My friend once told me about this doctor he knew. Back in the 1980s, this doc noticed that many of his patients could do with some advice on easily preventable ailments – which typically cost them a lost day of work at the farm and a visit to the doctor. He compiled a list of rural visitors to his clinic over the years and started mailing them inexpensive postcards with printed health messages aimed at preventing them ever having to visit him (in effect). The audacity of this plan was matched only by its simplicity and his practice flourished with the brand that this exercise built.
Fast forward to 2010 – The Thomas Jefferson University Hospital is on Facebook connecting to its users. The doctor my friend knew would be overjoyed to hear this. The Facebook page has invites to screening events, announcements for speeches and lots more information*. And with Facebook expected to close in on 500 million users next month, there is no doubt that cloud based social networking solutions (Facebook, Twitter etc.) are heaven-sent for consumer organizations who want to redefine their interaction with users (and successfully beat the competition in the process too).
CRN mentioned this recently as a successful example of ‘Consumerizing’ the Cloud – while also mentioning other medical players like Kaiser Permanente which lets patients to select and swap doctors while rating them as a user community.
The dizzying growth of social networking sites has been questioned quite a lot in the past. Umair Haque asks,
“If we take social media at face value, the number of friends in the world has gone up a hundredfold. But have we seen an accompanying rise in trust?”
Most of the social networking solutions using the Cloud (e.g. tons of Facebook apps now run on the Amazon Cloud) are rarely about ‘trust, connection and community’ and are more about attention grabs and clicks. This recent development by Thomas Jefferson University is like a whiff of fresh air in the hodgepodge that is ‘social networking’ these days.
What does this mean for other organizations which think they are missing the bus by not being on ‘social media’? – I believe that organizations that take Cloud based social networking solutions seriously and redefine their model of reaching out and offering services to customers will be leaders in their field while their counterparts who simply choose to fiddle with social-media ‘presence’ instead will be left behind.
- I admit Facebook is not a prime example for illustrating this point; what with Facebook’s shooting itself in the foot with privacy settings and the recent flak that it has received. Needless to say, any implementation of ‘consumerizing’ the Cloud should ensure that no user medical information is ever entrusted to Mr. Zuckerberg or to a Facebook app!
Vembu Home is the only FREE consumer backup solution for free local backups and optional Amazon Cloud backups. Get your FREE COPY now.
Leave A Comment