Simon Capel is Google’s Enterprise Sales Manager for Australia and New Zealand and is a man with a vision – for people to work in the cloud. What does that mean? Work anywhere, using any computer, securely access what you need and collaborate in real time. Why is this important? It changes the way we do business and, importantly, changes our expectations.

Simon Capel Presentation on Leveraging the Google Cloud

Working in the cloud for business uses Google Aps which delivers tools (like word processing, spreadsheets) through a web browser (think Internet Explorer, Firefox, and the new player, Google Chrome), tailored specifically to the user, and Google want companies to ‘get it’.  The business version is backed up with a service level agreement and support – Google are doing business.

Why is this different from what we have already?  It allows secure, easy collaboration and information sharing.  It’s not tied to fiddly accessing data through an intranet.  Data is stored on their servers – pointing to lower IT costs and lots of space (no more having to empty your inbox before another message can come in). Large government organisations (think city of Los Angeles), companies, as well as Universities have started using the cloud – my guess is they chose to do so because of ease of use, the collaborative tools offered and that it has the potential to save money.

Simon’s presentation is Google’s vision of the cloud changing the way we do business, and play.

Treating patients, keeping up with the latest research and running a business means squeezing the most out of minutes. Adding social media into the mix seems a contradiction – it might seem like chitter chatter and time-wasting.

There is also the question of mixing private use of social media with work – maybe you’re on Facebook – No Way do you want patients to find you, or know anything about your private stuff, but Yes Way, you’d like an easy way to stay up-to-date, and let people know what you do professionally. Maybe.

Photo by Mark Smiciklas, IntersectionConsulting.com

You might be thinking ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’, or perhaps you keep meaning to ‘do something about that Facebook stuff’, (does anyone get Twitter anyway?), but you reflect that your world is not going to stop turning if you do not use it – it’s not like you are going to run out of patients. If you relate to any of these common reflections, then it might be worth learning more. Here is one of two posts on some of the ways that social media is being used:

Social media to facilitate your clinical practice

Let’s say you are working in clinical practice, you might sell things, and you might be wanting to attract a particular kind of client? You want what you do to stand out as something a bit different and you want potential and current patients to see your treatment is evidence-based.

First, they have to find you. More and more, people are turning to Google (or Bing, or Yahoo! perhaps) instead of picking up the phone book. Adding yourself and your practice to social media accounts means Google finds you more easily, which means clients finds you more easily.

What is a social media account? There are several common accounts. Facebook is probably the most popular.  One can have a professional Facebook page, which is not your personal page, does not include personal information (unless you want it to) and does not put you at risk of cybermisadventures with which such sites are sometimes associated.  What would you put on your Facebook page? You might want to list some of the treatments you are doing, up-to-date research, events and relevant articles you’ve read. Facebook currently has 400 million active users, 50% of whom log onto Facebook every day[1] so it is certainly worth a second glance if you are considering it.

If your desire is to link up with like-minded clinicians or researchers, or to link in to their networks, then perhaps an aptly named site called LinkedIn would help[2].  LinkedIn is another free site and is your CV online – but much more: it connects you to your peers, clients find you as they search for practices in their area and it advertises very nicely what you do, in other words your LinkedIn profile comes up in Google searches. If you don’t have a website it can be your individual site online which you can add to your email address.  LinkedIn currently has over 70 million members in over 200 countries[3].

If you do have a website then add a blog/current news section – Google will find you a lot more quickly if you do this. What do you write about? This depends on your audience – for patients you might want to write about basic exercises, good practice, take a 2 min video of an exercise and stick it on youtube as well as on your site (not hard to do, honestly).  It is pretty cool to be able to say to your patient when you hand them their exercise sheet – ‘if you forget how to do it, have a look at my site – I’ve got a section there on how to do this exercise if you forget’. How often do you need to write? The content can be anything from a couple of paragraphs a week to a book a day.

This is an example of a virtual network translating into a physical one.  Your patient has a look at your site, tells their friends, they then have a look and your reputation grows on and off-line.  The bonus is that you get to put out some quality patient information (the quality of what you post comes down to you of course, and with the huge amount of information available it is worthwhile to provide evidence that what you are writing about is credible).

Next post: Social media and keeping up with research

References

[1] http://www.facebook.com/press/info.php?statistics
[2] http://www.linkedin.com/
[3] http://press.linkedin.com/

The Harvard Business Review Blogs are excellent to follow, one of their latest posts on the facebook debarcle is so good I’m posting an excerpt. This isn’t the first of their posts I have bookmarked – their blog is good because it doesn’t just describe a problem but gives a Why

Excerpt below, please check out the rest of their post facebook culture problem

[my students] ..  live on Facebook and they are furious at it. This was the technology platform they were born into, built their friendships around, and expected to be with them as they grew up, got jobs, and had families. They just assumed Facebook would evolve as their lives shifted from adolescent to adult and their needs changed. Facebook’s failure to recognize this culture change deeply threatens its future profits. At the moment, it has an audience that is at war with its advertisers. Not good.

Here’s why. Facebook is wildly successful because its founder matched new social media technology to a deep Western cultural longing — the adolescent desire for connection to other adolescents in their own private space. There they can be free to design their personal identities without adult supervision. Think digital tree house. Generation Y accepted Facebook as a free gift and proceeded to connect, express, and visualize the embarrassing aspects of their young lives.

Then Gen Y grew up and their culture and needs changed. My senior students started looking for jobs and watched, horrified, as corporations went on their Facebook pages to check them out. What was once a private, gated community of trusted friends became an increasingly open, public commons of curious strangers. The few, original, loose tools of network control on Facebook no longer proved sufficient. The Gen Yers wanted better, more precise privacy controls that allowed them to secure their existing private social lives and separate them from their new public working lives.

Facebook’s business model, however, demands the opposite. It is trying to transform the private into a public arena it can offer advertisers.

The rest of the post is here, it’s worth getting the feed of their blog….

CNN: ‘If you want to buy a consumer-friendly tablet computer today and you don’t want to purchase Apple’s iPad, you’re pretty much out of luck.

The iPad currently has no real competitors, and the touch-screen computer is so far ahead of the market that it has some gadget makers running back to the drawing boards, according to technology industry analysts.

“In essence, what Apple has done is created a wake-up call to the rest of the industry — that they need to look at what they’re offering,” said David Daoud, research director for the firm IDC. “They raised the bar significantly.”

Can anyone compete?  A friend asked me to write about the TEGA Tablet which was about the same size as an iPad and comes with a lot of functionality. So here it is along with its spec for the more technically minded:

The CNN article is right – the iPad has raised the bar, I like the competition it is producing – having played with it at a recent Publisher’s Australia event which demonstrated the iPad for publishers it is a game changer as far as technology and how people are going to access and publish information. Maybe the laptop will disappear altogether as more products like the iPad, and the TEGA tablet are produced,  I don’t know, but what is good is that with new technology comes new ways not only of doing things but of thinking and that’s the bit that excites me.

(for more on the iPad, TEGA Tablet and Kindle you might want to check out Sean Carmody’s blog post at the Stubborn Mule: The Re-birth of the Tablet).

To be found online, search engines like Google need to be able to find you, look at your content and make you visible.  The more visible your content to search engines, the easier you will be found – this is called search engine optimisation, or SEO.  To be most efficient in the social marketing frame there are some basic things to do when you are starting out.

• Standard naming convention (for sites, products, location etc)
• Standardardised names for all social media accounts (try to avoid spaces in names and terms and phrases)
• Define your keywords – these are your meta tags
• Have a tag line
• Be able to describe your service or business in a single line, single paragraph and in 400 words
• Set up relevant social media accounts such as facebook and twitter to get your message out quickly
• Use different media such as videos, slideshare as well as blogging
• Have a blog for rapid news dissemination
• Connect into a blogging network (such as a medical network) who will be ready to take up your links and disseminate your work

A word about Link popularity

Link popularity is essential for your site to increase your online presence and establish your lead in whatever topic your site addresses. It is determined by both the quality of links (links from high ranking trustworthy sites in your subject area) and quantity of sites that link to you to increase your exposure to search engines.
If your information is behind a login wall (eg a subscription site) this can make it more difficult for search engines to assess the value of the site linking to you and this is something that needs to be thought about when considering your online strategy.

Keywords

Paying attention to adding relevant keywords to your description could ultimately lead to more traffic being generated to your site.

Google Webmaster Central

And while you are getting to grips with being found online don’t forget Google’s tools – webmaster central is for ‘webmasters’ which is anyone with a website/blog. You log into it with your Gmail account and start learning.  There are a lot of tools there including diagnostics for your site.

A word of encouragement

SEO, rankings, digital strategy goes up and down.  There is always something to learn and it can feel like a mountain to climb. Start slow and go step by step.  And ask questions.

If you are feeling very keen here is a wealth of information in this video. It’s focused on domain names, but good for how to check out a site with some useful tools

• keywords
• google page rank and how to check for fakes
• backlinks and link juice in google and yahoo for a site
• indexed pages
• DMOZ/Yahoo listings

For more info like this check out Noble Samurai.

Thanks also to Mike Cadogan, Lifeinthefastlane.com of whom I have asked a lot of questions in this area.