Complexity, Interaction Design and Social Media
Posted: February 26, 2011 Filed under: complexity, design thinking, eHealth, health promotion, public health, Social media | Tags: Brian Solis, complexity, design, health, health communication, health promotion, interaction design, marketing, public health, Social media, strategy 1 Comment »
Social Media Targeting for Head & Heart
Social media, like all human activities, involves designed interactions in a complex environment. How we design for this space is as much about the social — and the complexity that results from it — as it is the media.
Yesterday I participated in a webinar on social media strategy hosted by the Program Training and Consultation Centre’s Media Network. The focus was on how public health professionals can use social media to engage their populations of interest to advance health promotion. Examples of how social media is being used were presented from ParticipACTION, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and my own research group’s Youth4Health initiative to show how these tools could enhance health communications.
What might have caught some of attendees by surprise was the introduction of complexity science concepts and design thinking into the discussion. These terms are not often used in public health, but as I’ve argued many times in this space, they ought to play a much larger role.
The other potential surprise for some might have been the emphasis on relationships, connection and the kind of things that Brian Solis showcases (see infographic above). Solis describes social media as:
Social media is a deeply personal ecosystem that I lovingly refer to as the EGOsystem. As such, there is a “me” in social media for a reason. It is quite literally a world in which we are at the center of our online experiences, a place where everything and everyone revolves around us. – Brian Solis
When a person is at the centre of an experience that is human formed and technology mediated, design is very important. How one engages with others and the opportunities afforded within that environment or EGOsystem is largely a product of design. For example, Facebook provides a great deal of opportunity to bring in your close “friends” into a conversation, but is relatively poor at bringing in strangers. In contrast, Twitter is about bringing anyone into the conversation, particularly strangers. As I like to put it:
Twitter enables you to learn answers to questions you never thought to ask, have conversations you could have never planned, and meet people you never knew existed
In both of these contexts, the manner in which one designs for interactions has a profound influence on what kind of conversations take place. To use Solis’ model above, attention to interaction design qualities of the technological and social space helps amplify the white arrows, dampen the effect of the blue arrows, with an aim of enhancing the power of the red arrow (belevolence).
This attention to these kind of patterns is at the heart (no pun intended) of complexity oriented planning and why social media, design and complexity require mutual consideration in developing strategy. When in complex spaces, the tempo, rhythm, and pattern of information exchange shifts constantly, just like in a regular conversation. So approaching the program from the perspective of a traditional, more linear-focused mindset will inevitably lead to a misalignment between program activities and the outcomes produced.
If you’re expecting to get a firm outcome from a social media strategy, you might be disappointed. If you are looking for surprises, consider more flexible outcomes, then social media may deliver the goods — but only if you design your strategy to suit the complexity of the context. A complex setting is one where there are multiple agents interacting and producing emergent new properties through such interaction. It it therefore fitting that the concept of interaction design be considered in examining how we engage in these environments.
Much of the discourse on social media from marketing and communication leaders hints at these concepts, but doesn’t name them. By explicitly making complexity, design and the social part of social media a focus we can more intentionally create better experiences that will engage our audiences, and in the case of public health, promote health.
The Face-to-Face Complexity of eHealth & Knowledge Exchange
Posted: November 24, 2010 Filed under: behaviour change, complexity, eHealth, innovation, knowledge translation, public health, Social media, Systems science, systems thinking | Tags: community organizing, complexity, CoNEKTR model, eHealth, innovation, knowledge translation, public eHealth, public health, Social media, systems thinking 2 Comments »The Public Health Agency of Canada‘s 2010 Knowledge Forum on Chronic Disease was held last night today in Ottawa with the focus on social media. The invitation-only affair was designed to bring together a diverse array of researchers, practitioners, policy developers, consultants and administrators who work with social media in some capacity. There were experts and non-experts alike gathered to learn about what the state of the art of social media is and how it can support public health. By state of the art, I refer not to the technological side of things, but rather the true art of public health, much like that discussed earlier this year at the University of Toronto.
Last night began with a presentation from Leanne Labelle that got us all thinking about how social media is radically different in the speed of its adoption and breadth of its social impact drawing inspiration from this video from Eric Qualman’s Socialnomics website.
Today we got down to business and started working through some of the issues that we face as a field when adopting social media. I would probably consider myself among the most experienced users in the audience, yet still gained so much from the day. Although I learned some things about how to use social media in new ways, what I learned most was how others use it and what struggles they have. This is always a useful reminder.
What stuck out was a presentation and related discussion from Christopher Wilson from the University of Ottawa’s Centre on Governance and a consultant on governance issues. In speaking about the challenges of doing collaboration, Christopher pointed to the problems of a ‘one-size fits all’ strategy using a diagram illustrating the fundamental differences between engagement at a small scale (under 25 people) and what is the mass collaboration that folks like Clay Shirky, Don Tapscott, and others write about. His diagram looks like this:
Technology Spectrum of Social Collaboration by Christopher Wilson
What Wilson stressed to the audience was the role that complexity plays in all of this. Specifically, he stated:
The more complex and interdependent things become, the more people need to be aware of the changing context and the changes in shared understanding.
As part of this, groups are required to engage in ways that enable them to deal with this complexity. In his experience, this can’t be done exclusively online. He further stated:
As complexity increases, the need for offline engagement increases.
I couldn’t agree more. In my work with community organizing and eHealth promotion, I’ve found the most effective means of fostering collaboration is to blend the two forms of knowledge generation and exchange together. The model that my research team and I developed is called the CoNEKTR (Complexity, Networks, EHealth, and Knowledge Translation Research Model).
This model combines both face-to-face methods of organizing and ideation, with a social media strategy that connects people together between events. The CoNEKTR model has been applied in many forms, but in each case the need to have ways to use the power of social media and rich media together with in-person dialogue has been front and centre. Using complexity science principles to guide the process and powered by social media and face-to-face engagement, the power to take what we know, contextualize it, and transform it into something we can act on seems to me the best way forward in dealing with problems of chronic disease that are so knotted and pervasive, yet demand rapid responses from public health.
Like this:
Social Media / Social Activism Redux: Can we Learn from Behaviour Change Theories?
Posted: October 13, 2010 Filed under: behaviour change, psychology, Social media | Tags: eHealth, health behaviour change, health communications, psychology, public health, Social media, Twitter 3 Comments »What started as a simple column post a column on October 4th in the New Yorker has really turned into a firestorm of discussion over the last few days (reflecting a building crescendo of discontent and plaudits from those on each side of the debate). The latest volley in the debate has come from the founder of Twitter themselves in a piece in the Guardian. In that column, the chief Tweeters remark:
Williams said:
“It was a very well-constructed argument but it was kind of laughable.
“Anyone who’s claiming that sending a tweet by itself is activism, that’s ludicrous — but no one’s claiming that, at least no one that’s credible. If you can’t organise you can’t activate. I thought [the article] was entertaining but kind of pointless.”
They have a good point. But while Gladwell might be too dismissive of the power of tools like Twitter, it is easy to overstep and imply that information is power and having more of it networked leads to activation (something I discussed earlier this week).
Knowing and doing are very different and any analysis of major theories on behaviour change and the evidence, shows a relatively weak correlation between knowing more and doing more. It also shows an OK, but also not a strong correlation.
What does change people’s behaviour? Lots of things — and that’s the problem. The either/or thinking that permeates the discussion of social media is too often simplistic and driven by an interplay of ideas and values that are not always aligned with the evidence or personal experience.
People tend to change for the following reasons:
1. They have information that tells them there is a threat or a problem with the status quo;
2. Others believe that the behaviour should be changed;
3. The person changing actually cares what other people think;
4. That person has the skills and tools to be able to change;
5. The environment is supportive of change and facilitative (e.g. there are policies, procedures, access to resources — including time);
6. There are more pros to changing than cons (and there are more pros to the strategy of change than the cons);
7. A person actually wants to change (they are self-motivated and not doing things because everyone else thinks they should);
8. A person feels capable of making the change at all.
The more of these elements are present, the more likely the change is going to take place and stick. This is a big list and indicates that change isn’t always straightforward, and it certainly isn’t easy.
The revolution most likely will be Tweeted, but whether that is the cause or the consequence is why research on social media and social activism is needed. Otherwise, we will wind up with another chicken and egg problem.
Chicken, Eggs or Social Eggs?
Social Media / Social Activism
Posted: October 12, 2010 Filed under: innovation, Social media, social systems | Tags: activism, collective action, Facebook, Malcolm Gladwell, public engagement, social innovation, Social media, Twitter 3 Comments »
Activism 3.0?
Malcolm Gladwell’s recently published essay on social media and activism has been gaining a lot of attention from the tech world and social innovation crowd. For good reason too. He has managed to articulately skewer the idea that online social activism and the tools that advance it are any better or even as good as previous forms of activism such as the type witnessed during the civil rights movement.
Gladwell also takes aim at innovators.
Innovators tend to be solipsists. They often want to cram every stray fact and experience into their new model. As the historian Robert Darnton has written, “The marvels of communication technology in the present have produced a false consciousness about the past—even a sense that communication has no history, or had nothing of importance to consider before the days of television and the Internet.” But there is something else at work here, in the outsized enthusiasm for social media. Fifty years after one of the most extraordinary episodes of social upheaval in American history, we seem to have forgotten what activism is.
Gladwell points to a new book, “The Dragonfly Effect: Quick, Effective, and Powerful Ways to Use Social Media to Drive Social Change,” by business consultant Andy Smith and Stanford Business School professor Jennifer Aaker, and how they use illustrations of how small acts such as forwarding an email request to search out bone marrow donors as examples of activism. His comparison is with the acts perpetuated in the 1950′s and 60′s in the United States south as part of the Civil Rights Movement where people physically put themselves in harms way and literally took action.
The evangelists of social media don’t understand this distinction; they seem to believe that a Facebook friend is the same as a real friend and that signing up for a donor registry in Silicon Valley today is activism in the same sense as sitting at a segregated lunch counter in Greensboro in 1960. “Social networks are particularly effective at increasing motivation,” Aaker and Smith write. But that’s not true. Social networks are effective at increasing participation—by lessening the level of motivation that participation requires.
This is an important distinction between participation and activism. But I argue that this paints things in too much of a black and white way of viewing the issue. What does activism mean? Gladwell doesn’t really say, pointing to examples like the protest at the Woolworth lunch counter in Greensboro, NC and how it grew through people literally standing up and sitting down for their rights, as activism. Using Gladwell’s example, one might not distinguish between those sitting at the lunch counter from those outside. But is there a difference? Does it matter if you are at the front or the back of the line, after all, it still is a line isn’t it?
I think that really depends on what the line means in terms of its goals and actions. Participation is the same way. Does it matter if you watch a football game at home compared to watching it in a stadium, live, with 40000 other people? What about if you are watching it from the sidelines, on the bench, or whether you’re in the game handing the ball? When does it cease to be participation and when does it begin?
Social media is like that. There are those with dozens, hundreds even hundreds of thousands of followers on Twitter. Some people I know have more than 800 Facebook friends, even if Dunbar’s number suggests that we really can only have close to 150 substantive relationships in our lives. So what does that mean?
The problem I have with Gladwell’s analysis is that it slips too far towards either/or thinking about social media without considering the nuance withing a social network. Indeed, there are many who will sign a petition, forward on an email, and join a Facebook group denouncing something, supporting something else, and advocating another thing with little real attention paid to the topic or outcome. But the same is true of anything social. Most human beings like to be where others are.
Thousands join protests, yet only a few commit to the issue enough to go beyond the protest to write letters, put up posters, vocalize, and study the problem. The same is true of social networks. The difference is that social networks enable passive engagement easier than through other means. So it makes sense that the gap between those who do little and those who do a lot is large, but in the end, are there more people active? The stats are hard to confirm, because activism is so much different now.
Back in the 1950′s and 1960′s, a protest and a sit-in was novel, thus it attracted a lot of attention. Today, we have protest staging areas at events like the G20 because they are expected and almost predictable. Thus, they’ve lost their ability to hold the same level of attention as they once did. Same with the petition.
We’ve hit marks with Facebook groups pretty quickly illustrating how quick things go from novel to trite. The lesson isn’t that social media doesn’t work, rather it is that the speed to which we adapt is increasing. Innovations are coming far faster. Twitter is now the rage, but soon it might be something else, maybe something with video. But they all will have some staying power, the issue is that we just don’t know what that will be.
But if we continue to view things as working/not working, good/bad, real/fake we start to miss the point that these tools and technologies are doing something and are supporting real people, some of whom are doing a lot; to dismiss that is to risk squashing the spirit and potential that we all have to advocate and participate in change.
The Complexity and Peril of Either/Or Thinking in Systems and Social Media
Posted: October 11, 2010 Filed under: complexity, Social media, social systems | Tags: complexity, innovation, Social media, Twitter 4 Comments »Malcolm Gladwell recently authored an article for the New Yorker that has been widely circulated and debated within the social media world. The piece, entitled Small Change: Why the Revolution Will Not Be Tweeted, takes the stance that Twitter and other social media tools are not much better at facilitating social change than the coffee houses were before.
The world, we are told, is in the midst of a revolution. The new tools of social media have reinvented social activism. With Facebook and Twitter and the like, the traditional relationship between political authority and popular will has been upended, making it easier for the powerless to collaborate, coördinate, and give voice to their concerns.
Read more http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/10/04/101004fa_fact_gladwell?currentPage=all#ixzz123KCHTbj
If you read Mashable, TechCrunch, Wired, GigaOm or any of the other major social media sites as I do, it becomes easy to get wrapped up in each device announcement with the idea that the world had indeed changed. The term “game changer” is used both as hyperbole, but also because many in the tech world really do believe that their game is changing with these new tools and technologies. Listening to podcasts like Search Engine or Spark, it’s easy to get seduced into the idea that everyone is using new media and cares when something new comes out.
I know people who are genuinely shocked to find out that certain folk don’t know the model number of their Blackberry, or give a hoot whether there is a new tablet computer. They aren’t in line for an iPad and can’t even imagine why one would do such a thing in the first place.
The problem with “everyone” is that they don’t exist. Outside of breathing oxygen, consuming nutrients and water, and life-sustaining bodily functions, there is pretty much nothing that “everyone” does. Indeed, there are actually few things that “most” of us do. But yet, this doesn’t prevent people from trying to proscribe things that are good for all of “us” or trying to show how terrible other things are for that same group of “us”
Gladwell’s essay is just another volley in a ping-pong match between the techno-utopians and the techno-skeptics, the true-believers and naysayers, the Jets and the Sharks and so on. It is so easy of a target to focus on the bad and the good and lump things into Black or White.
Grey is a much more difficult: it is not a solid colour.
We inhabit a world of greys. To defend Gladwell, he is right on many points. Twitter may have added a lot of context to the uprising in Iran, or the Moldovian revolution, but to hear those on the tech side speak, you would have thought that such events could not have happened without them. Look closely at the numbers and you’ll see that to be folly. However, what I would argue is that these tools made these two events much more visible to the world outside of those countries. If you were out of the loop on politics, but active on Twitter, the tweets from those countries could have awakened you to an entire social world — literally — out there that you were not aware of. That is where social media comes in.
Either / Or thinking makes for great copy in the news media business, not for policy and programming. For organizations working to reach their audiences, for health professionals looking to advance knowledge translation, and for people wanting to learn, eschewing social media because it’s no better than anything else before it is silly, just as foolish as embracing it to the point of believing that it can transform the world without paying attention to the social context in which those tools exist.
Social media is a “complexifier” of sorts. It adds more variation into a system, promotes networking among divergent perspectives (although not nearly as much as many techno-utopians would suggest according to research (see example)), and is dynamic and flexible. Social media permits voices to be heard in ways that could not be done before to the same extent, by offering multiple media channels. It is also global and mobile, but at the same time it only serves to connect those who are interested in using it, have the technological means (devices, networks, skills, resources), and are in a position where they can actually use it.
So as Canadians sit down for our Thanksgiving dinner today, consider how useful that Tweeting the play-by-play is when you’re trying to eat your turkey, stuffing or whatever you might be fortunate to have served. Perhaps talking to your table mates face-to-face might be more effective and leaving the tweets for later. In doing so, you’ll see how some conversations work at a distance, some work face-to-face and some will occur with people who have no idea that you can do both.
Happy Thanksgiving!
Social Marketing/ Social Media Blowback And eHealth Communication Etiquette
Posted: September 18, 2010 Filed under: Education & Learning, eHealth, Social media | Tags: health communications, literacy, public health, social marketing, Social media 1 Comment »
Those of us working at that interface between the professional and public worlds of health have to wear many hats. We need to be good at communicating in ways that gain respect within our professional worlds. This position means writing scholarly manuscripts, using technical language (but not always), and synthesizing the work of our peers on one hand, while being able to work within the world of most marketers, which includes reaching the public. That means working within the realm of (social) marketing.
Social marketing is described as:
Social Marketing is a planned process for influencing change. Social Marketing is a modified term of conventional Product and Service Marketing. With its components of marketing and consumer research, advertising and promotion (including positioning, segmentation, creative strategy, message design and testing, media strategy and planning, and effective tracking), Social Marketing can play a central role in topics like health, environment, and other important issues.
In its most general sense, Social Marketing is a new way of thinking about some very old human endeavours. As long as there have been social systems, there have been attempts to inform, persuade, influence, motivate, to gain acceptance for new adherents to certain sets of ideas, to promote causes and to win over particular groups, to reinforce behaviour or to change it — whether by favour, argument or force. Social Marketing has deep roots in religion, in politics, in education, and even, to a degree, in military strategy. It also has intellectual roots in disciplines such as psychology, sociology, political science, communication theory and anthropology. Its practical roots stem from disciplines such as advertising, public relations and market research, as well as to the work and experience of social activists, advocacy groups and community organizers.
Social marketing is about getting ideas out there and in use and within the realm of public health and social welfare programming, we often presume that what we’re “selling” is good in its quality, intent, potential use, and social benefit.
The problem is that most of what passes for social marketing in the health sector is not done by marketers, or even those skilled in health communications, but rather everyday researchers, clinicians and administrators. Certainly there are many large organizations where such skilled professionals do reside, but in the decentralized web of social media, those are drops in the bucket of content.
The result is that many well-intentioned messages get poorly developed and distributed, creating something akin to blowback, a hostile and aggressive form of resistance to the message. I’ve just been witnessing such a case of this with a an organization seeking to promote social innovation that is getting messages sent by people on its online mailing list asking to be removed from it. One of the big reasons for these messages is that these people were never asked to be put on the mailing list in the first place.
I get almost as much spam (or, in some cases, bacn) from well-meaning organizations and individuals hoping to get their message out than I do the usual snake-oil salesmen peddling natural male enhancements, Rolex watches, and “investment opportunities”. The senders of these messages, well intentioned for the most part, are hoping to you’ll “buy” their product, which means adopting their findings into your practice, register for the conference they are organizing, visit their website, or donate to their cause.
This reflects a fundamental lack of knowledge about social media, social marketing and knowledge translation in the modern age. Effective messages are a matter of content shaping and distribution, but also relationship development. When you send out messages unsolicited asking for something — time, mindspace, referrrals, whatever — you are hoping to develop a relationship, even a superficial one, with that person. Treating them with the disdain that comes from throwing content at people without their consent is violating that relationship. It is no surprise that miniscule things like one simple thing like an unsolicited email can unleash some fury among its recipients.
And for those people and organizations who think putting a tiny statement on their registration form or website in 8pt font saying that you must opt out of communications or presuming people want this, I’m sorry but that doesn’t cut it.
Building social marketing on relationships is something that our field needs to build literacy and competence in quickly as the number of these unsolicited campaigns seems to be growing. If we don’t improve our messaging, we’re going to have a lot harder time getting the right people to attend to the right messages or risk having them treat all of what we send with the same care as those messages from some Nigerian Prince in exile.
The Lady Gaga – mHealth Connection
Posted: August 28, 2010 Filed under: design thinking, eHealth, public health | Tags: design, eHealth, innovation, Lady Gaga, marketing, mhealth, Social media 4 Comments »
Lady Gaga: Calling Health?
It’s probably fair to say that Lady Gaga isn’t the first person you think of with Mobile Health (mHealth). Accessing patient records, behaviour change resources, and information on wellbeing are topics that reside closer on the spectrum of similarity than those most associated with the current reigning queen of pop.
But looking a little deeper, there is reason to consider that this image is a little more than a poker face (bad pun intended). Let me point to the comparisons.
1. One of central points of comparison is that, like mHealth opportunities, there is no escaping Lady Gaga. Her music is everywhere — in front, as background music, as a harbinger of taste (good and bad, depending on the audience), and something people are talking about. MHealth is in the same boat.
2. Consider that Lady Gaga herself is the subject of considerable attention. She’s on the cover and profiled in this month’s Vanity Fair and her image is strewn all over the Internet. She is what people are talking about. MHealth is likewise. If you want more Twitter followers, add #mhealth. If you want more readers, subscribers, and conversation, talk of mHealth. It is a very hot topic in the world of healthcare and mobile technologies.
3. Lady Gaga is a mystery. While we know her roots and her family name, there is surprisingly little that is known about the “real” Lady Gaga. How much is style and show and how much is her? That holds true for mHealth. Without a large field of research and evidence, the entire mHealth phenomenon is a bit of a mystery to many in and out of the industry. It is perhaps for that reason that many members of the public are not sold on the reasons for why they should need or want to access medical information like personal health records using electronic tools as was recently reported this week.
There are also a couple of areas where the comparison between her and mHealth should be strong, but isn’t.
4. Lady Gaga is enmeshed with social media. This past week, Lady Gaga surpassed Britney Spears to become the pop Queen of Twitter. Never to miss an opportunity to mark this regal occasion, Ms. Gaga went to YouTube, where she was, until recently upended by Justin Beiber, creator of the most watched video on that channel of all time. Surprisingly, mHealth hasn’t quite got there yet. There are many apps for health to be sure, and some of them are quite well put together, but most of them use a model of service that represents a push model of service, rather than a social model of conversation.
This issue of conversation was the topic that marketing thought leaders Mitch Joel and Joe Jaffe spoke about yesterday in their live-fed podcast discussion. That conversation centred on the idea that marketing is rarely about conversation per se, but trying to get information to people quickly with the hope that it will lead to something. True conversation requires relationships and time and many companies are not willing to do what it takes to get there. I would argue that the same holds true in the health sector and its related industries. There is too much money to be made quickly to slowly develop relationships, healthcare institutions are not (ironically) set up for relationship development, and health providers are rarely given the resources or incentives to spend the time with their patients in real time, let alone develop social media channels. Its therefore no surprise that mHealth and social media are struggling to find their way in their relationship.
5. Lady Gaga delivers. In conversation with colleagues and reading reviews of her concerts by even reluctant fans (I have not yet seen the spectacle that is the Monsters Ball) one story emerges: it is an amazing performance. And by performance, it means that she entertains and delivers something of value to her audience. From what I hear and read, even those who do not consider themselves as one of Gaga’s ‘Little Monsters‘ (i.e., fans), she is worth the price of admission to see. MHealth still isn’t there…yet. Indeed, for the reasons discussed above and in previous posts, there is a lot of questions about mHealth and what it can, will and should deliver. So far, its delivering on simple things like iPhone apps and push-model tools, but little on interactive, social media-based programs. The potential is to create environments of truly interactive, user-driven health content.
A project that I’m involved with is trying to do this. My research group and partners just lauched the Youth4Health website and, in the next few weeks, will have our multi-platform app distributed to youth with iPhones to provide mobile content as well. It’s a start.
6. Lastly, Lady Gaga is a 360 degree celebrity. She makes much of her own clothes, runs her own design shop, writes her songs, and produces many of her own work. She also has relationships with her distribution channels, including a sponsorship with Virgin Mobile. MHealth is nowhere near this. As an mHealth researcher, I can point to few peers who have relationships with developers, producers, the public, funders and distribution channels at the same time. It is for that reason that this work takes so long to build and why mHealth is either run by non-health professionals or run badly and in obscurity by health professionals.
Maybe mHealth needs to take a little more from the reigning Queen of Twitter and get a little more bold, stylish and out there. Then, and maybe then, will we see its promise unfold.
