Watched this great chat between business guru’s Gary Vaynerchuk & Seth Godin (I credit his stunning Tribes talk with the inspiration to start the mHealth group on Linkedin in October 2008 – something that has helped me build invaluable relationships with super talented people from around the world and earnt me huge amounts of cash via new clients for our consulting services without ever having to ask!) on my treadmill and my head has been buzzing since with great ideas it stirred up.
mHealth Insights
SG/7min “Semantics matter a whole bunch, what does authority even mean? …and I think the currencies of anyone who wants to make change happen right now are attention and trust. …and there’s a virtuous cycle you don’t get attention unless you’re trusted you, don’t get trusted unless you get attention. There are other types of attention you can you know light yourself on fire in the street but you won’t get trust doing that so there’s this attention/trust cycle going around and the question is: how do you get there? I don’t think you get there by saying how do I hustle a content media play to figure out how to get in front of people and somehow seduce them. Well you do it by being generous because people tend to trust folks who step up before they have to. They trust people who keep their promises especially when it’s not convenient. They trust people who tell them the truth. And if you do those things they’re probably going to tell someone else and then you’re going to get more attention and more chances to be generous and the cycle can go and go and go and guess what it probably never ends at a moment where you say “okay now it’s my turn to take take take”. We leave the ‘take take take’ part out mostly so you don’t feel like you own Heinz or TWA anything you are just in this environment where your attention is precious, your trust has been abused, if someone shows up and treats your attention with kindness and earns your trust everyday well one of the by products will be that they will want to hear what you have to say next”
It’s incredible how few Healthcare brands get any of this. From blatant lies and exaggerations to small print cheats it’s as though they don’t realise their whole future is built on telling the truth.
SG/9:15 “The glacial strategy which is I’m a glacia and I’m going to make it all the way down the Hudson to the Ocean and it’s obvious where I’m going and I’m just going to take a long time, well I would say that the strategy that you’re talking about that you’ve done consistently is that at any given moment the short term thinker thinks you are an idiot because you are not taking and that’s the key: you are doing things that are so generous and so trust earning that people look at you and say ‘why aren’t you doing that other taking?’. And it’s that feeling that the people around you think you’ve lost your mind that’s what makes it scary”
I think your answer to the following question makes a really good test of what you’re doing: What are you doing today in your business that makes people around you think you’ve completely lost your mind?
For us here at 3G Doctor there’s actually a list of things.
- The open sharing approach that we’ve taken because we want to be copied and we want properly documented consultations to become the new standard and we appreciate how far the Healthcare industry is from achieving this.
- The decision we’ve made to not sell prescriptions – this is such a cash cow for all the online Pharmacy retailers that it’s created a whole new breed of unethical getrichquick Doctors who would put their name on a prescription for an antibiotic as soon as you even mention a child is sniffing. It’s not that we don’t think you can safely prescribe a med to a remote Patient but we really need to distance our service from folks who have prioritised their bank balances over the needs of Patients.
- The decision we’ve made not to take on external funding – hundreds of millions of venture capital are now being poured into companies offering video consulting services and we’ve had our fair share of interest but it’s slowly becoming obvious to Patients that it creates a whole new issue of ‘what won’t this company do with my information to get the x10 ROI their investors need for an exit’.
- The decision we’ve made not to partner to make 3GDoctor available as a part of another companies service (insurers etc) because we believe in the need for Patients to have completely impartial independent access to a Doctor.
SG/11.28 “Everyone owns their own media company and one thing we need to amplify here though is there isn’t one market, there are many markets. and so you can sell to a market that wants you to be a pickup artist, business hustler, or whatever but just remember and please understand that that’s your market, don’t call me because I’m not your market. My argument is that most people, especially the people you want to be trust by don’t like to be hustled and I wish that a whole bunch of people who call themselves growth hackers, blah blah blah, would write on the wall: Most people I care about don’t want to be hustled because being hustled makes you feel bad”
This is so key to mHealth. It’s why I can’t think how, other than short term traffic, you can benefit from spending your money on adverts that are in anyway misleading, untruthful or incomplete.
SG/12:22 “…so what’s the next big thing? My argument is that this is the next big thing that if you are waiting for something beyond a billion people connected online with Mobile being the driving force, with fight for attention and constant froth around the edges. If you are waiting for something else you are going to miss out on a big chunk of opportunity. This is our revolution. There was the industrial revolution, there was the mass media revolution and there is THIS and it will be changing it’s flavour in terms of the public companies that are going to run things that will have to change but please don’t wait for the next big thing. This has been the next big thing since 1991. So the people at the newspaper conference in 1993 when I told them what was coming and they told me okay so we’ll just wait for that. No. This is it, this is what we got”
GV/13:20 “The one thing that’s on the horizon that i think a lot of people are paying attention to is VR and I say to a lot of people ‘look that’s a 10 years away’, in 1998 I thought that by the year 2000 everybody who would come into my wine shop would know the price of everything… …so the thing I’ve learnt is there is a long way away, if VR is truly contact lenses sitting in our homes being in places we’re talking about 15 to 25 years away from the scale. We’re just hitting the maturity – let’s not forget 15 to 17% of all commerce done in America is done online. It’s nothing. If you told me in 1998 that only 15% of all things bought would be online by the year 2016 I would’ve sat there and said sugar do I even want to do this, that’s forever away. This stuff doesn’t go as fast as we all think it’s going to”
SG/14:47 “there are people who are working in VR today who are going to go off and do something interesting but it’s not because they’re right about VR it’s going to be because they’re right about being a trusted person worthy of our attention. That’s the arc of the people and the brands you trust. Not that they got the product right the first time out the gate or the iteration right the first day but they made a commitment to show up in a certain way in front of certain people”
SG/20:59 “every human should have a blog even if you don’t put your name on it. Everyday write something you are willing to put into the world so that a week from now, a month from now, a year from now, you can look back and saw I said this. I predicted this. I knew this…”
I agree with this 100% and it’s one of the reasons why I think the GMC advice to Doctors is such a travesty and outright mistake. Imagine the power the Junior Doctors would have today if the Medical School tutors had given them mHealth training and encouraged them to maintain a blog. Imagine how convincing they’d be if they could show that they’re a good predictor of the last half baked expensive government scheme that cost Patients but was intended to improve the NHS?
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