As Luck Would Have It

by Chris Hall on July 23, 2010 · Comments

“I’d rather be lucky than good,” was what some contestant on an episode of Jeopardy said to Alex Trebek years ago. I immediately adopted it as an unofficial motto of sorts, and have stated it whenever fortune has smiled upon me…

Looking Back

It's Been Fun Humana

Image by Hallicious via Flickr

Two years ago is when a project manager position opened up within Humana’s Innovation Center. I was all over it, and got the job thanks to my mad interviewing skills and the recommendations of some good friends. But the lucky part happened when I was matrixed to Greg Matthews who had recently been tasked to get his head around social media for the company.

I thought that I had been hand selected by Greg, as the best fit for the job because I had started LouisvillePM, was a MySpace and Facebook veteran, and was really into the internet message board scene. But as Greg told the story to me later, it was the typical, corporate we need a warm body for the next project in the hopper and you just happened to be that warm body, thing going on…

I guess sometimes a guy CAN catch a break.

The past two years have been exciting, frustrating and totally worthwhile. The best part was hands down meeting and working with Mathias Kolehmainen to create the three-man Cougar Team that brought Humana: myTPSreport, Diabatron and Shopensteinr. It took the better part of a year to build the team, but there was really no reason that team should have existed in such a large company in the first place. And the fact that we built it, pioneered an agile development process, and made digital products that helped the business utilize the data behind social media is one of my favorite accomplishments.

I am grateful for the opportunity.

Looking Forward

Two weeks ago is when I accepted the Director, Clinical Platforms position at HealthCentral. Starting Monday, I get to lead the product and business development efforts for Mood 24/7, an SMS tool that allows users to rate how they feel daily on a scale of one to ten, via text message. I am fascinated by both the product’s simplicity and the enormity of its potential impact. I will be working for Ted Smith and with Dr. Adam Kaplin, and am very excited to be a part of the mission to eradicate suicides in America.

I anticipate that this journey, like the one before it, will be exciting, frustrating and totally worthwhile. I’m also planning for some hard work, because as Samuel Goldwyn said, “The harder I work, the luckier I get.”

And I’d rather be lucky than good.

Shopensteinr Lives!

by Chris Hall on July 19, 2010 · Comments

When you look at a product on Amazon.com, there is a part of each product page that displays what people also buy when they purchase the product that you are viewing. I found this to be extremely interesting, and even more-so after I had some conversations with Amazon API pioneers Valdis Krebs and Bernardo Huberman.  So I co-created Shopensteinr, at Humana, with my main man Ramtin and we had Seth create the awesome design.

The tool taps into Amazon.com’s Application Programming Interface (API) to help you visualize product relationships.

Shopensteinr Use Case

Shopensteinr shows you what people buy in relation to a generic search term. It can be used as a consumer research tool around topics of interest, and has proven to be especially useful for us when trying to understand the types of health related products people care enough about to purchase, and how they’re related to each other. For example, here is a Shopensteinr search on the term diabetes:

Shopensteinr Search on the term Diabetes

The insights come from the connections between diabetes general information, nutrition and living with the chronic condition on the go. With almost every inner circle product connected to a recipe book of some kind…

How Shopensteinr Works

When you type a generic search term into Shopensteinr, like diabetes, Shopensteinr displays ten products related to that search term. You may search within a specific Amazon.com department, like books, or all departments, and each of the ten products returned can have up to five products directly associated with them. This makes up Shopensteinr’s inner and outer rings of up to 60 products.

Shopensteinr has two viewing areas, the product list on the left side of the screen, which is a ranked list of up to 60 products displayed, and the interactive sociogram on the right side of the screen. Green lines connect your search term to the ten products that Amazon returns from your search. Purple lines connect to products that are “also purchased.” Line thickness varies but does not have an attribute.

Each search on Shopensteinr produces a unique URL that can be bookmarked, as Amazon.com randomly returns ten products per search. Individual searches for the same search term will vary, so bookmark your favorite searches.

Shopensteinr Features

The following features have been included in this first iteration of Shopensteinr:

Hover – Hovering over a product picture on the right side of the screen will reveal a pop-up box that displays the product rank, which is derived from the specific department the product resides within, product picture, product price and product rating.

Click – Clicking on a product from either the right or left side of the screen centers that product within the sociogram on the right side of the screen.

Focus – Clicking the “Focus” button on the left side of the screen or double clicking on the product picture on the right side of the screen allows you to focus on the connections of that particular product.

Let me know what you think…

Making Friends for Fun and Profit

by Chris Hall on June 11, 2010 · Comments

Relationship marketing means making friends

photo by: bradley j

Let’s talk for a minute about what social media is really good for, shall we? I have this crazy idea that social media has made everybody, who uses it, accessible. That’s what it’s good for, finding and connecting with people. You now have access to anyone and everyone. Take a moment to let that sink in a bit.

What could being able to connect to previously inaccessible people mean for you?

For me, it means a lot. It means that I can read this, say this, and connect with this guy over the phone the next week. The small world irony being that our companies already have a contractual relationship with one another.

The key is that I’m not selling anything, except myself… I’m honestly and earnestly trying to find like-minded people to make friends with, because friendship is what makes the social internets go around.

Friendship spreads messages.

Finding The Right People

Being able to connect with anybody is only half the battle, though. Most of your investment in social media, that you’d want to see a return on, is in time. Time is money. Therefore, you have to be able to connect with right anybodies, not just anybody. You need to connect with people who can help you and these people also need to be people who you can help.

So how do you go about doing this?

There’s this one tool that I’m really high on to help with the leg work. And I’ve come up with a methodology that I’ve been toying around with, in presentation form. It’s called: Relationship Marketing to Social Media ROI.

Check it out and let me know what you think in the comments below:

Here’s a Toast… and Corn

by Chris Hall on June 1, 2010 · Comments

King Korn: You Are What You Eat
Image by elycefeliz via Flickr

I had good times with my family this Memorial Day weekend. I am deeply thankful for all that has been given to me as a result of my service, and used the time to hang out with and remember old friends.

Remembering is important.

I also used the time to catch up on some movie watching, and one documentary in particular got me thinking a bit. If you haven’t seen it already, then you should definitely check out: King Corn.

The Story

Two friends find out that they both have great grandparents from the same town in Iowa. They decide to farm an acre of corn in the town together and film the process, whereby the audience learns about the positive and negative effects of U.S. agricultural policy

the good We have cheap food. What I really liked about the film was that they were able to interview the man who created the system of cheap food in the 1970s, Earl Butz. And it was obvious that in the interview he was still convinced that he had done the right thing for his country. Earl Butz had grown up in a time when food was labor intensive and expensive, and he had lived to see the day where Americans only needed to spend roughly 15% of their annual incomes on feeding themselves.

the bad Recent studies imply that cheap food may be causing an obesity epidemic across the nation, as American’s over consume things high in high fructose corn syrup due to its abundance and affordability.

The Takeaway

Politics aside, I think that the fascinating part of this storyline is that by solving one particular problem, the need for affordable food, we may (or may not) have created an entirely new problem, an addiction to sweets that causes health issues.

I get that it has taken some time to even see the symptoms of health problems that may be associated with the 1970s policy change… However, it seems to me that there is enough of a connection between the two areas: agriculture and health, to warrant more of a conversation than this about the two together.

I’m not saying abolish corn, because I don’t know if that is the answer. I am saying let’s break down the silos and really try to understand the network effects of policy decisions as we continue to make them. We can really only do this by connecting data together.

What do you think?

[Disclaimer Alert: I work for Humana, a health insurance company. However, the thoughts above are my own and do not reflect the thoughts of Humana.]

What’s The Worst That Could Happen?

by Chris Hall on May 24, 2010 · Comments

Nuclear Blast 1945
Image by thw05 via Flickr

I’m working on a presentation, for giggles, that ties some of social media’s biggest “mishaps” back to quarterly revenues and stock prices. You know, something that probably should have been done a while ago…

I’m doing it because someone needs to connect these dots and I haven’t come across anybody else really doing it. There has been so much to do about social media, both historically and recently, that I’ve been wondering for some time now, along with Peter Kim, if social media has any impact on a business’ bottom line.

I gotta say, that I’m not very surprised with the results from my research, so far.

The Risk of Catastrophic Failure

Fears of DEFCON 1 abound. I hear about the risks associated with social media everyday as we attempt to push the social media envelope within a Fortune 100 company. And these fears are all larger than life. I will concede that there are risks involved with external social media from around the enterprise.

But I argue that they’re not catastrophic in nature… at least not yet.

So I’ve been wrapping my head around the bad things that could happen to a company as a result of corporate social media gone wild, and it’s become clear that not all social media is created equal from a company’s perspective. A distinction needs to be made between social media that a company produces, for inbound marketing purposes or what have you, and the social media that is produced and shared from outside the company based on something that happened with the company.

In other words, there’s stuff that your company can do bad in the social media world. But there is also stuff that your company can do that is bad and gets spread around social media networks like Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. Here’s what I’ve been able to come up with during my research so far:

the boss is crazy This is social media that your company produces and shares on-line. And if your company is afraid to let the CEO have a voice on the internets because he/she may say something that upsets your customers and potential customers, then you may be worried about a risk that has a potentially high impact, but a historically low probability of becoming an issue.

the employees can’t be trusted Again, this is social media that your company produces and shares on-line. And of all the risks out there, I understand why this one is popular the most. That doesn’t mean that it can’t be mitigated, however. And my favorite response is that every organization’s employees are having analog conversations with friends, family and neighbors every day. If there is something wrong about the culture, those conversations are going to occur regardless.

the ads make people angry This is traditional media that gets spread around on the social web. Now, I know that it’s great to have people click on your company’s ads on YouTube just because they’re cool. But let’s say that your company makes an ad that offends people? Then what… catastrophic failure, or what?

the product is bad This is news that gets spread around on the social web. If your product is bad, or can not live up to the claims that you’re claiming, then people will find out about it and they will pass it along to their friends who they think would benefit from the information. I really like this category, because it focuses more on your company’s reason for being in business and less on fluff.

So What’s The Worst That Could Happen?

I’m hoping to have something put together in the this week/next week time frame. That is if I can stay motivated on it, because as I mentioned it’s just something I’m doing because it’s interesting to me. In the mean time, ask yourself which category your fears of corporate social media fall into, and why.

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