Greetings from San Francisco

I'm spending this week in San Francisco, attending the Society for Healthcare Strategy and Market Development (SHSMD) Conference and discussing the vagaries of healthcare planning, marketing and public relations. My colleague Dan Millar and I gave a presentation on Wednesday morning dealing with Crisis Communication and Social Media (you can see the link to our survey on the subject to the left), which went very well. We laughed at the opening session entertainment featuring political satirist Mark Russell - with his political jokes, piano and still entertaining audiences with hat and bowtie.

Today's opening session featured author Andrew Keen, who bills himself as the "anti-christ of silicon valley". His remarks regarding Web 2.0 and the "Cult of the Amateur" were interesting and provacative. His premise is that Web 2.0 has created an environment where - while everyone has access and can be an author - we have lost respect for expertise and there is little or no mechanism to proof, check, authenticate or serve as gatekeeper to prevent false and often crazy information being labeled as "the truth." He told one story where he was talking to a person before the last election, and the person said -"I could never vote for Al Gore, he's Jewish!" Andrew asked, "how do you know that?" The answer was, "I read it on the internet!" Falsehoods, lies and malicious information are now being passed off as accurate or true. Keen says that this total lack of respect for expertise has already led to negative impact in the Music Industry, Journalism and a variety of other fields as "talent" is no longer being paid for being talented, and he chastized marketers for falling into the trap that the Internet (YouTube, Facebook, Google, etc.) provides a forum for "free marketing" - when in fact it isn't free, the internet companies are th e only ones being paid, and advertising is not discernable from informational content, and eventually it could "all be marketing" - so there beign no such thing as paid marketing, we're putting ourselves out of a job. Take a look at his Blog, or read his book, "The Cult of the Amateur"

Fred