This presentation shows and explains the dramatic shifts in the demographics of users of social media between 2005 and 2009. Moving away from a mostly male to majority female population, and rising as a percent of population all the time, this is another marker on the perpetual presence (whatever the app forms in which it comes) of social media.

Rohit Bhargava, at Ogilvy, 360 Digital Influence has written a good summary of the rapid adoption of social media now underway within the hospital community, “How Hospitals are Leading the Way”. He points out several instances in which social media have connected staff and the patient community, to the benefit of the institution. For instance:

• Doctors at Henry Ford Hospital used Twitter to connect with more than 1,900 people to answer tweeted questions during actual brain surgery.
• A cancer surgery patient at Nebraska Medical Center shared her experience via YouTube generating so many requests for the surgery that NMC opened a monthly clinic for the condition.

The implications in this trend are likely to go well beyond improving current institution-stakeholder communications, which I suggested in this comment:

Dave Peck at New Media Chatter, chips in with an advisory, 6 Ways Social Media Can Help A Local Business. The basics: a blog, a Facebook fan page, a Twitter account. But more importantly, taking on the role of “an expert” in your field. This concept and variations will stand as a fundamental precept for effective use of social media in local. My comment on Dave’s post:

“The secret for any local merchant is that they are already part of one or maybe many more social networks. In the old days, those were called “market segments;” but that phrase must be BANNED forevermore; it is far too static for the dynamism inherent in any social network that can now be animated by social media.”

Plus: if you attach your Twitter address to your napkins, brochures, shopping bags, store signs, ads on the sides of buses, you get more directly inside the flow of viral networking among people likely to have an interest in your stuff.

This deck summarizes thoughts about applying social media-enabled services in local markets in a way that can provide the revenue base to sustain journalism.    Not a panacea, but embodies the unique attributes of the medium, which in my view drives its potential.

Ideas more than welcome.

The Huffington Post has announced the formation of a $1.75 million fund to finance investigative reporting that will be conducted by its staff and freelancers.    The site described it:

“The Huffington Post said Sunday that it will bankroll a group of investigative journalists, directing them at first to look at stories about the nation’s economy.

“The popular Web site is collaborating with The Atlantic Philanthropies and other donors to launch the Huffington Post Investigative Fund with an initial budget of $1.75 million. That should be enough for 10 staff journalists who will primarily coordinate stories with freelancers, said Arianna Huffington, co-founder and editor-in-chief of The Huffington Post.

“Work that the journalists produce will be available for any publication or Web site to use at the same time it is posted on The Huffington Post, she said.

Arianna Huffington’s announcement is here.

Jeff Jarvis, blogger at buzzmachine.com, a seeker of innovation to sustain journalism and a contributor to HuffPost had this observation:

“This, I’ve long held, is where foundation and public support will enter into the new ecosystem of journalism: not by taking over newspapers but by funding investigations and other slices of a new journalistic pie.

“… Now to touch the third rail in the debate over the future of news: This is how paid content will work … by setting up systems to take advantage of the 1 percent rule online that decrees you need only a limited number of contributors (of money or effort) to support great things in a gift economy. See: Wikipedia and NPR.”

This may well be a decent bridge financing structure for sustaining the news.  It will prove more difficult in local markets.  It is a commitment of decent enough size and duration to evaluate and perhaps expand on, but the sustainability of the 1 percent solution is very questionable.

My questions on any of these alternative structures is how they will sustain or strengthen the protections that have been assured primarily by the existence and legal departments of the institutions producing the news.   What is the liability between Huffington, the funders of this venture and the reporters who will produce the news product?   Who asserts 1st amendment protection when one of these stories is challenged.   I rarely see any discussion of this topic, but it is central to securing the profession.

Now having plunged into complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) at the local level, I find interesting parallels between the state of CAM today and that of online services in the pre-Netscape days of the Internet in the early 1990’s. These comparisons feel a little sketchy, but the more I think about them, the more telling they appear. (CAM, also referred to as integrative medicine, includes therapies like Chinese and Indian (Ayurvedic) medicines, acupuncture reiki, reflexology, bio-feedback and others that are the focal point of our LifePages business.)

As the net has reshaped the assumptions central to the information and communications industries, this far more amorphous collection of healing therapies and modalities has the potential to have a similar effect on healthcare. In some places it already has.

Consider these similarities:

1. An experienced consumer base, hungry for “more and better” and willing to pay for it:

On the Internet: by the time Netscape appeared in 1994, millions of people had learned how to use their personal computers and modems to get email, find news, chat, participate in forums and download software. The services that created this handy Netscape beta cohort – The Source, CompuServe, Delphi, MCIMail, America Online, The WELL – had several serious limitations:
- customers paid from $6 to $15 per hour for the privilege of being online
- if you had an account on CompuServe, you couldn’t send an email to someone on The Source or anywhere else.

Despite the cost, despite the creaky, confounding technology, the numbers grew from zero in 1979 to some 12 million by 1994.

In Integrative Medicine: In the last 30 years the growth in the number of consumers of natural and holistic therapies couldn’t be more evident. The CDC reported that by 2002 one-third of adult Americans have used some form of “natural or holistic” health service or product. The National Institute of Medicine looked at consumer use of these therapies and reported that people use these practitioners more than they do physician services. And it is all out of pocket.

Despite the cost and the reluctant acknowledgement of the traditional healthcare establishment (although this is changing), the use of holistic therapies has grown like crazy.

2. Federal funding:

On the Internet: The funding of internetworking technology by the DoD and NSF for the ArpaNet and other research networks that formed the basis for the Internet is very well known.

In Integrated Medicine: The NIH through its National Center for Complimentary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM) has in recent years underwritten more than $20 million $1 billion for research in acupuncture, meditation, and other non-traditional modalities.

We can’t compare these funding regimes or their durations, of course, other than to say that they both reflect public investment in activities considered important to the public and are factors in expansion into the public markets.  The NIH funding is relatively new and more overtly challenges prevailing orthodoxy, and so, as one long time CAM expert told me, without the NIH funding, the next piece of this parallel would collapse. And that would be:

3. A national intellectual infrastructure:

Along the Internet: the earliest inter-networks were housed in campus computing centers, connecting researchers to each another and to computing resources located on other campuses and labs. That incipient information infrastructure coursed gradually into deeper corners of academe until, one day (say 1991), someone at a computer far, far away, said, “Hey! Let’s let the kids at Blair High School near DC use the supercomputer!” Thus inspiring the first exclamatory use of the word “awesome!”

Around the same time, the issues of access, content, search and retrieval, email and blending newsgroups into that national research and education network of computing resources (or NREN, as it was then called) were taken up in large part by university librarians and other campus-based end-users.

In Integrative Medicine: there now exists the Consortium of Academic Health Centers of Integrative Medicine, comprised of more than 30 of the nation’s top medical schools and health centers. Just as the technology, applications and ethos of the Internet percolated within academic networks, the elements of integrative medicine are finding their way into clinical work, nursing practices, doctor-patient communications, the physical environment and a new blending of healing and curative traditions.

4. Cracking open an impervious and entrenched industry (or several):

On the Internet: well, here we are.

In Integrative Medicine: It is way too early to predict, and yes the comparison is inexact (I don’t really know when the first exclamatory use of “awesome” took place). In September, the Health 2.0 conference will carry the same vaguely seditious connotations recognizable from early Internet conferences, sporting the title “User – Generated Healthcare.” This feeds the still very amorphous notion that consumers will someday have at their hands the power over their health that Web 2.0 has given them over their Web presence. Or more precisely, will let them make their health status part of that web presence.

Just to underscore this seemingly wild proposition, technology analyst and entrepreneur Esther Dyson went to Health 2.0 to discuss her decision to put her health records and her own DNA and onto the Internet. I don’t quite know what that means. But it is easy to envision a new application in FaceBook called MyStrands. (“Compare your strands with a T-Rex unearthed in Montana!” “Who ARE your closest blood relatives!?”)

I have little doubt that one important reason that alternative medicine has found its way to the doors of the healthcare establishment is the role that the global net has played over the last 20 years or more, connecting people via online support groups, listservs, forums and email.

So not surprisingly, the parallels arrive eventually down the street where we live and work. Earlier this month, NCCAM issued a project concept review entitled, “Outcomes, Cost-Effectiveness and the Decision Making Process to Use CAM.” A primary purpose of this study is “the development of observational studies…in the communities;” which is to say, down the street where we live and work and where healthcare services of all kinds are delivered and experienced.

The local health vertical where we are working should become even more interesting. Especially if the CAM community comes up with its version of Netscape.

Peter Krasilovsky in his Local Onliner notes a fundamental shift in local focus within the Gannett newspaper chain, reported by Wired magazine:

“The original prototype, CincyMOMs, from The Cincinatti Enquirer, brought in $386,000 in its first six months and gets 40,000 page views a day. Half of the CincyMOMS advertisers are new to the paper….Wired also notes that Gannett’s 110 papers are being reorganized by interest group. Instead of being seen as single, top-down metro paper, The Enquirer is now envisioned as 270 niche publications, including its suburban papers, neighborhoods WebSites and regional magazines.

“Reorganized by interest group…270 niches”? I can only say: Bingo. Good for Gannett. Now lets see if the corresponding blended revenue streams can fund a robust news operation.

Peter’s complete article is here.

MetroHealth Media, Inc.

Current assignment involves carving out a piece of the local consumer health care market by converting a print directory called LifePages that serves the DC metro region.

LifePages serves a sub-set of the local consumer health care vertical: complementary and alternative medicine (CAM), holistic and natural health therapies and practices.  These are now more consistently referred to as integrative health and medicine, a serious component of the rapidly growing prevention and wellness sector, as people step aside from mainstream medicine to test supplements, massage, meditation and other therapies. Acupuncture is perhaps the best known “non-traditional” (unless you live in Asia) treatment to evolve into acceptance. Meditation, herbal remedies and “energy” work are on the same path.

Since the time and dollars spent in pursuit and practice are almost entirely local, it fits the local/vertical formula I’ve focused on the last couple of years.

I often find myself wondering if I really read what I just read in commentary on what’s to happen to the news industry, the media industry, the advertising industry. So I delight when finding something I agree with, even if it is six months since posting. In his review of Google’s flirtations with newspapers and the offline movement of digital advertising, Richard Waters of the Financial Times’ ft.com summed up the central task:

“…Assembling a large body of like-minded consumers will involve tapping into a variety of small-scale markets.”

This is particularly true in local markets. We all hop from our positions in one small-scale market to another at our own whim, entwined with a corresponding variety of like-minded folks. I don’t think it is any more difficult than that, is it?

For the full context, check out Waters’ ft.com story:

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/4e057d1e-eac2-11da-9566-0000779e2340.html

Filed under: Advertising, News Industry

In 2002 my daughter Libby tore an ACL playing summer league basketball.  After wrestling the poor kid to the car and thence to the emergency room, I proceeded to research the injury, the local docs, the rehab, the prognosis. In this process I thought: “I’m not the only one doing this.” Parents have not had a resource that informs their experience hauling kids from games and parks to schools and fields and gyms. “We need one,” says I.  I assembled a proto site site with the able assistance of Jonathan Lundardi and Dave Leichtman.  It is on the list.