Outside Innovation

Why Don't Customers (and Voters) Count in Healthcare?

The votes are in:

In Southport, Maine, 95% of voters want to keep St. Andrews Hospital's Critical Access Status (24x7 ER + up to 25 beds);

In Boothbay Harbor, 83% of voters said Yes to the same vote.

In Boothbay, 86% of voters said Yes.

Even in Edgecomb, the town furthest away from St. Andrews Hospital and closest to the closest competitor, Miles Memorial in Damariscotta, the vote to retain St. Andrews’ critical access status was still 81%!

According to the Selectmen in all 4 towns, voter turnout was double that of last year. Saving St. Andrews brought out the vote, big time! This is quite a mandate. What does it mean? That a SUBSTANTIAL MAJORITY of the voters on our peninsula want to keep our St. Andrews’ 24-hour emergency room along with acute care beds and recuperation beds for those who are too sick to stay home, who need nursing care and want to be near their families.

If 87% of your customers tell you they want a certain product, do you turn them away and close your doors? That’s not very good business, is it?

Who Should Buy the Boston Globe?

I find it rather ironic that the Boston Globe, which is an amazing asset, with an incredibly well-oiled and hard-working team, is still on the block, being offered for sale again by the NY Times, the current owner. And my message is, whoever buys the Globe should move quickly to snatch up this media innovator with a team of people who know how to pull together in a crisis, are capable of extraordinary performance, and that have the experience of being masters in the difficult world of social and digital media.

I believe that whoever buys the Globe—whether an individual or an organization—should be Boston-based and should be in it for the long haul. The acquisition should be about the brand and the customers, not just about the money. Sure, the Globe needs to be profitable. But buying the Boston Globe is like buying the Red Sox; you are buying a team, an institution, and a franchise, with millions of loyal (fans) customers. The buyer should be someone who understands the local climate, the culture, the customer base, and the area personality.

In a February article on Smartertimes.com, writer Ira Stoll suggested a list of 25 potential buyers. Of those perspective suitors, we like the idea of the following (as described in Ira Stoll’s article):

“Gatehouse Media: owns a bunch of small dailies, weeklies, and Web sites in the cities and towns surrounding Boston. But with its stock trading in the pennies, it's not at all clear that the company has the balance sheet to complete an acquisition the size of the Globe.”

We say that the money could be found, the company knows the Boston area culture and climate, as well as the publishing/media business.

“John Henry: A stake in the Boston Red Sox and its associated sports cable channel was part of the Times Company's Boston operation for some time. If Mr. Henry, who owns the Red Sox as part of a broader group, bought the Globe, it would reunite the newspaper with the sports operation. The rationale here is similar to the idea of selling the Globe to ESPN; a large part of the value is the sports coverage, and the advertisers who want to buy signs at Fenway Park or television commercials during Red Sox games are presumably the same ones who would want to reach Globe readers. On the other hand, other than the sports network that covers the Red Sox, he doesn't have much in the way of experience in the news business.”

But he does understand a franchise with a legion of fans!

“Abigail Johnson, with a net worth estimated by Forbes at $11.8 billion, could certainly afford to buy the Globe. She and her family own and run the Fidelity mutual fund empire. They were in the Boston-area suburban newspaper business at one time, but got out of it.”

Fidelity is a Boston mainstay with deep pockets. And they have a background in the newspaper business. This could be a great match!

What We Can Learn from How the Boston Globe Covered the Marathon Bombings

Last week we published an article about the Boston Globe's coverage of the Boston Marathon bombings and aftermath. I commended the Boston Globe for doing an exceptional job of keeping the public informed with real-time, and accurate, information as the Marathon bombings and aftermath unfolded. Here are the highlights of what the Boston Globe not only did right, but did outstandingly, and should be a model for other media outlets, whether print, broadcast, or digital.

1. Provide a real-time stream of updated info—most news sources already do that for paying or registered customers. The Boston Globe extended that service to everyone—for free!
   
   
2. Fact-check everything! Unlike many other sources (and, especially, social media outlets) the Globe refused to spread rumors.
   
   
3. If you find that you posted or retweeted something that is wrong, correct it immediately even if you weren’t the source. (The one time the Globe passed on erroneous info from CNN, they fact-checked and corrected it quickly.)
   
   
4. Make it easy for others to share your updates or retweet what you send so that you become the trusted source.
   
   
5. Use all media, including short text posts, photos, video clips, and links to longer articles. In this way, the Boston Globe reached people on all devices with information that they could access in a media that spoke to them.
   
   
6. Get all hands on deck. Don’t leave this type of major coverage to a small team that deals with social media; everyone needs to be involved. At the Globe, every employee (who was safe doing so) was involved in some related activity, from live reporting to fact checking.
   
   
7. Have hot backup or a shadow system that can scale to the increased traffic resulting from everyone wanting information NOW! When the Boston Globe sites were saturated, the paper not only added additional servers, but shifted the real-time blogging to a single live blog hosted by ScribbleLive. Make sure you have an infrastructure in place to ensure the message gets out.
   
   
8. Let your people and your customers know how much you care. The Globe made employee safety a priority over news reporting, urging those who couldn’t come in for safety reasons to stay home and not worry. And the executives at the Globe made sure that the hard working staff knew how much they were appreciated.

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Boston Globe Masters Social Media in a Crisis
How the Boston Globe Covered the Boston Marathon Bombing
By Patricia B. Seybold, CEO & Sr. Consultant, Patricia Seybold Group, April 26, 2013

What does it take to beat all the major news and cable networks in news coverage? An amazing team and a commitment to getting it right! The Boston Globe took the time to fact check every piece of information, yet keep up-to-the-minute with a continuing real-time blogging. And it opened up all its paid online services to everyone for free information all week. As a result, the Boston Globe became the trusted source of information during the Boston Marathon crisis.

Read a sample and download the full article in PDF.

Students Co-Design African Rural University

I have been a part of the gestation, birth, and early childhood of this fledgling university as a member of the University Council (its governing body) since its inception. This truly is a unique undertaking—an all women’s university, designed to train the women who will help transform the African bush, bringing impoverished and illiterate people into the 21st century in a manner that preserves the best in their cultural traditions and in their natural environment, but lets them create prosperous livelihoods in their own rural communities.

The story I chose to tell in this case study includes some of the highlights in this organization’s journey from a seed planted in 1987 by its founders, Mwalimu Musheshe, Ephrem Rutaboba, and Silvana Franco, to its current status as a newly minted University with students two years into a four-year program. But the journey to this point is fascinating. Because, in order to co-design the University, all of the constituencies—students, faculty, people in hundreds of communities, local government officials—ran a 7-year pilot program—starting with 29 “researcher-students” who piloted a 5-year curriculum (3 years of courses and 2 years of internship in the field), and winding up with 17 graduates who are now working as professionals in 17 different sub-counties, helping hundreds of thousands of villagers create and actualize their dreams.

The Evolution of African Rural University
Co-Designed by Its Faculty, Students, and End-Customers (People the Grads Will Serve)
By Patricia B. Seybold, CEO & Sr. Consultant, Patricia Seybold Group, April 11, 2013

Bitcoin Hacked Again and Again

Last week we joined the media frenzy that seemed to suddenly swirl around the odd digital currency known as Bitcoin. That same day, one of the top Bitcoin exchanges, Mt. Gox, suffered a denial of service attack, sending the value of Bitcoins down as investors began panic selling.

Value of one bitcoin in U.S. dollars one-minute intervals chart

Last night, Mt. Gox was out of commission again. Another denial of service attack? Not at first. Mt. Gox posted a different explanation on its Facebook page:

“First of all we would like to reassure you but no, we were not, last night victim of a DDoS but instead the victim of our own success!

Indeed the rather astonishing amount of new accounts opened in the last few days added to the existing ones, plus the number of trades, made a huge impact on the overall system that started to lag. As expected in such a situation people started to panic, started to sell Bitcoin in mass (Panic Sale) resulting in an increase of trade that ultimately froze the trade engine!