Seasons Greatings

What takes longer, teaching a doctor to tweet or sticking a microphone in their face and asking a question? I have been thinking a lot about efficiency in the way we interact with media. Techy types often have the same thoughts about data storage – compression and decompression. What is the most efficient way to record a file to a disk and then read it back? It is not a stretch to think about our relationship with media in the same way.
As an experiment, what is the first thing that comes to mind when you see this image?
How long does it take to register “STOP” in your mind? Probably longer even than it takes to put your foot on the brake. Call it Pavlovian, but the truth is that our brains are wired to process visual stimulus very quickly. The “decompression” of the meaning of a red octagon is highly efficient.It takes very little effort for us to decode the message behind the sign.
Now examine a sonnet from Shakespeare:
There are two challenges to texts as ethereally magical as those from Shakespeare. The first is the creation of the written words. To take a simple phrase – ‘I cannot figure out if it’s my heart or eyes that love you more’ and transform it into:
Mine eye and heart are at a mortal war How to divide the conquest of thy sight
requires a substantial amount of intellect. The effort required to “compress” the emotional sentiment associated with the text is staggering. It is probably our appreciation for that effort that causes us to always conjure mental images of poets gazing into the distance, quill in hand, always thinking more than writing. It is not just poets that have the challenge. Writing is simply hard work. Ask any good editor . To take an idea and translate it into text that, hopefully, the majority of your audience can understand is not a simple thing. Your audience, in turn, has the job of decompressing what you have written and recompiling it into a cohesive thought. Its a lot more complicated that drawing a stop sign to write about something as complex as love.
Video has emerged as pretty comfortable middle ground in the compression/decompression challenge. From a decompression standpoint, videos require fairly low “processing power”. That explains why so many of us are glued to the TV every night. The entertainment value is high compared to the effort we have to put into it decoding it. Practically speaking, the “how two” video has a lot of advantages over a text book. Julia Child understood this very well. Showing someone how to truss a chicken is easier on both parties than writing about about it. To truss a chicken you first tuck the wing tips into and under the wings themselves. Then you have a complicated procedure of wrapping one long string around the bird in a way that both closes it up and forms the perfect roasting shape. On second though, let the folks at HowCast show you how…
Video, as it turns out, is pretty efficient in both compression and decompression as a means of interacting with media. It is worth noting that audio, as in the spoken word, also fits nicely into this niche. Both require less effort than text to create and less effort for an audience to decode.
In a healthcare setting, one of the biggest challenges to the adoption of social media is time. It is fairly easy to convince people they have something worthwhile to talk about. It is another thing to get them to take the time to do it. Doctors, executives, department heads, etc all have the same excuse “who has time to blog or tweet?” I wonder if what they mean is ‘I don’t want to have to write a term paper every week!’. But what about 30 second audio blip, or 2 minute video? How hard is it to stop a doctor in a hallway, stick a camera in their face and ask for three health tips? OK, maybe it feels funny to do it, but the effort required to capture that moment is pretty low. From an audience standpoint, no one has to read a bombastic (ahh humm, you are still right this, right?) post about health tips; you get the “how to” video and nothing else.
With that in mind, I present a Phil Baumann styled list of 10 things you can try for easily compressed and decompressed social media posts (in no particular order)
Have some more suggestions? Post them in the comments!
So you have a hospital blog, now what? The more contributions you have to your social media effort, the more engaging you will be. No one is an island, and it would be nearly imposable for one person to represent an entire hospital or health system. Fortunately, the nature of social media is that everyone can join in the fun.
A model of which I am increasingly in favor is the “Pipeline” approach. The pipeline is where many contributors funnel in various media (video, written posts, photos, etc) into the effort. Those contributions can live on which ever site is most appropriate (IE video on youtube) and be aggregated and embedded on a centralized, branded “social media hub”. Sharing.mayoclinic.org is a great example of a social hub. They then become the fodder of tweets, facebook updates, etc.
As interest in social media grows and marketing funds disappear, service lines and departments are clamoring for support. We answer that demand by asking those interested to become contributors – part of the funnel of content, the pipeline. When an department or service line is identified, we share a guideline document with them. The guide highlights the social media program and establishes expectations for time commitments and content.
The example below is not fancy or even complete (what about policies and a review process?) but it may help serve as a launching point for those creating their own pipeline of social media contributors. This is a de-identified and simplified version of the document we use internally, please forgive the generic name and branding. It can be downloaded and used under the creative commons guidelines.

Social Sharing guidelines by Nick Dawson is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
Based on a work at www.nickdawson.net.
There are a few truths in life – death, taxes, jackalopes, freedom and the equality of all humans. Ponder that list, study it. Notice what is missing? Bacon. Maybe its sausage, maybe its a nice pate or a pickled trotter; regardless it is time to liberate our swine. Proclaim porcine freedom!
What am I blathering on about? Let us go back more than 2 years ago to the Pownce social network (RIP).
Those were the early days when we waxed on into the morning hours about the pursuit of life, liberty and the pursuit of pork. We heard the call to arms with the first Pownce Pork Project (again, RIP). The concept was simple – make bacon as a group. We voted on everything from the spiciness of the cure to the wood it was smoked over. In the end we rattled the foundations of commercial pork production by auctioning off a luscious slab of salty bacony goodness. Whomever made the biggest donation to a food related charity got to…well…take home the bacon. The winner was @surlyshirley.
It is time once again crusaders of cochon to take up arms. We must not go gently into the factory produced, chemically cured BLT. Let us stand up together and say “We demand open source pork!”
Over the coming weeks we will resurrect the hoggett mission. Follow @nickdawson – help plan the next Open Source Pork Project. I will be asking YOU what part of the pig to lop off, how to treat it and in the end, it will once again come to a food related charity auction. So spread the word – let free pork reign and don’t miss your chance to get in on the action!
Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday. Its all about family and food. Does it get much better? Sure, Christmas has gifts, and Halloween has candy, but Thanksgiving comes with very few strings attached – you show up and eat. We show up to talk. We show up to enjoy each others company and remind ourselves, no matter what the circumstances, that we all have something for which to be thankful.
Our ability to chose for ourselves is one of the many things for which we have to be thankful . Last year, bloggers reminded us that there may come a time when we, or someone we love, may not be able to make their own choices. It is a hard conversation to have, discussing end of life care, but remember that if we do not have it now, then when the time comes for our wishes to be known, it may be too late.
Engage With Grace is the “one slide project” that aims to inspire families and individuals to think about end of life care by answering 5 simple questions. It may be hard to discuss, but imagine how much harder it will be to face these decisions without knowing what your loved one would prefer. This Thanksgiving, take a few minutes with your friends and family and engage with grace.
Once a month, a who’s who of central Virginia healthcare execs convene for CVHEG – the Central Virginia Healthcare Executive Group. The CVHEG is the local chapter of the American College of Healthcare Executives. The group represents a wide swath of healthcare professionals. Recently, I was privileged to address the group as part of a fantastic lineup of speakers on social media and healthcare.
You can find my notes, references and presentation here.
Other panelists included:
I have been thinking a lot lately about the relative importance of social media. Actually, I have been thinking about history. Really, what we know about history is what was recorded by the people who thought those particular details were favorable or important. What’s the old saying? History is written by the victors. In a sense, the same thing is true for recent history; take family for example. What do we really know about what our parents were like in high school? I am inclined to believe my parents were pretty cool cats. I have seen pictures of them before prom, football uniforms and signed yearbooks. But the truth is that I was not there. The truth is that I am seeing their history as told by the victors.
Now think about this – think about all the kids growing up in the socially networked generation. What happens when they grow up and have families of their own? Who gets to tell the history when it was already been documented live in real time? Its a mind-bender isn’t it? The children of the next generation, maybe even my kids, will have a digital history of our entire lives. Everything we posted, tweeted, flickred, youtubed, regretted, liked, friended, faned…. it will all be there. That embarrassing night in college, videos from our wedding, tweets about the first job. Imagine the internet as the scrapbook of the future. What will our kids find when they google us?
As I started thinking more about the idea – and indeed the importance of the concept itself – it made more sense (at least to my twisted brain) to explore it graphically:


What happens when you gather two hundred Land Rover enthusiasts on a 1,000 acre farm in Virginia?

Roavstock , that’s what!
Susan and I got lucky – my 1973 Series III Land Rover left the rover hospital just in time to make the 2009 MAR. We spent all Saturday (its a 4 day event for most people), exploring the trails, meeting new friends and checking out some seriously spectacular off road machines.
Take a look at the pictures on Flickr.
For some serious off road action, have a look at RCC92’s video of some of the “red” trails