by Joe McKendrick
September 9, 2009 at 3:11 pm · Filed under
Facebook, Social Networking, Twitter, YouTube
My colleague over at Insurance Networking, Pat Speer, has just published an account of a major health insurance company that is employing social networking to communicate with its members/customers.
For starters, Pat reports that Anthem Blue Cross and Blue Shield in Wisconsin is piloting a program which employs Twitter to “identify members who may have questions or concerns about their health benefits.” The use of Twitter enables the insurer “to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, real-time conversation, and respond to each tweet about Anthem.”
Anthem is also using its Twitter channel to help members with healthy lifestyle choices such as weight loss programs. If that isn’t enough, Pat reports that Anthem has also formed a Facebook channel and a YouTube channel to promote wellness and member interaction.
As Kate Quinn, VP of corporate marketing for Anthem, puts it: “Social media provide a great opportunity for us to engage our members, listen to them and be more responsive.”
At a time when the viability and future direction of the health insurance industry is under debate, social networking is providing a means for insurance companies to reach on on a very personal level to their customers. The perception of “big, bad, greedy insurance companies,” however rightly or wrongly earned, has been part of the discourse for years, and came about because of the sense of impersonalization that created a very high wall between the companies and their constituents. Social networking may be just the right tool to tear down this wall.
by Jon Husband
September 6, 2008 at 9:42 pm · Filed under
CNN, Change, Culture, Emergent, Facebook, Public Media, Social Media, Twitter, User Revolution, Web 2.0
I’ve just been watching an interesting new component of CNN prime-time news, wherein Rick Sanchez, one of the current anchors, flashes cherry-picked items from Twitter (Rick’s Twitter Feedback) and from Facebook (Rick’s Facebook Feedback) in order to counter or reinforce the story he has just introduced.
I’m (still) all for Web 2.0 and listening to the voices of the great unwashed, but there are key aspects of using this approach that leave me skeptical or cold. He and his colleagues get to pick which items they want to use add emphasis or colour an issue.
Nevertheless, I applaud CNN for actually paying attention to what is happening on the Web.
Mashable has more.
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by Sean McClowry
February 7, 2008 at 4:25 pm · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0, Facebook, Social Networking
Facebook and MySpace are the world’s most popular Social Networking sites, but are they the best model for bringing these web 2.0 concepts into the enterprise?
My view is trustedplaces is perhaps a better model to use as a reference. Its a collaborative site primarily for reviewing restaurants, clubs and pubs. The community effectively has jobs, and their social network forms as a by-product of the work that they do. It can still be a social network on its own, but you probably wouldn’t go there unless you were interested in the outcome.
Building the “bottom up approach”
Trusted Places does some particularly interesting things:
- Featuring contributors on the front page
- Providing “award points” for contributions
- You can interactively build your tastes
- Providing recommendations for new connections based on common interests
Combined with a great UI, I’m a big fan of what this team is doing.
Yes, Facebook has Applications
The lines are, of course, a bit greyer than I have painted them. Facebook applications can be used to find other people with common interests and help people build new connections. The Facebook platform can be used to build any functionality that TrustedPlaces has, and more. But since Facebook is so large and completely open in scope, I find it more difficult to relate to a work context. Facebook and MySpace may be more fun, but work, alas, is not always fun. And while there are plenty of focused product review sites, I’ve yet to see any that form social networks better than trustedplaces.
What public site do you think provides a good model for explaining Enterprise 2.0?
by Jon Husband
January 30, 2008 at 8:29 am · Filed under
2.0 Design Thinking, Artisanal Economy, Business Model, Change, Chris Anderson, Community, Culture, Economics, Emergent, Facebook, Long Tail, Relationships, Social Media, Social Networking, Social Objects, Trusted Space, Web 2.0, Web Advertising
A few days ago I wrote a post and linked to an Aspen Institute report titled The Rise of Collective Intelligence – Decentralized Co-Creation of Value as a New Paradigm of Commerce and Culture.
Today I’d like to offer readers an example of new tools and web services operating in social networks that in my opinion make the concepts and observations in the report come alive. The example involves people using search, content, collaboration and sharing, which are all central elements of the ecosystems of commerce and culture in which we will all be living, working and consuming.
There’s a small company up here in Vancouver, British Columbia (the warm and beautiful part of the Great White North of North America) that develops social networking platforms and customized elearning solutions. The Donat Group is also creating a social music initiative (Project Opus), a part of which involves Mixxmaker, a web service that helps music lovers build playlists collaboratively. Building playlists collaboratively creates a "Social Object", offering people a means of co-creating value around music they like and want to share with others they know.
We all know that the music industry is in real turmoil, and is searching frantically for new business logic and new business models. The major participants have all been under pressure from free downloads, and the price of music is under pressure as never before. Where will additional value, and eventually revenue, come from ?
David Gratton is the founder of the Donat Group, Project Opus and Mixxmaker. David recently wrote a post about why the digital packaging around music, especially as a social object, can and will be of value. Mainly, being able to search for, locate, aggregate and acquire various elements about a song or an artist that someone likes will help create meaning and in turn value.
He also wrote about ‘who’ is involved in the co-creation of this new form of value … or in other words how the market for value associated with songs is being broken up and then co-created anew. Doing this around a playlist that is built in collaboration with others also helps mightily in creating connections and trust, and lays a foundation for putting the dynamics of word-of-mouth marketing into dynamic operation.
It’s important to note here that David and his colleagues at Project Opus and Mixxmaker put a lot of work into staying within the bounds of Fair Use, an all-important consideration when exploring new paradigms for creating (or co-creating in this case) potentially new economic value.
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Once people start building today’s equivalent of albums together with their friends, the changes to the ways music is distributed and acquired will continue to diversify away from purchasing CDs, as David has noted. But people will still want that unusual album cover from the old vinyl days, or the most recent YouTube video clip of a given band’s performance, or a series of photos from Flickr (carrying the appropriate Creative Commons license, to be sure) to add to their own personal collection of digital artefacts about that kind of music, that band, that group of friends .. and so on.
It’s a pity, really, that this fun and easy-to-use capability exists only as a Facebook application at the moment. I seem to be observing a rapidly-growing trend of people turning down invitations to add another Facebook application to their Facebook profile (I am one of those people). While supposedly Mark Zuckerberg is aware of the growing dissatisfaction .. and you’d think the Beacon fiasco was notice enough … it’s hard to shake the sense that Facebook and its partner applications are all really just looking for ways to maximize page views and ad impression.
That, for me, does not fall into the category of decentralized co-creation of value, no matter how you spin it.
But .. I suspect that in the coming months and years we’ll see many more examples of applications and services like Mixxmaker that let and / or help people co-create online things that they care about and enjoy.
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Tags: Aspen Institute, Decentralized Co-creation of Value, Donat Group, Project Opus, Mixxmaker, Facebook
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By 1999, John was publishing another best seller, 
