New Media Med Blog

Mark Little asked the panel in the web summit last night for advice on setting up his new venture. The last word of the evening came from Wired Editor-at-Large, Ben Hammersley. He just said “Whatever you do Mark  – Make it beautiful”. We all laughed and Mark was really bemused at having  to tell his colleagues in his startup in the morning to “Make it beautiful”. But when you look back at the evening, there was one common theme running through and it was the passion which every entrepreneur had for their idea such as Chris Horn’s joy of getting the first sale with IONA. That simple theme of “Making it Beautiful” was there throughout the evening. There was Craig Newmark’s passion to keep Craigslist as it has always been and not to sell it. And Matt Mullenweg’s clear core values of democratizing writing and making the writing as good as possible.

People ask me how New Media Med is going to make money and I often get very caught up with all the myriad of tantalising economic models which have emerged in the Internet.

Now I’ve settled on

“We make and sell online communities.”

No more complicated economic models.

And keeping it simple is beautiful.  Thanks Ben Hammersley for that suggestion.

We’ve been using socialtext for our own internal intranet for some time now so I thought I might put down some of the findings from  that experience. We were sending e-mails with attachments and passing links back and forth on skype calls with no recording of the combined wisdom of the company. I found myself browsing back through the transcripts of skype text interchanges and finding fantastic nuggets of wisdom. Topics get fragmented across many places – individual emails, different versions of presentations, excel files and word documents – stored in different desktop applications, shared drives and content management systems. Having become very familiar with Facebook, Twitter and Linked In and wikis, I set about looking for a tool to do provide social media for use internally.

I came across Socialtext which started out as a wiki vendor and was one of the first to introduce social networking and most recently microblogging with its recent introduction of Socialtext Signals, which brings Twitter-like functionality to the enterprise. We deployed socialtext and knowledge within our organisation was being captured piece by piece every day. Here’s a part of our socialtext dashboard:

Now after 6 months we have a very extensive knowledge base which makes it easy to get new employees up to speed or to get potential partners quickly up to speed on what we do and potential collaborations points.

Best of all, when you come back bloated after Christmas, it’s a great way of quickly getting everyone plugged and back tackling the issues which were there in 2009.

Went to simply zesty’s wintercamp on Wednesday – whirlwind tour of how to use social media in businesss from Facebook,Google and more. Full agenda here and Twitter running commentary #szcamp.

It’s all been recorded here on simply zesty’s website. Simply Zesty are a great example for how to use social media.

Things that stood out for me from the meeting were:

Facebook’s priority is to keep their network as a set of trusted friends
UK is better on web content than Ireland – hmmm – and we thought we were the island of saints and scholars

Watch what’s happening in the UK and you’ll see it 3 years later in Ireland
Google’s aim is to get people on to the web as fast as possible so they can sell more advertising
12seconds – video Twitter – record a 12 second video and vweet it

Facebook passed 350 million worldwide  - will it level off before every online person is on facebook?
Iphoto for organising photos on desktop and post to facebook
Urbanspoon find out what your friends have said about any topic
Changing  name of your Facebook page?  - difficult but possible
Facebook’s Privacy policy  changed this week – you will have more granular control of photos
Social search from google is based on your google profile
Google labs has information on different search algorithms
80 reports available in Google analytics – worth checking them all

Collecting data on a human population has become more expensive per head in the past 10 years. Studies have suffered from low response rates and a higher drop-out rates in longer term studies. The reason is that there are many more media of communication thus raising the distraction noise and lowering attention spans.

A study from Sweden in 2008 by Christin Bexelius showed a much improved response from web based research when compatred to Interactive Voice Response (IVR)

Sweden has today among the highest Internet and cell phone penetration in the world, making the population suitable for introducing new technologies in data collection (11). The Department of Medical Epidemiology and Biostatistics (MEB) at Karolinska Institutet in Sweden has since 2001 designed and evaluated several studies using e-epidemiology. In 2003, the first large scale web-based study including 47,859 women in the age group 41-60 was conducted (12). Today, the department has used the Internet for several large scale population-based studies, including an Internet based-hearing test and a surveillance system utilizing IVR and a web-based application. .

Social Media can now be adapted specifically to the needs of the researcher and web-based questionnaires can either be delivered to PC’s or to mobile phones. So could social networks play a role in data collection on a population?