worked like a charm!

It's going to be really interesting to see how this space evolves ... and I wonder if check.in is going to give brightkite a (needed?) dose of relevance. Hope so; I was always a fan of the app, but it seems to have been overtaken by foursquare, gowalla and causeworld.

Another site that's making cool use of the APIs for foursquare and gowalla is http://vicarious.ly. I love the idea and the interface, but if you can figure out why you'd need it, please let me know.

Posted via web from chimoose is (pre)posterous

Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution

2010-03-27T10:46:00.002-05:00

via jamieoliver.com

I was one of the folks who was eager to watch Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution last night ... and I wasn't disappointed.

I spend a lot of time thinking about health, and how to help people live healthier lives. My team at Humana has spent a lot of time thinking about the exercise piece of that equation; much less on the nutritional components. Nonetheless, I have been a big fan of Alice Waters' movement in California, and was really excited when Jamie Oliver took up her mantle in the UK.

The show, if you haven't seen it, is a reality show set in Huntington, WV - recently named the unhealthiest city in the US. More than half of Huntington's adults are obese. So Jamie Oliver has come to Huntington to revolutionize how the citizens there think about food. The show is equal parts entertainment/drama and shock value. And while I think some WV residents have been offended by the way they feel they've been characterized, if we think about this as a WV problem, we are missing the point.

The WV schools abide by the same USDA guidelines as every other public school district in America ... so if your kid goes to public school, it's likely that he or she is subjected to the same (or worse) lousy breakfast and lunch options that the Huntington kids are.

In any case, I think that this show has the potential to cast a bright light on a major problem - and I encourage each of you who reads this to sign Jamie's petition to present his case directly to the President at the conclusion of the show. Oh, and be sure to watch - Friday nights on ABC.

http://www.jamieoliver.com/campaigns/jamies-food-revolution/petition

Posted via web from chimoose is (pre)posterous

The ER 2.0 Panel from South by Southwest

2010-03-15T00:44:00.001-05:00

via twitpic.com

I had the pleasure of attending the ER 2.0 "core conversation" at South by Southwest this morning. It turned out to be a terrific conversation - and it didn't hurt that it featured some of my best friends in healthcare and social media.

In this picture are Dr. Bryan Vartabedian of the Baylor Medical Center, Ed Bennett of the University of Maryland Hospitals, Jen McCabe of Contagion Health (and a business partner of mine at Humana) and Aimee Roundtree, a medical writer and researcher at the Texas Medical Center.

Also not coincidentally, I also had the opportunity to spend all day on Thursday with this crew (and about 75 other really sharp people) at the first Social Health summit in Austin (2010) ... a fantastic opportunity to really expand understanding across the health system for how we can all do things differently to improve people's lives.

Thanks to these friends, new and old, for making this year's south by southwest a particularly special experience for me.

Posted via web from chimoose is (pre)posterous

Twitter list analysis - You heard it here first!

2010-02-10T18:50:00.004-06:00

If you're like me, you've been pretty interested in Twitter lists and their evolution. In case you're not like me, and haven't been using Twitter lists, you can catch up here.

As more and more people are using twitter to connect, it's getting harder and harder to stay looped in with the conversations you're most interested in. Twitter lists helps out with that a lot because they allows you to create groups of people (by topic, location, or whatever moves you) so that it's much easier to follow relevant conversation threads.

There are a couple of tools out there that have done a really good job of getting utility from Twitter lists - my two favorites have been Tweetdeck - which allows you to import your twitter lists and see them all on your screen - and TweepML, which allows you to import your twitter lists in such a way that visitors can follow everyone on your list with one button-click. That functionality is really important for conferences, tweetchats, and other circumstances where you want to follow everyone in a given group.

You already know that my team at Humana has been really focused on using twitter to provide insights and analysis (using our home-made tool called the Tweet Positioning System). We've now taken our analytic capability to a new level by allowing anyone with a twitter account to view all of their twitter lists and analyze the results by location, topic and frequency ... including

Lists you've created
Other lists that you follow
Lists that follow you

The coolest part is that you don't have to do anything except to sign in to twitter using OAuth, and click "recent searches." There's a tab there for twitter lists, and once you've signed in, all your lists will show up. I've attached an image of one of my favorite lists (HealthTweeps) - it's Greg's version of the "Health All-Stars" that I think everyone ought to be following.

Get more out of your lists - check out myTPSreport.com!

South-by-Social-Health (SxSH)

2010-02-07T10:50:00.004-06:00

If you pay much attention to the business of Social Media and Interactive technology, you're already well aware of South by Southwest (SxSW). David Armano calls it, "spring break for geeks." I had my first exposure to it last year, and agree that the atmosphere festive and fun. But I think that it's more than that, too ... it's also a time when people who are really passionate about social media and interactive can come together and share what they've learned, what they're doing, and what they think is going to happen next.

There is no better place to connect, and I still keep in touch with many of the folks I met at SxSW last year. This year, though, I am really excited about more than just SxSW. Over the past year, there has been a massive increase in the number of people in my industry - health - who are using social media to make their businesses stronger, and to help people be healthier. The leading Tweetchat for that space, #HCSM, recently celebrated its first anniversary (a celebration I was honored to be a part of). I've even been involved in starting a new Tweetchat with my friend Fran Melmed that's focused on health and wellness in the workplace (#co_health).

For the first time, there will be a sub-conference on health at SxSW ... it's called South by Social Health (#SxSH), and a lot of my colleagues from #hcsm and #co_health are planning to be there. I don't know exactly what it's going to look or feel like yet, but I am really excited to find out. It's easy to follow all of the details on TPS; just search for SxSH to get all of the latest news (and analysis thereof!) See you in Austin ...

The Decision Tree: How Smarter Choices Lead to Better Health | Magazine

2010-01-20T08:00:00.003-06:00

via wired.com

After Fran Melmed called this article to my attention, I also heard several other people raving about it before I had a chance to give it a read myself. Now that I have, I am even more intrigued by the concept of visualizing your health decisions.
And while planning out my own decision tree, I noticed that the piece went on to show 3 sample decision trees for people who were dealing with health issues ... and one of them turned out to be my friend Alex Carmichael. Definitely worth a read!

[Editor's Note: "The Decision Tree" is now available; find out more at http://thedecisiontree.com/blog/]

Posted via web from chimoose is (pre)posterous

TPS has a new widget!

2010-01-01T23:52:00.002-06:00

We've been adding features galore on TPS ... and are now featuring two new widgets. The first can be seen on my sidebar ... and the second is here. I think that these are great additions to any blog ... or blog post.
We've been experimenting with adding TPS Map widget to all of our posts on CrumpleItUp, and I should probably start doing it here as well. What do you think?

At long last, The State is on video

2010-01-01T23:01:00.004-06:00

via amazon.com

This short-lived MTV comedy series featured some of the most memorable skits around ... like "I'm Doug" and "$240 worth of Puddin." Check out Rick Klau's blog for the best writeup on that one.
The show featured Michael Ian Black (one of the funniest guys who hasn't quite made it) plus Thomas Lennon and Kerri Kenney from Reno 911.
If you're into sketch comedy on the edge, The State should be considered the less-well-known little brother of Kids in the Hall, Mr. Show and Chappelle's Show.

Posted via web from chimoose is (pre)posterous

How Might Health Insurers Respond to Medical Loss Ratio Regulation? -- Seeking Alpha

2009-12-31T13:04:00.001-06:00

As Washington continues to micro-manage various industries via royal decree, it is becoming increasingly evident that Congress is afflicted by some combination of the following conditions:

Ignorance of industry specific business models

An inability to read financial statements

Willful disregard of #s 1 and 2

Delusions of grandeur

via seekingalpha.com

Whether or not you agree with the sentiment on this particular issue (health reform), I think you'll agree that the writing is awfully good - and funny. Carneades, I salute you.

Posted via web from chimoose is (pre)posterous

MentionMap's Gorgeous Twitter Visualizations

2009-12-16T17:08:00.004-06:00

I'm a big fan of social network analysis as a means to understand the connection between individuals and groups ... especially if those networks can be visualized in helpful ways. My friend Mathias Kolehmainen (the guy who actually built the Tweet Positioning System) turned me on to this site today, and I was blown away.

MentionMap is a living visualization of your twitter network, showing the connection between you and the individuals with whom you interact, and even the hashtags you use. I can guarantee that you'll learn something about your network - and the mesh of connections it contains - that you didn't know. For example, I didn't know that Chris Hall had connected to Fran Melmed ... Chris and I work together; Fran and I are going to be hosting a TweetChat together. Amazing. Check out MentionMap to see what you can learn from your network ... and let me know what other great network visualization tools you love. I want more!

Edelman hires Armano; sees spike in Twitter reaction

2009-12-14T11:50:00.003-06:00

via flickr.com

One of the things I love about TPS (the Tweet Positioning System) is that you can get a sense of trending topics really easily. A nice example is happening now ...

Last night, David Armano (a true Twitter celebrity with over 22,000 followers) announced that he would be joining Edelman Digital as a senior vice president. At that point, the search term "Edelman," which was toddling along at 50-100 tweets per day, shot up to over 1,000. [You can see it yourself, here http://crumpleitup.com/tps/searches/show/2891].

It's also pretty neat to be able to see where those tweets are coming from; I zoomed my map over to Europe and found conversation happening in places as diverse as Austria, Turkey, Moldova and Sweden.

Where are people talking about you and your business? And are you measuring to see what can make that conversation accelerate? I'd love to have you check out TPS and let me know what you think; it's been a boon for our business, but I'd like to see how it might impact yours.

Posted via web from chimoose is (pre)posterous

LinkedIn Premium - why so expensive?

2009-12-12T11:49:00.001-06:00

I am a big fan of LinkedIn. I've been using it for years, and have gotten more and more value from the connections I've made using it. But I confess to being a little puzzled about their premium memberships. For those of you who are unaware, anyone can use LinkedIn for free, as a tool to connect with people they know either personally or professionally. Most people consider it to be something like "the professional version of facebook." And most companies will allow employees to access it from inside their firewalls (even mine, which blocks such evil sites as Google Documents).

The free version of LinkedIn allows you to connect to people you know ... and a circuitous way to connect to people you don't. That's all well and good. But the premium versions allow you to do much more ... things like organizing profiles, reaching out to people outside your network, seeing who's searched for and viewed your profile, etc. They seem to think that they only people who'd be interested in more than the free version are recruiters, who would be willing to pay the $24.95, $49.95 or $499.95 per month they charge for that increased level of access.

But what about the individual networkers, who want to access at least some of that functionality on their own? It's clearly time for an upgraded individual subscription to LinkedIn, for some reasonable amount ... $14.95 per year, or $1.99 per month or something like that. What do you think? Would you pay for enhanced access to LinkedIn? What's it worth to you?

Greg Matthews

Posted via email from chimoose is (pre)posterous

TPS Search of the Day

2009-12-06T21:23:00.004-06:00

I'm a regular participant in a wonderful online group called HealthCareSocialMedia, or HealthSocMed for short. I've gotten to know many of the participants pretty well - although I've met only one in person. This group is what's known as a "TweetChat" - a group that uses Twitter as a meeting tool. Check out my blog post on Twitter, Social Media and Healthcare for more information on how and why TweetChats are interesting and valuable.

Anyway, one of the rules of the group (actually I think it may be the only rule) is that you're not allowed to pitch your products in the meetings. I have to confess that I kinda broke that rule just now ... by introducing the group to the Tweet Positioning System, and showing the folks where we were all tweeting from. The novelty of it seemed to keep anyone from getting too upset.
So what are you interested in? Who's talking about it, and where do they live? Get out to the TweetPositioningSystem and check it out!

21st Century American Art

2009-12-06T10:32:00.004-06:00

It is my opinion - nay, belief - that Stephan Pastis' Pearls Before Swine represents the apex of American art in the dawning 21st century. It's even begun to be referenced among its competition - today by the brilliant Bill Amend of Foxtrot:

Greg Matthews

Posted via email from chimoose is (pre)posterous

TPS Search of the day - guess where people are talking about Indiana Basketball?

2009-12-02T15:00:00.003-06:00

If you guessed, "Indiana," YOU'RE RIGHT! Although there are a few conversations out of state, the hoosier state is primarily talking about itself.

How about you ... what are the things that interest you? Try running a search on TPS and saving it over time ... you might be surprised what you find.

Putting fitness on the map

2009-11-30T11:17:00.006-06:00

I've been really excited to be able to launch the health industry's first twitter monitoring tool - the Tweet Positioning System. Thousands of people have used it to track online conversations that are important to them - in real time - and with geographic relevance.

Now we're taking it up a notch, though. Instead of hoarding all of that valuable data, you can share your searches with the world ... on your blog, your facebook page, etc. So I'm launching a new permanent* feature on CHIMOOSE TALKS NONSENSE ... the "TPS Search of the Day**." My inaugural search is for Twit2Fit, an online fitness community that I've been a part of for the last several months. It was a community that had its start right here in Louisville, but has now quite clearly gone national.

So your call to action, dear readers, is manifold.

Be sure to run your favorite search at myTPSreport.com (don't forget to save it! There's a button below the map!), then post the widget on your blog (yes, there is ANOTHER button below the map for that!). More widgets (including a sidebar widget) will be available over the coming weeks.
Check out Twit2Fit and think about joining up; it's been good to have that online encouragement in my fitness program
Check back often to Chimoose Talks Nonsense for the featured TPS search of the day; I'll do what I can to keep it interesting!

* In this context, "permanent" should be interpreted as "as long as it amuses me to maintain the status quo"
** In this context, "search of the day" should be interpreted as "the most recent search I happened to put out there" rather than any reference to any actual time period

Native American Bunny with Bow and Arrow

2009-11-09T20:30:00.001-06:00

via flickr.com

One of my kindergartner's more creative subjects. I'm glad that she has chosen to focus on aboriginal bunnies vs the European imports.

Posted via web from chimoose is (pre)posterous

What's Thwarting American Innovation?

2009-11-07T09:07:00.006-06:00

Those of you who know me, know that I grew up "corporate." Over the years I've acquired a passion for helping businesses grow and transform. And I have had some great opportunities to do that at companies like Andersen Consulting (now Accenture), Braun Consulting (now a division of Fair Isaac) and Humana.

After working for the last two years under Jack Lord and Grant Harrison in Humana's innovation center, I have totally changed the way that I think about growth and transformation ... and about innovation. I was intrigued by a headline in Fast Company this week ... "What's Thwarting American Innovation? Too Much Science, Says Roger Martin." The headline caught my eye for two reasons ... first, I knew that my colleague Miguel Encarna ç ão, PhD, would hate it. As he already considers me a Philistine of the first order, I forwarded it to him for the sheer entertainment value of his reaction (I wasn't disappointed). The second reason is that I had the opportunity to hear Roger Martin speak at the Business Innovation Factory's 5th annual collaborative innovation summit last month.

Roger's warning for American business is not against science ... far from it. His warning is that innovation doesn't necessarily come from America's vaunted MBA mills (McKinsey is called out specifically in the article - though I certainly have nothing against McKinsey).

"The business world is tired of having armies of analysts descend on their companies," he says. "You can't send a 28-year-old with a calculator to solve your problems."

While I think that Mr. Martin (it's really, really hard not to call him "Dean Martin" a la "Back to School") is a little rough on the big strategy firms, he does have a point: Their job, and their foundation, is not innovation. Innovation comes from a completely different place. I've had great experiences working with McKinsey and other strategy firms, but I haven't asked them to design any products for me. And Martin's argument is that design thinking is much more important to teach for companies who are truly trying to differentiate themselves and drive long-term competitive advantage.

I have a feeling that there's a lot more to say on this subject (I may just turn a book review of Martin's tome into a series of blog posts), but in the meantime I can send you back to my favorite personal example of how design thinking (rather than "corporate strategy") changed the way my team at Humana approached innovation: "Why wellness doesn't work" from the CrumpleItUp.com blog.

Featured Social Network - 12seconds.tv

2009-11-05T16:25:00.002-06:00

via 12seconds.tv

Hey, everybody! I am really excited (and a little nervous) to be co-hosting the Quick 'n' Dirty podcast with Jennifer Leggio tonight on Blog Talk Radio (http://bit.ly/1CPXXr).
As always, there will be a "featured social network of the week" - and this week, it's 12seconds.tv. I haven't done a ton with it, but I am impressed by how easy they're making video sharing. I decided it would be a good idea to do a little mini-promo on 12seconds in advance of the show.
Be sure to tune in tonight at 3pm PST/6 EST.

Posted via web from chimoose is (pre)posterous

We love Google

2009-11-03T10:51:00.002-06:00

via flickr.com

During my latest trip to Mountain View, I had the chance to visit the Google Store on campus (much like every google product, it claims to be in "beta." Cute.) Anyway, I am just geeky enough to buy google-wear, so I came home with stuff for my team at work (@naimul and @hallicious each got a shirt) AND for my family.

Here are E and I showing off our swag.

Posted via web from chimoose is (pre)posterous

The W Flag

2009-10-31T18:52:00.001-05:00

The W Flag
Originally uploaded by ChiMoose

For the last 20 years, I have wanted to own one of the "W" flags that are flown over the old scoreboard at Wrigley Field. Now, thanks to my wonderful wife, I do.

Go Cubs!

TPS goes to Sweden

2009-10-21T07:05:00.001-05:00

I had to post this tweet from Stefan Ronge of Stockholm ... it's the first foreign-language reference to our new TweetPositioningSystem that I am aware of. And yes, I did check first to make sure it doesn't say, "Yet another crappy piece of twitter-dreck." Can you guess, without using an online translator, what it does say?

Posted via email from chimoose is (pre)posterous

Greg's on the radio!

2009-10-19T17:03:00.001-05:00

Webw Chicago Greg Interview by Innovation Center
Download now or listen on posterous

WBEW Chicago Greg Interview.mp3 (15508 KB)

Had a great time this morning on this (all too brief) interview for public radio station WBEW (a sister to Chicago's mighty WBEZ). Thanks to Adam and Steve from Vocalo.org for pulling it all together. In case the file doesn't play here, you can link to the WBEW site to listen.

Greg Matthews

Posted via email from chimoose's posterous

When it's nice to come to work in the morning

2009-10-19T10:26:00.002-05:00

via flickr.com

There are times - and I think that we've all been there - when it can be pretty tough to come to work in the morning. Times when you wonder if all of the hard work is really making a difference. Times when you question the value of what you're doing.

That's why seeing a note like this is such a ray of sunshine. It's a notice that somebody, somewhere, is seeing that value and changing the way they think. That little piece of encouragement can go a long way.

So Megan Enloe, thank you. Chris Hall (aka hallicious), thank you. I'm at work on Monday morning and I feel great. Let's slay some dragons!

Posted via web from chimoose's posterous

why backups are a good idea

2009-10-17T14:57:00.002-05:00

Cable fire
Originally uploaded by f650biker

Note: This post refers to a commercially available service that's owned by some friends of mine: Rob May and Jason Falls.

I've always been kind of a computer geek (my wife would probably remove the "kind of.") I was the first kid on the block with a Macintosh back in the 80's, and was among the early adopters of something called "Chicago Online" (a piece of a fledgling service called "America Online") in the early 90s.

I've also been trying for years to digitize everything - and that includes photos. I've been storing photos digitally for years, but have been positively militant about it since my eldest daughter was born in 2000. But one thing I was never very good about was backup. Part of the blame goes to Windows, which always made backing up a lot harder than it ought to be (I'm back to Mac now, BTW). But mostly, I was just lazy.

When the hard drive on my Dell Dimension blew, I knew I was in trouble. I sent it in to one of those mail-order recovery places to see if they could help. I was willing to spend $2,000 to get my data back, but the only stuff I cared about was the pictures.

It didn't work - I lost everything, and only had about half of the pictures backed up. My mom was able to fill in some of the gaps from CDs I'd sent her over the years, but it was still pretty devastating.

Now most of my pictures are taken on my iPhone and uploaded directly to flickr - which means that I don't have to worry so much about my hard drive any more. But what about flickr? What if they go down - or out of business? And for that matter, what about all the work I've put in to building effective social networks on facebook and twitter? And even this humble blog contains some stuff that I wouldn't particularly want to lose.

I've finally gotten smart. I'm now using a service called Backupify to back up all of my online accounts. At $29 per year, it's a lot more economical than the $2,000 I was willing to pay to recover my hard drive. I'm using it to back up my accounts at:
flickr
facebook
twitter
de.licio.us
google docs
blogger
gmail; and
friendfeed

I'm hoping that, as the service grows, they'll also start offering backups for my accounts at:
reqall
Ning
google reader; and
pandora

The best part about it is that - for today only - backupify is FREE for one year.

Disclosure Alert a la Hallicious.com – Backupify is giving away three Amazon Gift Cards, in a random drawing, to individuals who blog about it and list a service that they would like Backupify to backupify. This post is my entry into that contest. You can participate by following the instructions here…

The wrong side of the velvet rope

2009-10-15T23:20:00.010-05:00

I've been hearing a lot lately about the value of the "velvet rope social network*." As a business person, this sounds pretty interesting. It conjures up images of inviting just the right customers or suppliers into a snug, fancy little room to talk shop and share witty repartee. Or a social club where you can feel totally safe and at home because you know exactly who the other members are.

One of my new favorite bloggers, Julia Roy, blogged here about luxury brands who use velvet-rope social networks to connect with their customers.

But there's a downside. Exclusive sounds cool until you're the one being excluded.

One of the brands that Julia highlighted was Mercedes-Benz and their velvet rope social network, Generation Benz. I happen to be a Benz enthusiast, so I figured that I'd go check this bad boy out. I linked to the site, and had my first interaction with their "doorman" (played by this innocuous questionnaire; I imagine him as a huge, HGH-swilling beast):
I'm pretty suave, so I casually hit the "continue" button. He came right back with:

Yeah. You know that Benz wants to know what cool guys in their late 30s and older 40s are thinking.

DOH! Denied! Now I REALLY want to know what's going on behind that rope.

There's a moral to this story, right? It could be this one:

Be sure to hire the right bouncer, because he might keep out the very folks you want to have in your club.

But more likely it's this one:

Exclusivity feels nice for a while, but it's mostly just lousy to keep people out. That's what I teach my kids; why should the social web be different?

Since velvet ropes seem to be the coming thing, I'd love to know what you think!

*BIZARRE SIDE NOTE: I linked above to a video of Chris Brogan talking about velvet rope social networks, because I know that he's been interested in them. I didn't realize until after I'd posted the link that this video was filmed at my company, and that I am sitting stage right, looking up admiringly at Chris. Irony; you've got to love it.

Bouncer photo by Tawny Rockerazzi

Why Google is a "Best company to work for"

2009-09-30T11:22:00.001-05:00

Because their toilets have heated seats and an automated bidet functionality. How do you compete with that? Sent from my iPhone

Posted via email from chimoose's posterous

"Consuming Louisville" is a winner!

2009-09-25T15:47:00.002-05:00

via consuminglouisville.com

I just wanted to give a shout-out to my friend Michelle Jones who runs Consuming Louisville. Her brilliant blog was just named Best Entertainment Blog and runner-up for Best Local Site in the LEO Weekly Readers Choice Awards.
Michelle cares more about Louisville than anyone I know, and that love comes through in her writing every day. Way to go, Michelle!

Posted via web from chimoose's posterous

Appropriate attire in the workplace

2009-09-22T09:35:00.001-05:00

via peopleofwalmart.com

This is a great t-shirt. But I probably wouldn't wear it to work.

Posted via web from chimoose's posterous

Customer service to die for

2009-09-20T14:27:00.001-05:00

I love good food, good drinks, fast cars, photography and New York City. I've been an Apple fanboy my entire life and worked on Final Cut Pro for 6 years.
You should follow me on twitter here.
I’m a cofounder at Posterous.

Sachin Agarwal's profile »

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via sachin.posterous.com

So, I've been using posterous for a few months now, and loving it. I especially love the posterous bookmarklet that I can use to grab content from any web page, and blog about it here.

One thing I DON'T like is that, when I use the bookmarklet, I don't have access to any HTML controls (e.g., to embed hyperlinks). So I used the feedback option on the site to make that suggestion.

I got a response back from Sachin, the founder of the company, in less than 20 minutes indicating that he liked my idea, and would add it to the queue to be evaluated.

I know that personal service like that isn't always possible, and its probably not terribly scalable. but it sure as heck is nice when you can get it.

Thanks, Sachin, for the motivation to keep my customer service top-notch.

Posted via web from chimoose's posterous

Religion and the Internet

2009-09-20T13:42:00.003-05:00

via flickr.com

I've been doing a lot of thinking lately about the intersection of two important areas of my life - the social web and my faith.

I am a Christian, and am in the middle of a pretty intensive 2-year bible study program called Discipleship Curriculum. Our group meets every Monday at 6am (yes, that hurts!) and we have 4-5 hours of reading and work every week. To try and keep it all straight, I set up a private Ning site for my group.

I've actually put a lot of work into it, but it doesn't get used much. While there are a bunch of guys in my group who are on facebook, most of them have been pretty cautious (or uninterested) in the social web more broadly. And in my thoroughly unresearched opinion, that seems to be a microcosm of most American Christians.

I do read a few Christian blogs (I like the Evangelical Outpost and OpinionStreams) and the pastors at my church (Dave Stone and Kyle Idelman) have recently started blogging.

But a friend of mine, Frank Reed (of Frankly Thinking) recently asked me whether I knew of many really forward-thinking churches or ministries relative to the social web. I couldn't come up with many.

I know that there are probably more than I am aware of ... but also that there are less than there probably ought to be. Given the literally hundreds of millions of people who are using the social web, many for hours per day, it seems crazy not to have a stronger presence in the space ... if only to better understand the folks to whom we can offer help and hope.

I can't help but think that Jesus' teachings fit the social web perfectly ... he came to serve and love everyone. He came to offer wisdom, hope, and help. He came to connect people to him and to each other. All of those missions fit.

I'm going to keep pondering how the Christian movement can be more present on the web ... but in the meantime, I welcome your thoughts and ideas, be they "for, against or otherwise."

Photo by Daquella manera

Posted via web from chimoose's posterous

When you stop and relax for a minute ...

2009-09-17T07:44:00.002-05:00

via flickr.com

It's amazing what you can find when you just STOP ... and spend some time BEING. I went outside with my daughters last week, and just sat on the curb while they were tracing themselves in sidewalk chalk.

After a while, I just listened to them while looking up at the sky. It was incredibly peaceful. I took a couple of iPhone snapshots, including the one above (more at flickr.com/chimoose). I had more or less forgotten them when I saw this on @armano's posterous ... which inspired me to share my own fluffy clouds.

Take a minute today to relax and look up!

Posted via web from chimoose's posterous

I apologize for what I'm about to do

2009-09-15T16:45:00.002-05:00

My wife borrowed this little garden spade from Loew's, but she had to give it back a week later. It turns out that the free trowel period had ended.

Posted via email from chimoose's posterous

The People's Republic may need a new PR agency

2009-09-14T15:00:00.002-05:00

Uphold the basic economic system with public ownership playing a dominant role, tra-la

via economist.com

I love this example of a slogan that the Chinese government has approved to celebrate its 60th anniversary. As a longtime corporate hack, I don't pretend to be a guru in marketing or advertising.

But even as an amateur, the slogan below doesn't seem to roll trippingly off the tongue. Perhaps its lost something in translation? ;-)

'Citizens might lift their spirits with a list of 50 officially approved slogans issued to mark national day (soldiers have been ordered to post them up and shout them in their camps). “Uphold the basic economic system with public ownership playing a dominant role and diverse forms of economic ownership developing together, and with the practice of distribution according to work being carried out as the mainstay alongside other forms of distribution,” goes a particularly snappy one.'

Thanks to the brilliantly wry writing of The Economist ...

Posted via web from chimoose's posterous

What it feels like to be 9

2009-09-13T07:08:00.001-05:00

I just spent a glorious day in my hometown that included a walk along the former railroad bed through the center of town, an amazing farmer's market (with live and excellent bluegrass tunes), a trip to the kids science museum, a birthday party, a hike in the woods and an evening swim. Along the way my brother captured this picture that sort of summed up the day for me. Sent from my iPhone

Posted via email from chimoose's posterous

Fixing health care on the back of a napkin - Or not.

2009-08-16T22:24:00.001-05:00

via digitalroam.typepad.com

I love the guys at digital roam's "back of the napkin" blog. Their mission is to visualize issues and to eliminate jargon and technobabble so that the average person can make sense of complex issues. And that's a great mission.

But with all the talk about health reform lately, I am concerned that there are an awful lot of people trying to simplify the problem. And it just isn't simple. The back of the napkin gang has gotten one thing very right: That health reform isn't about health reform anymore; it's about health insurance reform.

Full disclosure; I work for an insurance company. It'll be no surprise to you that I think my company does a lot of good and adds a lot of value for a lot of people. I wouldn't work there otherwise. And there are clearly things that need to be reformed in the insurance (payor's) part of the healthcare equation just as there are on the parts of the doctors and patients (the napkins address the docs and payors in their analysis, but not-so-much on the patients). But the picture above shows how the back-of-the-napkin guys have simplified an issue so much that they have fundamentally changed reality. I'm going to assume that this is an error rather than a subtle way of using their bully pulpit to support their own viewpoint. But insurance didn't "jump between me and my doctor" to ration care. Your employer told your insurance company what it was willing to pay for. And that's just one, obvious example.

There's a quotation on this subject that I really like, and I wish I could remember who said it: "For every complex problem, there is a simple solution. And it's wrong."

That's where we are here. Both in the health reform "debate" [read: propaganda wars] and in the (presumably well-intentioned) back of the napkin summary, we're dumbing down a complex problem to the point where we're not actually educating anybody on anything.

Posted via web from chimoose's posterous

Humana Takes Health to the Streets With B-cycle Bike Sharing | Fast Company

2009-08-13T10:27:00.002-05:00

via fastcompany.com

Humana's Innovation Center has been on a mission for the last two years - a mission to create a social revolution in health And that revolution isn't focused on making healthy stuff more fun - it's focused on making FUN stuff more HEALTHY.

Bcycle is our most mature effort to date in this regard. The joint venture between Humana, Trek and Crispin Porter + Bogusky has already sold a major bikesharing system in to the city of Denver (which will launch in 2010).

We've always felt confident that what we were doing was going to make a difference - but it's nice to get validation from a publication that most of us read religiously (Fast Company).
Hopefully, this exposure will inspire others to get into the game, and to join the Health Revolution.

Posted via web from chimoose's posterous

Another Science Girl

2009-08-09T10:54:00.001-05:00

"Can I keep these pennies, Dad?" We have a standing rule in our house that if you find loose change lying around, you get to keep it. Big A found a couple of pennies in my car while we were on our way out to breakfast, and decided that today would be a great day to do some science experiments. Her sister is visiting my parents for the weekend, and she's been having a lot of fun being the center of attention. She had done an experiment at preschool that involves mixing water, white vinegar and salt into a solution, and dropping in a bunch dirty pennies. Turns out, it works! We were able to make some nasty old pennies look brand new! And big A, who is usually relegated to the "Igor the Assistant" role in her sisters science projects, got to be the lead scientist. And everybody needs that once in a while!

Sent from my iPhone

Posted via email from chimoose's posterous

The ultimate business card - TAT Augmented ID

2009-07-26T11:20:00.002-05:00

via mobileuserinterfaces.blogspot.com

This is a fascinating concept that I read about on Greg Verdino's Marketing Blog this morning.

Meeting people who share (or challenge) your interests at conferences has never been easier thanks to twitter. By listening in on a conference's tweetstream using a hashtag and a twitter client tool like Tweetchat or Tweetdeck, you can easily see who's saying what about the conference. But often, you can't connect with the people who are actually presenting - because they're usually not on twitter while they're on stage (otherwise, why be on stage at all?).

However, a Swedish design firm called TAT has released a video for a new "augmented ID" concept that would recognize the face of a person, and then visually show whatever networking info that person wanted to have shown at that time.

But what's really interesting (to me, anyway) is what other contexts this might work well in. What are the potential applications for gaming, for example? Imagine an alternative reality game (ARG) that was able to display characteristics about the gamer in real life - that would be amazing.

Anyway, it would appear that this TAT product is still in concept phase (rather than an actual product), but when it does hit the streets, it'll be interesting to see how people use it.

What do you think about using a tool like this? What new applications would you have for it? What concerns does it raise?

Posted via web from chimoose's posterous

Geeking out with new social tools | 12seconds.tv (beta)

2009-07-21T08:40:00.003-05:00

Geeking out with new social tools on 12seconds.tv

As usual, I like keeping abreast of interesting tools for helping people interact and collaborate. I've been hearing about 12seconds.tv for a while, but was finally convinced to explore it more deeply after hearing about it on the Quick and Dirty podcast with Aaron Strout and Jennifer Leggio.

12seconds, which allows you (surprise) to record or upload no more than 12 seconds of video at a time, is being billed as "twitter for video." I'm not entirely sure that I buy that description, since one of the main attractions of twitter is that you can actually move pretty robust content over the web quickly, from anywhere, with limited effort.

Recording 12 seconds of video from a webcam isn't exactly difficult, but how would I embed a link for example? Now, if there was a way to attach a bit.ly link over the video, THAT would be cool.

How are you using 12 seconds? If it's an interesting platform, what would put it over the top in terms of features or usability?

hallicious » Can “Free” Work for Enterprise Applications?

2009-07-14T07:52:00.001-05:00

If the data is important enough, there really isn’t a mitigation plan in the world that will appease decision makers who are concerned about this risk. Deferring the costs of owning, operating, maintaining and upgrading software and servers sounds awesome, no arguments there. However, transferring the risk of catastrophic failure to a start-up or even a company the size of Google, with limited to no recourse, sounds unfathomable to most large organizations with a need to control…

via hallicious.com

It's amazing the transformation that can occur when people have a voice ... which is one of the reasons I've become so passionate about the revolution that social media is engendering in our lives and in our work.

By finding that voice - and a chorus of new voices that push, challenge, support and oppose that voice - a new kind of growth is happening. I see it in myself. I've never been one to thrive on connectedness, and had always maintained pretty intense levels of privacy.
But ever since I decided to "put myself out there" I've discovered tremendous value from connecting with others. They inspire me, they push me, and sometimes they even make fun of me. But the experience has definitely changed me in a positive way. The link you see on this post comes from a guy I work with - Chris Hall. He came to the Innovation Center as a project manager a little less than a year ago. And in that time, he has (through tireless pursuit) become a really, really good social media thinker. In fact, the way that Chris has grown over the last year has made me think differently about how people work - and how vital it is to pursue your passions.
What has pushed you to grow? Does riding the waves of "social" inspire your growth as it has for Chris and I?

Posted via web from chimoose's posterous

Greg's Summer Classics Reading Program

2009-07-03T01:43:00.006-05:00

Our modern lives sometimes feel lacking in the adventure department - or at least mine does. Don't get me wrong, I'm not complaining. And I certainly have plenty of drama - just not enough adventure, in the classic literary sense.

I've also become aware that, as a professional, I get jam-packed with reading from business books, blogs and magazines. And I'm in the midst of an intensive 21-month bible study program at church that involves 4-5 hours of study (I hate to call it homework) per week. When you throw bi-weekly Baseball America in there, there's not a lot of room for pure leisure reading.

So I decided to kill two birds with one stone by creating Greg's Summer Classics Reading Program. I kicked it off last May with 3 books that I'd never read, but now absolutely love. [I should point out at this juncture that I had failed in this experiment in the summer of 2007 by starting with Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment. While I may one day share the common opinion that this book is a wonder, its density caused me to slowly grind to a halt somewhere around the 4th chapter. EPIC FAIL!] Anyway, the 3 books I tackled in the summer of 2008 were:

The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
The Scarlet Pimpernel - Baroness Orczy
The Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas

I absolutely loved all 3 of these books . . . and incidentally, they helped me to understand Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn a lot better. Tom had clearly read all three when he decided to break Jim out of prison! They're fast-paced, have great characters and twisty plots, and can be read while drinking a Manhattan on your porch [trust me, I can verify this fact].

The program was such a success last summer that I decided to give it another shot. My 3 selections for this summer are (DRUM ROLL):

Cyrano de Bergerac - Edmond Rostand
The Last of the Mohicans - James Fenimore Cooper
Dracula - Bram Stoker

I'm halfway through Cyrano, and am loving it. Cyrano's character is brilliant (in fact, one of his oratories will be the subject of an upcoming blog post at CrumpleItUp.com).

What books are YOU reading this summer? What adventure classics do I need to add to my list? Your comments are welcome . . .

Social Business Design

2009-07-03T01:04:00.001-05:00

Social Business Design
Originally uploaded by David Armano

Not only am I pretty intrigued by this visual rendering of the Social Business by David Armano, I am trying to figure out how to embed flicker images in blog posts (thereby clearly adding value and attribution to the image creator) rather than just downloading the image and reposting it.
I'm working on a blog post now for http://crumpleitup.com/blog in which I hope to use this image.

Greg does Dallas

2009-06-18T07:43:00.004-05:00

Last month I had the pleasure of presenting at the Inbound Marketing Summit in Dallas, hosted by Chris Brogan and Justin Levy. The summit featured a great crowd of folks that I was honored to be a part of - and I always get excited about telling the Humana story.

I have collected some artifacts from that presentation to share. While my session wasn't videotaped, I did have the pleasure of being interviewed by Amber Rae Lambke of Leverage Software (a Chicago girl - always a plus!).

I also saved my presentation materials to Slideshare; while they lose something without the talk-track, I'll provide them here anyway; if you're really interested you can download the presentation with speaker notes and it'll probably make more sense.

Social Business from the Inside Out

View more OpenOffice presentations from chimoose.

Next week I'll be in Boston for the Enterprise 2.0 conference; looking forward to being a panelist along with Peter Kim (Dachis Corporation), Ben Foster (Allstate) and Morgan Johnston (JetBlue).

Introducing the Insert Coin Game Contest, 8-Bit Style! | Crumple it up!

2009-06-17T08:02:00.002-05:00

via crumpleitup.com

[NOTE: This post contains updated statistics]

As many of you know, my company, Humana, has become a leader in creating games for health. Two of our recent efforts, the America's Horsepower Challenge and Operation Planet Savers, have been really well received.

We're working on a lot more health-related games now. In addition to our own ideas, we're also working with interesting folks at Georgia Tech, USC, MIT and Stanford on developing healthy game concepts.

But now, for the first time, we're soliciting ideas from gamers themselves. Our "Insert Coin" idea competition was launched last week at the Games for Health conference, and we're hoping to get thousands of great ideas from gamers all over the world. For my part, my team has been working on ways to use social media to drive awareness and interest in the game.

Our first effort was to create a video to get people's attention. And it has. Over the first 48 hours since we released the video, almost 60,000 [stats as of 9am on 6/18 are over 80,000 views] people have watched it - putting it in the top 50 most-watched videos on YouTube. Given that 10 hours of video are uploaded every minute, we think that's pretty good! [YouTube now reports that 20 hours of video are uploaded every minute; expecting 24 hours per minute by the end of June]

Check the CrumpleItUp.com blog for more information and submit your ideas for the contest at humanagames.com/insertcoin.

Posted via web from chimoose's posterous

New Media Academic Summit 09

2009-06-16T07:21:00.003-05:00

I had the pleasure of sitting on a really interesting panel last week hosted by Edelman's Rick Murray. I was on the panel with Alex Wheeler from Starbucks, Aaron Lilly from Microsoft and Richard Brewer-Hay from eBay.

You can watch the video from the panel here.

We had a pretty good dialog going on how each of us goes about engaging our customers to create content that benefits both them and us.

I felt a little outgunned in terms of coolness, but managed to meet a ton of interesting people, many of whom I've already been back in touch with. Hoping that this will lead to more opportunities for me to share Humana's social media story with the world.

Posted via web from chimoose's posterous

Back to the Ballfield

2009-06-08T12:56:00.002-05:00

Baseball Players
Originally uploaded by ChiMoose

I'm a blessed man - I have two daughters. I wasn't always sure that would be a blessing . . . I grew up in a house with 3 boys, and didn't have the first clue what it would be like to have little girls.

As any dad can tell you, having daughters is incredible. You have instant hero status that will hopefully last a lifetime. I realized that playing dressups, Barbies and Polly Pockets can be fun (it's not all that different from the GI Joe I grew up with; instead of a kung fu grip, many of our Barbies sing).

I also learned that there's nothing cuter than ballet and piano recitals, and the first back walkover in gymnastics is a significant athletic feat. My oldest daughter has even begun to dabble in basketball, which I've coached for the last two years.

But as a boy, I spent my summers on a baseball field - and that's something I missed. Until now. For whatever reason, Ellie has decided that she's into baseball . . . it seems to have happened at her last Louisville Bats game; the first one she ever really tried to pay attention to.

She started requesting a baseball glove. Fearing that it was going to be a fashion accessory as opposed to sporting goods, I decided that if she was really interested, she could start learning to play catch - sans glove - with a tennis ball. Not only did she like it, but she's actually pretty good at it.

So last week, we made a pilgrimage to Dick's Sporting Goods and picked out baseball gloves for both girls (Avery always wants to do everything Ellie does!). We played catch together on Saturday afternoon, and before bedtime we oiled our gloves and tied them up with a shoelace to break them in (just like I did when I was a kid!).

We repeated the whole routine on Sunday, and will hopefully continue to do so throughout the summer. With any luck, I'll be back on the baseball field by next summer.

Not a fan

2009-05-24T13:59:00.003-05:00

Social currency has been getting a lot of press for the last few years. Ever since Friendster gave way to MySpace, Facebook and Twitter, their users have rediscovered the fact that there is value - whether real or perceived - in who you know.

What's interesting is that, in recognizing that value, it's been distorted in strange ways. What began as a way of reconnecting with old friends and finding new ones didn't take long to devolve into a race to add friends and fans. The quantity of "relationships" (use that word loosely!) became more important than the inherent value they brought. And this new "relationship as currency" works two ways.

I want to rack up as many fans of my facebook page as possible to prove how valuable I am to know!
I want to associate myself with people, bands, athletes and causes that I think are cool in the hopes that, by my affiliation, I'll inherit some of their coolness

And it's in that context that my church has started to talk about our relationship with Jesus in a way that distinguishes between "fan" and "follower." For those of you who aren't Christians, this message doesn't really apply - directly. But it may shed some light on what Christianity really is . . . and it's probably different from what you think.

A lot of people think that being a Christian means that you try really hard to do what's right. And true Christians can often be identified through their deeds. But the point is that you can admire Jesus' miracles and the way he lived his life . . . you can even believe that he's the son of God and be restored to a relationship with God as a result. But those are "fan" behaviors. Being a follower is something else entirely.

Jesus tells us what's required of his followers - his truly committed followers - many times. Here are two that stand out to me:

Luke 9:23 - Then he said to them all: "If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me."

John 12:26 - "Whoever serves me must follow me; and where I am, my servant also will be. My Father will honor the one who serves me."

There's no mistaking the level of commitment required through those verses. And I can say that today I'm more like a fan of Jesus than a completely committed follower. But I'm ready to change that. I'm committed to starting every day with a recognition that not only is Jesus my Savior, but also my Lord . . . and I'm going to pray to deny my own desires in favor of his will in my life. In other words, I will pray to die to myself just as Christ did when he accepted the humiliation of death on a cross.

I'm scared to publish this post. I don't know what people will think of me if they read it. But I do know that I can't really be a completely committed follower of Christ if I let those things stop me - and unless I am completely ready to accept the consequences. I may lose some fans - or some friends. But at the end of the day, none of that matters relative to living as Christ has asked me to.

If you'd like to find out more, please feel free to reach out to me, or to visit http://notafan.com.

PicoCool - Her Morning Elegance

2009-04-30T00:28:00.001-05:00

via picocool.com

Wow. If you have any interest in the incredibly creative use of video, you should really watch this stop-motion piece.
I don't know a lot about video - yet - but would love to be able to do work like this. Kudos to the creators and actors.

Posted via web from chimoose's posterous

Dell Customer Service Update

2009-04-29T23:53:00.002-05:00

Remember when I posted about my disappointment in Dell's customer service? I was pretty sure that I was going to hear back from someone there right away. But I didn't, so I forgot about it.

But then, a couple of weeks later, BAM! I had messages on twitter from the famous @richardatdell and one of his honchos, @rich_at_dell. They were real, live, personal, non-form-letter messages indicating that they'd read my blog post and wanted to see how they could help. I have to admit that I'm impressed.

If you'll remember, I was in the middle of trying to resolve a technical issue when my warranty ran out . . . so I'm hoping that my warranty will be "extended" for long enough to finish solving the problem.

Stay tuned for the exciting conclusion!

The telepathic iPod

2009-04-17T17:00:00.002-05:00

You've got to hand it to Apple - they're always coming up with exciting new features for their line of consumer electronics products.
I discovered one accidentally on my way home from work today - my iPod is telepathically connected with me and my surroundings.

I'm 41 years old, which means that I came of age in the 80s. I grew up in southern Indiana, a good midwestern boy listening to some serious hair bands.

I also grew up driving a convertible, thanks to my dad who bought his in 1966 (and still has it). So picture me, my mullet flying in the wind, rocking out to Quiet Riot, Iron Maiden and Motley Crue on my way to the drive-in (where I'd sip Bartles & Jaymes coolers and Little Kings - but don't tell my parents).

Anyway, I've always dreamed of driving my own convertible. That dream has only gotten stronger since moving away from Chicago for the warmer climes of Louisville. So this spring, I bought one. My own version of the economic stimulus package, if you will.

Today is the first REALLY nice day of spring - 70 and sunny on the way home from work. So I dropped the top, hit shuffle on my 30-gig iPod, (4,000 songs in every imaginable genre) and headed for home. My iPod was sensing me winding down from the day, and started me off with some John Coltrane as I picked through the traffic downtown.

As I pulled onto River Road and opened things up a bit, the music that reminded me of being 16 again started up. Van Halen - Running with the Devil. VH was a revelation as a freshman - the hardest rocking band I'd ever heard (before that I never got fiercer than Styx or Journey). Next, Night Ranger's "Don't tell me you love me." This, in my opinion, is one of the most underrated songs of the hair era (haira?).
Then, as if that wasn't enough, the set closed out with the Scorpions, who proceeded to "Rock me like a hurricane."
I pulled into the garage feeling like a kid again and gave a hug to my waiting 9-year-old. I wonder what music and experiences are going to shape her teen years?

And what features will those geniuses at Apple think of next?

Posted via email from chimoose's posterous

Seth Godin on Web Design: Do you want visitors to notice?

2009-04-12T09:32:00.001-05:00

"Do you want the people visiting this site to notice it?"
It's a subtle but essential question.
For artists, musicians and web 2.0 companies, the answer is probably yes. Yes we want people to see the interface or remark on our skills or cleverness.
For everyone else, it's no. The purpose of the site is to tell a story or to generate some sort of action. And if the user notices the site, not the story, you've lost.

via sethgodin.typepad.com

This is interesting. As someone who's relatively new to the business of communicating a message through the web, it's not a question that I've formally asked myself.

But now that I have, I'm not entirely sure that I agree with Seth's answer. I get his point; the message is the important thing - not the delivery mechanism. But I also think that a really well-designed web site is going to reflect the values, mission and message of the entity it represents. And while our site (http://crumpleitup.com) doesn't represent a web 2.0 company, I want it to reflect the fact that we design with excellence. With insight. With clarity and with cleverness.
And that, to me, says that the web site is going to be - must be - noticeable for its design. What do you think?

Posted via web from chimoose's posterous

The art of negotiation

2009-04-12T00:09:00.001-05:00

via youtube.com

I've been thinking a lot about negotiation recently. It's something that, whether we realize it or not, we do every day.

Sometimes, we know it. We're working with a vendor to get the price down. We're talking to a customer about how to increase the value of the sale. Or we're buying a car.

But often its less obvious. I had a meeting with my boss on Friday to review web site designs. I knew going into the meeting that we disagreed on some fundamental issues. And although I didn't really mean to, I prepared for that meeting as a negotiation. I thought about what his position was, and tried to imagine why. I looked for flaws in his argument - and in mine. I thought about how he'd respond to various approaches.

In the video attached (one of my favorite "Kids in the Hall" clips), you see negotiation as most people approach it - with tunnel vision; fixed on their own point of view. Sure, it's cliched . . . but unless you think at least twice as much about your negotiating partners position as your own, you're not likely to reach a satisfactory conclusion.

Posted via web from chimoose's posterous

I thought Dell fixed their customer support problems?

2009-04-09T20:50:00.001-05:00

I know. A story about problems with Dell and customer support aren't new. I know about Jeff Jarvis, his experience and the "been there, done that" feel of another blogger writing about Dell issues. But coming back from a trip and finding my recently repaired Dell desktop failing to boot as has been the case on several other occasions -- I've had it.

via daggle.com

I wasn't going to do this, but I feel that I need to share my personal Dell Hell story. And the reason isn't because I hate Dell. It's because I like them. It's because I'd like to buy another one (I've bought 6 in 10 years). But I won't - because I've been through Dell Hell too . . . and I can't get anyone there to listen.

I feel kind of left out. I know that I'm a few years late for the Jeff Jarvis version of Dell Hell, and everyone seems to feel that they've cleaned up their act. They have customer service people on twitter! They have a crowsourcing site that everyone loves! But they have at least one loyal customer in Kentucky who is just shouting into the wind. So I decided that I will put them to the test - and take my story to the internet.
I am typing this on a Latitude 4700 that I bought at the end of 2005. Yes, it's a little dated now, but still not a bad machine. BUT . . . my hard drive crashed last summer - all data unrecoverable. Of course, no backups (which is MY fault, not Dell's). They sent me a replacement, I installed it, it works. BUT . . . my speakers started crackling. All the time. I figured it was the speakers, and replaced them. But the new ones crackled too. So, over the next couple of months I spent literally 8-10 hours on the phone with customer service, trying everything INCLUDING reinstalling Windows XP (which, as you know, is a MONSTER P.I.A.)
I was in the middle of working through the next round of solutions with my customer service rep, and she decided that my next step was to live-chat. So I tried . . . except that I couldn't; my warranty expired. Just then.
So I called. Talked to the rudest customer service agent you could imagine. Her name is Rosalyn, ID 133976. She thought that it was perfectly OK to stop serving me in the middle of a months-long fix process, and wouldn't let me speak to her supervisor.
So I wrote to Dell's customer service, who sent me a form letter informing me that I needed to talk to tech support.
I sent another note to customer service, explaining that tech support wouldn't talk to me. Got another form letter back.
I tweeted about it a couple of times, and a friend offered to contact @RichardAtDell. [Side note: I work in social media, and everyone I know, knows RichardAtDell and thinks he's a prince. So I'm not blaming him]. No response.

So I gave up, until now. Dell, are you out there listening? Do you really think that it's OK to leave a long-time loyal customer hanging like you did with me? If so, just do nothing. I've gotten used to it. And my next computer will be a Mac.

Posted via web from chimoose's posterous

TweetDeck Plugs Memory Leak; Launches Facebook Integration for All

2009-04-08T18:32:00.001-05:00

Beyond plugging the memory leak, TweetDeck will also be pushing out its Facebook integration – previously optional – to all users, which lets you view your friends’ status updates and simultaneously update both Twitter () and Facebook ().

via mashable.com

Tweetdeck has done it again.

It was already an invaluable tool for managing Twitter connections, but now it's integrated - elegantly - into facebook as well.

Anyone who follows more than 50 people on facebook knows that it can be tough to get to all of the tweets that you really want to see. Tweetdeck lets you do that by grouping the people you follow, and separating those streams from the mass.

Now, I can also see my facebook friends' status updates AND, with the toggle of a simple radio button, update my own status on facebook and/or twitter. I promise that I'm not going to be one of those guys who sends all of his tweets through to facebook - I've always found that annoying (especially when I get them both places), but it is nice not to have to actually GO to facebook to share something cool.

Thanks, tweetdeck . . . looks like it may be time for another donation!

Posted via web from chimoose's posterous