Richard's Blog

 Posts Tagged ‘facebook’

I recently attended a presentation at my business school reunion by Professor David Yoffie entitled “The Digital Revolution: How Technology is Changing the World”.  There were many interesting statistics and points he made – most of which reinforced to me why what Therap is doing is the right direction.

Some of the statistics are hard to figure out what to do with – such as 2.9 billion transistors can fit on your finger nail. A terraflop of instructions per second (1 trillion instructions per second) fits on a fingertip and costs about $220. He gave this as an example of the movement towards mobile devices being affordable.

The tablet market is expect to grow from $0 to $50 billion within 2 years. With all of the low cost tablets becoming available – there are good choices for agencies using Therap. We can continue to focus on our application and what we do well – and leave the devices to Apple and Google and others.

He also showed some statistics on Facebook. How younger people are now communicating on social media and not email. The leading Facebook app is apparently Cityville with over 70 million users. Given this – I have decided to actually try Cityville for hopefully 5-10 minutes a day to experience it. I realize that part of the experience is people will get some of those annoying messages which clutter up mailboxes.  I apologize in advance – but I guess that is hopefully part of this learning experience.

People talk about digital natives and digital immigrants – I am not sure if this is digital immigrants or a 3rd category of a businessperson trying to understand culture.

I attended an interesting event at Jeremy’s high school. There were a number of group discussions with parents, administrators and students. One discussion was regarding how parents react to students using facebook, farmville and IM.

Much of the discussion was regarding parents being concerned about their children using facebook rather than doing homework.  Some parents apparently take computer access away from their children if they think their children are multitaking or  IMing too much.  However the students then pointed out that certain of their classes are using facebook and twitter as part of class assignments.

Some parents commented on how teenagers have relationships and stay in touch via facebook or other social media. I pointed out that one of my major methods of staying in touch with people I work with is through blogs or facebook.

The one area which has most surprised me as I see high school students online in facebook is the level of insults and potential cyber bullying which I don’t think would happen if people were interacting in person with each other.

I think most parents around the country (and probably world) are dealing with similar issues.Perhaps I have a heightened level of interest as I spend so much of my time thinking about issues such as cyber security, privacy and other issues related to electronic communication and documentation.

As Facebook and Twitter become so essential for information flows in todays world, it is interesting to see the wording that they use to enable one to follow information.

In Therap – when you have seen information it is marked “I have read” and you see information based on “roles” or “caseloads”. The words are based on rights to access.

If you want to read information on Twitter – you have to “follow” something.

In facebook – there are series of choices which include “like”, “fan” and “friend”.  What word does one choose if you want to read and follow information which you may not necessarily agree with -but want to heard what someone is saying.  If you want to subscribe to a political magazine you don’t have to say you agree with the contents.  In facebook if you want to in effect to subscribe to a feed – you cannot click a “I want to follow but not say what I think” button.

With so many conferences and money (both investments and corporate marketing spending) being spent on often trendy or perceived fun products and services – we try to assess which are good use of resources for Therap to be involved with from a marketing and support perspective.

In general our approach is to encourage our team members to use many of these services so they have first hand experiences. That makes for more effective internal discussions about what is possible. We also communicate with our users in so many manners.

While Farmville doesn’t allow outside apps to create products that integrate into Farmville, we do have buttons for flair on facebook.

We also have increasingly been posting some video’s to YouTube.

Our You Tube videos tend to be informative which may be why they haven’t really taken off on page views yet (maybe eventually). Topics like electronic signatures, documentation for surveyors and MAR’s don’t seem to be as popular as Lady Gaga’s music videos.

Clearly important pieces of what we do include making sure we have proper medicaid approved electronic signatures and documentation, ensuring a user interface that allows direct support professionals to accurately and cost effectively enter data, working with providers and states on various state and federal requirements, managing our company owned equipment infrastructure and more.

But there are choices on how to communicate with users.

We tend not to use Twitter very often. Justin does a bit. I have tried it and don’t get it. I had tried Second Life a couple of years ago and thought it was fun – but it had huge bandwidth requirements. Its seemed fine for someone like Starwood Hotels trying to hype their new Aloft brand hotel – where they could supplement whatever they spent on Second Life with a huge PR budget. But where does that leave companies without those type of budgets?

John Burton recently headlined a blog post: Twitter, Second Life, Mafia Wars: Enterprise-Grade Business Tools or Silly Toys for Business Professionals?. He wrote

Twitter is on top of the world. Twitter is the soup de jour. Twitter is the new black. Twitter is the prom queen and the homecoming king. Twitter is, dare I say, its own religion. Yet in the back of my mind the question remains, is Twitter really a useful business tool, or is it just yet another toy for stressed-out business professionals?

He continues with lots of reasons why twitter and second life haven’t been effective as customer relationship tools.

In Nicolas Carr’s Blog Rough Type he stated

We are now coming to understand that the failure of the once much-hyped virtual world Second Life was inevitable. It was never that the Web would provide an alternative reality. It was that the Web, a labyrinth devised by men, would become reality

John Burton finally concludes with

Which Brings me to the Next Point: Don’t Stalk Your Customers on Twitter! Just Pick Up the $#@! Telephone When They Call

There are so many effective ways to communicate with our users and potential users. Telephone calls, live help chats, webinars, user groups, in person meetings, visits to agencies for training and other discussions, and our conferences. We will continue to monitor new technologies and services and employ them as appropriate and useful. We are very mindful that every minute someone is using Therap is time away from other activities. So our goal is to be efficient and productive in our interactions.

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