Tag Archives: tips

Tips from a Q-Tip

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This week was packed with lessons… you go through life swabbing your ears like nothing and then one day… PUFF! You are taught a huge lesson by nothing more than a Q-Tip! Here are the tips I learned from this unlikely teacher this week:

     

  • Never… I mean NEVER, stick a Q-Tip inside your ear canal: it happened to me and it can happen to you -you can find yourself trying to scare off a fly and accidentally push the q-tip inside your ear.

 

Eardrum rupture

  • Flying with a ruptured eardrum is not as dangerous you may think. The reason is that pressure change due to air travel pushes in on the eardrum. But when there is a hole in it, the pressure on both sides is equal, so there is no need for you to compensate as you go up or down.
  • Corollary: when you DO compensate, you feel “air” oozing out of your ear… very weird sensation, I have to admit.
  • A perforated eardrum causes temporary (partial) hearing loss: know when you go into a pool and you come out with water “stuck” in your ear, how your hearing is sort of muffled? That is exactly how I hear now from my right ear. The difference is that I cannot get rid of the water and hear OK again. I need to wait about six weeks for the eardrum to heal.

After my appointment with the ENT yesterday, I have confirmed in a month and a half hearing should be restored, as long as I keep my right ear dry and clean. Still, I don’t recommend this experience to anyone… it sucks… a lot! :(

5 ways to improve your newsletter

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1) All email newsletter platforms give you some kind of reporting. We use Constant Contact. Check into the data for your reports. See how your Open Rates and Click Rates compare to market averages. Open rates should be at least somewhere around 10-20% (i.e. this percentage of your messages that didn’t bounce should be opened if the subject line appeals to them). Click rates should be somewhere around 15% too (i.e. this is the percentage of your opened messages that got clicked on, with each click counting towards it).

2) If you are seeing a low Open rate, try playing with the subject line: avoid things like “Our newsletter – August 2011″ in favor of things like “Learn why it pays off to do XYZ”, i.e. include something that will make more people want to open the email, such as including a reference of what they can expect inside. Think action verbs, teasers, things that will prompt an action, not things that are descriptive.

3) If you are seeing a low Click rate, try working with the content. If you have too much content on the newsletter, it will likely not be all read, but it will still likely take you very long to put together. People’s attention span typically won’t go beyond a minute or so per email, so keep it short (test it yourself: read it and see how long it takes you). This is an example of a newsletter (ours) that is intentionally not too long.

4) A very good way to reduce the amount of content you include in a newsletter is to blog about it and LINK to it from the newsletter, instead of including all the content in the newsletter. It will make for an easier-to-skim piece too, which will likely engage people until the end of the newsletter.

5) Another way to reduce the amount of content you include in a newsletter is to send more frequent (though I would recommend against more frequent than weekly) newsletters, with less content each.

What pieces of advice you have for people wanting to improve their newsletters?

Building Stronger Communities

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In preparation for a few coming presentations I will be doing about patient communities and other related topics, I went back to this great presentation from NTC 2010 where I was part of an amazing panel of online community experts. Hope you find it useful.

Building Stronger Communities

Are you seeing "everything" you can see on Facebook?

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A while back I had read on either Dose of Digital or JohnHaydon.com about the fact that Facebook is set to automatically show ONLY posts from people who you’ve recently interacted with or interacted the most with. This is the reason why you may only be noticing that “some people haven’t updated their status on Facebook in a while” (or some pages you thought you were following are not posting any updates). They are, you are just not seeing them.

Though, this means that you will see MORE updates on your Facebook home page (and that means you may end up wasting more time on Facebook than you do now), if you want to change this, this is what you need to do:

(Thanks to this Facebook event for reminding me of this…)

Content Phishing: "African Mango" make-believe health news review

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This morning, I was curious enough to click on an ad on a web site (I click on very few ads) and I was led to a web site that talked about “African Mango”. Here’s a screenshot of the page I was taken to: you can click on it for a longer version, including all the content, down to the first “comments”:

As a patient advocate and a web user, I am always curious when I learn about these kinds of things… like the “reporter” from the “news web site”, I was curious to learn more about this new diet… Notice my use of quotes.

Why do I imply with my quotes that this is not a reporter writing about a new diet, or that this is not a news web site:

  • The page you land on when you click on the ad has the URL http://newshealth6.com/LoseWeightFast. If you visit it and you try clicking on any of the U.S., World, Business, Politics, etc. sections of the news site and guess where it leads? BACK to the same page. This is a 1-page web site that only seeks to promote this so-called African Mango diet!
  • If you try to leave the web site, you are presented with a very classy “Are you sure you don’t want to take advantage of the African Mango and LeanSpa Cleanse Free Trial?” popup (see below). When was the last time you saw a news site doing this? Let me think…. ah…. right! NEVER!

  • Best of all, if you dare to post a comment in reply to this scam, you are (not surprisingly) taken to a broken page… I rest my case…

It’s not a real news site and they are not really doing what they say:

As part of a new series: “Diet Trends: A look at America’s Top Diets” we examine consumer tips for dieting during a recession

These guys are “content phishing”. I am not sure if it’s even a term that exists, but it’s the name I give to these kinds of practices, similar to the ones by people trying to make you believe you are visiting your bank web site, to steal your banking data (and money) from you. These kinds of practices are unethical and should not be allowed!

When you read about something that seems too good to be true, maybe it is! Please take a few moments to navigate around the site you get to. You may discover a lot, simply by clicking around as I did…

What’s sad is that, when I see practices like this one, I don’t even care any more if what they somehow got on Reuters Health about African Mango two years ago is true or not. Anyone willing to go to this extreme to promote their product is not going to get my money… and I hope they don’t get yours and they get sanctioned for deceiving people this way!

Fighting Spam on Facebook Pages got easier

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Yesterday, while training our new Social Media person, I discovered something on the Diabetes Hands Foundation Facebook page (I never cease to be amazed at how many things they change without announcing them…) that comes in handy to fight spam on your Facebook page.

If you are an Admin of a Facebook page, you will see at the top of your page (below the Updates box) a Spam option you can click on.

When you click on it, you are presented with the equivalent on Facebook to your Spam or Junk folder on your email. Pretty handy-dandy! I don’t know exactly how they are designating posts as spam, but I assume they must be throwing in there anything that follows spammy behaviors, such as posts that are copied and pasted in multiple places with little or no changes.

If you concur with their judgement about a post being spammy (as in the case below):

you can remove the post and ban the person from your page as you used to be able to do before.

If you feel the post has been designated as spam by error, you can also correct that by choosing the “Unmark as Spam” option from the dropdown in the corner, as shown here:

So, what do you make of this resource Facebook gives you to keep spammers at bay on your Facebook pages?

5 Tips to Make your Community More Vibrant

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Running an online community is not easy, is extremely fulfilling and can help your take your organization’s mission to the next level.

I first wrote this topic about a year ago, but these tips continue to be as relevant as ever!

  1. Know who the champions are in your community and acknowledge them visibly.
  2. Highlight member generated content more often than content you create.
  3. Refresh content often, but not TOO often: Google Analytics can help you figure out how often.
  4. Conduct contests and other initiatives regularly to engage members of the community.
  5. Always: listen to your community. Sometimes, ALL it takes is to listen to what they have to say.

A bonus tip: get the book “Managing Online Forums”!

What are some good examples of ways in which you made your community more vibrant?

Slow Dance by David L. Weatherford

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Reminds me of a friend of mine, in my first job (back in 1998 or so), when he asked me “When was the last time you sat still long enough to see the clouds go by?”

Enjoy this poem, “Slow Dance” by child Psychologist, David L. Weatherford:

Have you ever watched kids on a merry-go-round,
or listened to rain slapping the ground?

Ever followed a butterfly’s erratic flight,
or gazed at the sun fading into the night?

You better slow down, don’t dance so fast,
time is short, the music won’t last.

Do you run through each day on the fly,
when you ask “How are you?”, do you hear the reply?

When the day is done, do you lie in your bed,
with the next hundred chores running through your head?

You better slow down, don’t dance so fast,
time is short, the music won’t last.

Ever told your child, we’ll do it tomorrow,
and in your haste, not see his sorrow?

Ever lost touch, let a friendship die,
’cause you never had time to call and say hi?

You better slow down, don’t dance so fast,
time is short, the music won’t last.

When you run so fast to get somewhere,
you miss half the fun of getting there.

When you worry and hurry through your day,
it’s like an unopened gift thrown away.

Life isn’t a race, so take it slower,
hear the music before your song is over.