Artist: len-k-a, stock.xchng

Like many other areas of life, churches are being impacted by the development and adoption of new technologies. A recent article by Terry Mattingly points out the challenges the church (Catholic, Protestant, and probably many others) have in reaching the younger generation who are used to connecting not by paper, phone, or even e-mail, but by Facebook and Twitter and text message.

Businesses ran into this problem some years ago, and someone coined the term Digital Darwinism. This refers to the habit some businesses had, like Polaroid, when they failed to see the change in technology coming and lost their market to a competing technology. The church doesn’t have quite that problem – there’s not a digital salvation that I’m aware of. But the church does need to find a way to reach people, young and old, to get its message out to them.

And it’s more than just outreach and evangelism. In my studies of churches using social networks, some use them for evangelism – trying to reach new people who have not previously been a part of a church, or who are looking for a new church. This is the case that Mattingly is initially concerned with – how to help the “digital natives” find their local churches, since they now look online, not on the street corner or in the phone book. The churches I studied also used their online presence to enable their members and sometimes others to interact – to organize, to discuss, and to support one another.

Beyond that, Mattingly writes of a recent (Catholic) Council of Bishops meeting where the bishops have been considering how to engage in the online world. The starting point is a web site, what Bishop Ronald Herzog calls a “one-dimensional” reality for the culture. Going beyond that is the “two dimensional” world of blogs, where anyone can state an opinion, and all opinions look at face value to have equal validity. In that world, the culture expects a dialog, to be able to engage with church leaders to discuss issues of faith.

But that takes time, and it takes risk for church leaders to take that on. I think it will be necessary for church leaders of all kinds of churches to engage in the online world – the “digital natives” will expect it, and at some points that will be where we’ll find them. That doesn’t mean the online world replaces the in-person world – just as in business, it’s a complementary channel that we’ll have to figure out how to best leverage and manage.

What do you think?

Source: Marc Smith, http://everystockphoto.com/photo.php?imageId=6077678 (license at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5/)

Facebook is all the rage among consumers – we know that from discussions among friends and around the water cooler. Companies are trying to manage how Facebook is used in the workplace – both from a “time used” viewpoint, but more importantly from a “what are our employees saying about our company” perspective. And, most importantly, how do we leverage this social networking thing to our company’s (or celebrity’s) advantage?

I ran across a report from SAS, based on an eMetrics conference session in May, 2010, in San Jose. This came up in some consulting I do for White Glove Productions (www.whitegloveproductions.com), a small company that focuses on providing fan sites that celebrities can control directly – giving fans access to “behind the scenes” activities and comments from the celebs.

The authors (Katie Delahaye Paine and Mark Chaves) make several interesting observations:

1.       Hits are a passé way of identifying impact of your web presence. It might measure the number of people (or scraping robots!) that have visited your page, but the authors claim there was no reliable way to translate those hits into real value for the company. Paine goes so far as to offer an acronym for “hits” – “how idiots track success”. (Yes, I know that hits roughly correlate to “impressions”, from the marketing world, but the authors are questioning whether online “impressions” carry the same weight as those offline.)

2.       It’s now all about engagement – can you get those folks who have had an impression of your brand to respond to it in some way? Click on a link, post a comment, participate in a forum, etc. Paine suggests a taxonomy of engagement, as follows:

a.       Searchers – those who scan online sources, but don’t pay much attention to the social media sites. You also don’t get much information about them – just perhaps a count of unique visitors.

b.      Lurkers – those who observe social media interactions, but don’t participate.

c.       Casuals – these folks participate a little in social media – they might follow your page, become your friend on Facebook, follower on Twitter, etc.

d.      Actives – regularly post comments and engage in conversations, “retweet” to others, and so on.

e.      Defenders – those who actively promote and support the brand, whatever it may be.

3.       It’s going to be increasing important for commercial enterprises using social media to clearly define their ROI – or in Paine’s terms, explicitly defining the R and the I.

a.       The Return (R) might be measured by how people engage – brand awareness, improving the company’s perception, allowing fans to interact with one another, etc.

b.      The Investment (I) needs to be measured and tracked as well – it’s not free, even if Facebook doesn’t charge you to post content there. It still costs staff time to interact with those visitors, and perhaps development time to create content to share with your audience.

They go on to identify further steps to measure impact, analyze results, and modify strategy as required. Some of those analysis models include looking at simple measures of numbers of posts, friends, etc., at links between friends and followers (social network analysis), and at analyzing the text of individual postings.

I’ll cover those more another day, but will leave you with one interesting site – www.live.firstdirect.com. These folks, at a bank in the UK, have spent time to scrape comments from blogs, Twitter, Facebook, and other sites that refer to their brand. They then analyze each comment for its “sentiment” – did the user make positive, negative, or neutral comments? The results are displayed in a way that gives a visual of the “whole world” view of the company – and they publish it for all to see. That’s another feature of social media – it makes your company or brand much more visible, and potentially much more transparent.

How will you leverage social media to support your brand (or even your personal brand)?

Source: photoxpress.com

Intuit Financial Services (disclaimer – they bought my former employer, Digital Insight) recently published a survey indicating that about 1/3 of Americans now bank online. Precious few, though, have any access to their medical records online, nor do their health care providers. Medical records in the U.S. are still largely paper-based – a thick file of paper accessible primarily to the provider where it resides – your doctor, pharmacy, or other treatment provider.

As such, we lose out on some significant benefits, which recent health care legislation hopes to change. Health care providers are being incented to invest in technology to digitize their current records, and to move all of their recordkeeping into an electronic format. This might (but won’t necessarily) enable providers to share information among them, so that it’s easier for your oncologist, dermatologist, and general practitioners to see what each has learned about your case, and better coordinate your care.

Once those records are online and available to your health care team, they could also be made available to you. Kaiser-Permanente, among others, is among those making a splash in the media about how and why they do this – to improve care, to save trees, and to enable you to handle your health care in more convenient ways.

But using Kaiser’s, or any other provider’s, system directly will tend to lock you into that provider. Kaiser is also an “all-in-one” shop – good in that you get all your care through their services, but a bit limiting in that their system won’t store information about care you receive elsewhere.

There’s also not yet any good way to move your records from one provider to another, so if you change providers, your records may not move with you. But there are alternatives – Google Health, Microsoft HealthVault, and others that claim to be able to extract information from your various health providers and assemble it into one view, and allow you to enter your own records – exercise records, pulse, blood pressure, and glucose measurements, etc.

This model, though, moves your records into the hands of companies who provide you the service for free, but then may use that data to target ads to you. They can also use the data (in aggregate) to analyze all sorts of things about their users, and sell that information to others. And like any other company, if they have possession of data, it is possible that it may get misused – by outside hackers, or by their own employees.

There are still more options – your pharmacy, and your bank. Your pharmacy already has your prescription information, and often offers online access to your records. It wouldn’t be hard to extend that model to include data from your medical providers, if they allowed it. And your bank already knows how to manage security – and you’ve demonstrated you trust them enough to share information about your finances online. What if they could also offer a gateway to your health records?

So what’s your preference? If you bank online, you’ve already chosen to take a certain set of risks with your information, in return for added convenience and control. If you had access to your medical records online, how would you prefer to access them? Through your insurance company? Your primary care physician? Through a private independent provider like Google or Microsoft? Or perhaps through your pharmacy or bank?

I’d love to hear your ideas – thanks in advance for sharing!

everystockphoto.com - jurvetson

You (most likely) never heard of Google Wave, or never tried it out.  And now you likely never will, at least by that name. It’s been out on the market for about a year, open by invitation only, much like GMail originally was. I wangled an invitation from a student so I could try it, but it’s not one of those things you can really try by yourself. It’s a collaboration tool, so it required someone to collaborate with, and, to be meaningful, something to collaborate on. I had lots of collaboration to do, but after playing a bit with it, I concluded that the learning curve was too steep, so chose not to burden anyone else with that.

Google announced recently that Wave development would not get further funding, but that code for some of its fundamental capabilities had already been released as open source. Bloggers at TechHaze note that Wave’s demise is likely due to lack of anyone to collaborate with – in other words, a lack of critical mass. It’s a product that clearly could have thrived from the Network Effect (link here TBD), but Google never achieved enough mass to get that growth to happen on its own.

So why did GMail become a raging success, but Wave failed? I think the surface cause was threefold: the lack of critical mass of users, the need to learn to do something new in order to use it, and the fact that it didn’t work with anything else – no interoperability.

That lack of critical mass was in turn caused by the invite-only model, and the fact that even relatively early adopters like me gave up on it (see reasons above), and never invited anyone. Turns out there was a great video available to help jump-start users, but it was an hour long. I think I started to watch it, but decided if I had to devote an hour to a video, it wasn’t likely to be worth my time until someone else tried it first.

GMail, in contrast, was immediately usable (and intuitive, for the most part) to anyone who already had an e-mail account. And, it could immediately send messages to anyone else using e-mail. Users didn’t have to get their friends to sign up for GMail before they could exchange messages.

It’s too bad it ended this way. Google certainly has the resources to make tools like this come to life, and those who’ve tried it say it was great. TechHaze says, and I modified it slightly, “there are two kinds of people: those who love Wave, and those who haven’t tried it” (or never heard of it).

Did you try Wave? For what purpose? What did you think? I’d love to hear from you.

Source: everystockphoto.com - Chris Breach

Microsoft recently created a fake bank branch (the “Greater Offshore Bank and Trust”) in New York City, and hired “staff” to convince consumers to divulge personal information. The payoff? A promise of $500 for new accounts that consumers opened.

Consumers were asked to provide much of the standard identification information – driver’s license, name, social security number, etc. But they were also asked to provide such obscure items as their pants size, a snippet of hair for a DNA test, and other such things.

And what was the point of this? To promote Microsoft’s Internet Explorer version 8, which includes tools and capabilities to help consumers catch potential fraud on the Internet. A catchy concept, but very misleading, in my view.

The fact that consumers will walk into a realistic-looking bank branch and divulge personal information is very different from consumers divulging their information to a fraudulent web site. Granted, both can happen – but consumers are much more likely to be lulled into a sense of security by a real physical space, rather than a web site. In that physical world, they have a real person that they can describe to police, there are lease agreements for the building, and other tools to track potential criminal activity. And in this case, the consumers had the promise of a payoff for their information.

In contrast, a fraudulent site on the Internet has virtually none of those attributes to induce consumer confidence (or motivation). Consumers, once educated about the risks, would likely be much less prone to divulging such data without some confidence about who was receiving it and how it would be used. And if we can take the greed out of the equation (“We are looking for someone to help us transfer $20 million for the Queen of Transylvania”), that makes consumers less vulnerable still.

Microsoft’s advertising does make a valid point, even if they don’t emphasize it – it is harder to know who you’re dealing with in the online world. So consumers need to be cautious with their information in both the physical and online worlds, and to find out who they are sending their information to, and ensure that it’s reputable. We know from statistics that way too many people don’t do this – I just wish Microsoft spent its effort promoting this element of safety, and not just its own toolbox.

See the original article here, and commentary here (with video) and here.

The gist of the piece is that it should be possible to use a single PC for both high-sensitivity work (like your banking), and for casual web surfing. Now of course, most folks already do this – but they risk their information regularly, due to the plethora of malware out there that can infect their PC and steal their information.

The folks at Intel Labs have a vision for how they might be able to segregate off a portion of the technology in the PC, and use that for the secure functions, while retaining normal PC functions in the rest of the machine. See their overview summary here.

I’m happy to have had the opportunity to work with my Intel colleagues, and look forward to more such opportunities – technology is a great gig because it never stays the same!

Update 6/9/10 – Found a related story by Brian Krebs about a business banking user who on one occasion used his home “casual web surfing” PC for banking, and lost $100,000 in the process.

Banktech article: http://www.banktech.com/blog/archives/2010/05/could_mobile_ba.html?cid=nl_bnk_daily

Voice of America article: http://www1.voanews.com/english/news/africa/Mobile-Banking-Gives-Kenyans-New-Weapon-Against-Poverty-94942564.html

I’d welcome your thoughts. If you have comments you’re willing to share publicly, please do so – thanks.

1) Thieves who can take control of your bank account can tell the bank you have a new phone number, and then answer the calls on your behalf.

2) Banks who are smart enough to call your previous phone number if your number was recently changed can be blocked from reaching you.

A new variation, primarily applied (thus far) to high-value thefts, uses automated calling programs to call your previous numbers, delivering dead air, advertising, and other such things. The calls continue incessantly (as much as every 30 seconds for a month). This prevents the bank from checking with your old number, and allows the thief more time to convince the bank that they do have the rights to take money out of your accounts.

See the original article in Wired magazine here.