I first saw this video of Hatsune Miku two days ago. Initially, I was disturbed. Here are 20,000 Japanese teenagers dancing and screaming to the live performance of…a hologram?

Her dance routine was produced by a programmer. Even her voice is computerized, made up of complex combinations of phonemes driven by an algorithm developed by Yamaha, auto-tuned on the fly. The virtual band concept was an entertaining gimmick when the Gorillaz performed “live” with Madonna at the ’06 Grammys, but come on- a world tour?

Then there’s the inevitable realization — at least this is honest. As others have pointed out, Hatsune’s creators (managers?) have wisely avoided straying into the uncanny valley by giving her the form of a typical anime charicature. Aside from that, is it any different than [insert your favorite no-talent pop sensation] lip-synching a song written by a guy in Sweden while every movement, every gesture, every glance has been tightly choreographed and rehearsed until the entire routine can be delivered with robotic precision? In fact, we might be better off for it: for one thing, Hatsune (or her stateside incarnation) will never be a trashy role model for little girls across America. And without the potential for weight fluctuations, wardrobe malfunctions, trips to rehab, sex tapes, and public head-shaving incidents, the TMZs and Perezes of the world might have a little less celeb drama to shill. That’s alright by me.

But until a hologram can smash an amp with a real guitar, you won’t catch me at one of these shows. And with that, we now return you to your regularly scheduled programming.

They were nice enough on the phone, though they ran through the obligatory upsell messaging that plagues any unsubscriber.

I thought I was done with AT&T. Then, over a week after my last bill was posted, I received a marketing email. I clicked the Unsubscribe link buried at the bottom of the email, and came face to face with this page. (click for full size)

Let me share some direct quotes from this Unsubscribe form. (Emphasis added for emphasis.)

The title of the form reads: Non-Customer Opt Out Request

The form itself reads:

AT&T uses e-mail, telemarketing, and direct mail to inform you about products or services we think will interest you. If you do not wish to receive these types of communications, select “Do not contact me” and indicate the form(s) of communication you do not wish to receive.

While we are processing your request, you may continue to receive marketing materials from us.

Fields denoted by an asterisk (*) are required.

* Do not contact me regarding AT&T products and offers via (check all that apply below):
_ E-mail _Telephone _Text message _Mail

If you do not want to receive e-mail communications from us, you must provide us with the e-mail address we should not contact.

If you do not want to receive telephone communications from us, you must provide us with the home telephone number we should not contact.

If you do not want to receive text messages from us, we need to know which number you do not want us to send text messages to.

If you do not want to receive mail from us, we need to know the mailing address to remove from our list.

I didn’t click through to the next page, but I can only imagine it had a form that stated: “If you would not like us to steal your identity and terrorize your credit, you must supply us with the Social Security number you would not like us to abuse.”

It’s been a while since I’ve posted here, but there’s nothing like a conference to get me back on that horse. I’m currently out in San Diego for the 7th Annual Healthcare Unbound conference, featuring such speakers as Forrester’s Liz Boehm and DMAA President & CEO Tracey Moorhead.

Things kick off tomorrow morning at 7am PST. I’ll be taking notes and posting them on the fly (or at least nightly) as I did for SXSH and SXSWi. Stay tuned…

Sounds like the Making Digital Work workshop was a pretty great event.

I’ve said a lot about what a great event Social Health 2010 (aka SXSH) was as a pre-conference to South by Southwest Interactive, but I wanted to wrap things up by sharing impressions and thoughts from the breakout sessions I attended.

Bryan Vartabedian, MD (@Doctor_V)

Bryan spoke about what he sees as an obligation of providers to participate in social media, and posed some suggestions for how doctors can continue to stay relevant in the future. The most interesting to me was the idea of doctors as digital shepherds of health literacy, in response to the overwhelming amount of misinformation and even propaganda around health issues on the web.

As an example, he explored the misinformation surrounding the issue of whether vaccines can cause autism. The study that initially raised this concern has since been retracted, yet 1 in 4 parents still believe there is a causal relationship between vaccines and autism. Bryan proposed that if each of the 60,000 doctors in the American Academy of Pediatrics were to write a single blog post on the subject (especially if they each linked to medically-sound resources), it would go a long way in combating the spread of this misinformation. (You can read more of Bryan’s views in this piece in Oncology Times.)

It raises an even larger question: is health an area where the democratization of information on the web is actually detrimental? It seems to me that the more outrageous or sensational some piece of health content is, the more likely it is to capture links and thus rank higher in Google results on related keywords.

Phil Baumann, Creator of #RNchat (@philbaumann)

Phil is the creator of the #RNchat, a weekly Twitter conversation for and among registered nurses, and he joined the event virtually via WebEx/Skype.

In addition to providing a forum for RNs to share information and resources, #RNchat has a secondary goal of improving web literacy among RNs. Phil sees this as an opportunity to get RNs using Twitter, which may then serve as a “gateway drug” to other forms of social media. Follow @RNchat to stay up on the latest discussions.

Rather than try to summarize Phil’s session, I thought I’d share the deck he presented:

Dana Lewis,  Co-Organizer of SXSH (@danamlewis)

I got lost in two other sessions on my way to Dana’s, but I was glad to catch as much as I did. Talk about passion! Diabetes management is a topic that’s very personally relevant to Dana, and her own experiences engaging with others diagnosed with Type I Diabetes in online communities are quite interesting.

Ash Damle, CEO of MEDgle (@ashdamle)

Ash spoke about the company he founded, MEDgle, and the clinical decision support tool he created primarily to help nurses in emergency rooms perform triage. Unfortunately I can’t link to that tool (it goes into its first hospital testing soon), but I encourage you to explore MEDgle.com and HealthierMee.com (an online health and fitness tracking tool).

Jen McCabe, Founder and CEO of Contagion Health (@jensmccabe)

I caught the tail end of Jen’s breakout session on practical tools for business, where she was leading an enthusiastic discussion around “gaming” your health to produce behavior change in incremental steps. Jen is the creator of Get Up And Move, and ended her session by playing this video that Wired editor Joe Brown had posted just that morning of his 60-second wall sit in response to a G.U.A.M. challenge.

You can follow Jen over on her blog.

Anything I missed? Let me know about additional resources from SXSH in the comments, and I may include them in this post.

My first thought as I walked into the Austin Convention Center as a SXSW rookie: “Wow, that’s a lot of homeless bloggers.”

McLovin! The cast of “Kick-Ass” at Studio SX:

Quotes from Danah Boyd’s keynote:

Web services go astray when they over-optimize communication and remove important social rituals.

Google Buzz fell in the social equivalent of the ‘uncanny valley’.

Early adopters are often surprised by what changes when a technology becomes mainstream.

Unique, if pretty gross, mobile out-of-home:

Great quote from Ze Frank, on whether he ever wondered if the content that he was producing so rapidly during the year-long run of “the show” might suck:

“I wanted to get my ideas out there as rapidly and faithfully as possible, so I could live on the edge of that anxiety that I had nothing left.”

Chevy’s branded power strips for all the homeless bloggers in promotion of the Chevy Volt:

Callpod: the modern proverbial campfire (for geeks at least).

A sad farewell:

Unfortunately, I was only able to stay for the first half of Ruge’s talk, but he is a captivating speaker (and a Keynote pro). I wanted to share a few of my notes and photos from this fascinating session.

The mission statement of Project Diaspora, written as an open letter to Africa, is a powerful, saddening, inspiring piece of prose. It pledges the following:

We here by pledge to mobilize, engage, and motivate the African Diaspora to take an active role in Africa’s economic, social, and cultural revitalization. We believe the economic assistance and relief models provided by the World Bank, IMF and other monetary or relief organizations to Africa has spectacularly failed on it’s promises over the last 30 years.

We propose a new model. There are over 167 million Africans in the Diaspora. As of 2007, financial remittances by these Africans topped $40 billion annually. That’s capital that’s directly involved in the sustainability of lives—through the stimulation of education, finance, health, and social sectors. We believe this model is far more effective in changing the Africa’s economic landscape. The continued direct involvement of Africa’s Diaspora community is our solemn mission.

My notes from Africa 3.0:

450,000,000 Africans (out of 1 billion total) are under the age of 15. They are ”the cheetah generation” — they are going to want the latest and greatest in technology. Accordingly, Ruge predicts that mobile web technology will leapfrog desktop computing in Africa the same way mobile voice communication leapfrogged landlines.

The following photo is a slide showing the massive under-sea telecommunications infrastructure surrounding Africa. (If you want to see a clearer version of this, check out slide 47 of this Slideshare deck, or click through to see the larger image on TwitPic) In a few years, there will also be a network of geosynchronous satellites over Africa providing broadband to the rest of the continent.

Ruge spoke about his mother in Africa. She has no electricity or running water, but her mobile phone is one of the most prized thing she owns. To have it charged, she sends it into town via taxi for an entire day. She’s able to use it to know what the prices of goods are selling for in nearby towns each day. Ruge actually tried to give her a call on Skype during the presentation, but apparently there was a network outage that day.

He was, however, able to pull up a live video chat with part of the team at Limbe Labs, a Camaroonian startup consultancy and incubator, and they described a few of the projects/ventures they’re working on. (Click through to see a larger version on TwitPic)

Unfortunately, that’s about when I had to step out of the session. This post feels entirely incomplete to me, as I was regrettably absent for the conclusion of the presentation, but I wanted to share what I could. If the session was recorded, I’ll put the video up as soon as SXSW releases it. In the meantime, I encourage you to visit www.projectdiaspora.org to learn more about Ruge’s work, and follow him on Twitter at @TMSruge.

After the morning breakout sessions, we had a quick lunch (provided by MD2P.net — thanks John) and an opportunity to socialize. I had a very interesting conversation with Abby Lowe, Lauran Driver, Sally Bage, and Marc Monseau about HIPAA (what else?) and the impact patient privacy has on innovation in health (or lack thereof). After lunch we were treated to three more impressive speakers. As in Part 1, I’ve tried to provide notes and links to resources for those who were unable to attend.

Fabio Gratton, Chief Innovation Officer and Founding Partner at Ignite Health (@skypen)

Once we were all suitably fed and caffeinated, Fabio Gratton took us through the story of his creation of the hashtag #FDASM and the site FDASM.com in response to the FDA exploratory on regulations for social media.  In addition to his role at Ignite, Fabio is a founding member of WOMMA, on the editorial board for Medical Marketing & Media, and is a regular contributor to several top e-health marketing blogs.

Background on the conversation around FDASM, from FDASM.com:

On November 12-13, 2009, the FDA held a public hearing regarding how FDA-regulated products can use the internet and social media for health-related communications. These hearings were the first step toward developing guidelines around this type of marketing for the industry. This site is dedicated to capturing the conversations, stories, and resources related to this topic.

Fabio led off with a quote from Pepsico Americas SVP Frank Cooper (with regard to Pepsi choosing to invest in social media instead of the Super Bowl): “In 2010, each of our beverage brands has a strategy and marketing platform that will be less about a singular event, less about a moment, more about a movement.”

Three ingredients for a successful movement:

1. People +
2. Purpose +
3. Passion

Fabio illustrated how he used collaborative tools to help gather & organize resources such as draft comments to the FDA from pharma companies in a way that was much more user-friendly than the govt’s own site. (You may need to just spend some time at FDASM.com to see it all in action.) He also took us through a few more projects he launched, such as PharmaTweeps, an aggregator of all the leading pharma brands’ Twitter feeds.

Great closing quote: “Fail forward.” Don’t be afraid to screw up — do it in such a way that you’re making progress even as you’re making mistakes.

Marc Monseau, Director of Corporate Communications and Social Media at Johnson & Johnson (@JNJcomm)

Marc has a rare perspective on what it takes to lead a giant corporation with dozens of subsidiary brands into the social space. He handles media relations for Johnson & Johnson — providing issues management and crisis communications support and counsel. He’s also responsible for Johnson & Johnson’s blog, www.jnjbtw.com, works with different teams in the organization on their social media strategy.

J&J’s approach to social media:

1. Start simple
2. Introduce complexity; build confidence
3. Add more complexity; broaden scope (add more tools/platforms)

Marc highlighted the importance of not trying to launch social media efforts in a silo, but rather to tie them to specific programs & strategic objectives: “Make sure that your social media initiatives connect with other initiatives around your business.”

Marc shared some interesting stats on health seekers online. One in particular stood out, from (I believe) the Pew Internet & American Life Project: 60% of online “health seekers” say that the information they found on the web directly affected a health decision they ultimately made.

Q&A featured a good discussion about the distinction between an individual who represents a brand in social media and the brand itself. Marc represents J&J much as Scott Monty represents Ford; but Forrester struggled with this when Charlene Li, Peter Kim, Jeremiah Owyang and others left (separately) and took their massive audiences of followers and blog subscribers with them. (Forrester has since implemented a policy where blogging employees are more or less required to blog only on Forrester’s properties. Peter Kim reflects on this policy here.)

David Hale, Social Media Strategist at the National Library of Medicine and Project Manager of Pillbox (@lostonroute66)

Just about the time most people hit their post-lunch, early afternoon energy slump, David came out and gave a presentation that jolted us all awake. David is the Project Manager of Pillbox, a National Library of Medicine/ FDA patient-safety initiative which is restructuring federal pharmaceutical data and adding  high-resolution images of solid-dosage medications to create a public  domain medication identification and reference system.  Pharmaceutical  Manufacturing Magazine referred to Pillbox as “the Physician’s Desk  Reference on steroids.”  Pillbox is being built through an open development process, with various health-related communities sharing ownership of the project.  And get this: all data from the project is being released through an API to promote disruptive innovation in the Health IT community. Very cool.

What can I say about Pillbox? This is an incredibly exciting project that seeks to take an enormous amount of dense, user-unfriendly data that the government has on FDA-approved drugs, and turn it into an API that has real, practical value for rapid pill identification. There are 1.5 million reported cases of unknown pill overdose resulting in emergency hospitalization every year (hope I didn’t butcher that stat too badly, David), and emergency responders have very few resources on hand to narrow down exactly what that small, blue, partially-digested pill might be after it’s pumped from someone’s stomach.

David’s team has taken the raw FDA data on thousands of drugs and dosages and combined them with original hi-res photos in a slick (and very usable) Adobe Flex-powered interface for rapid identification based on characteristics like color, shape, visible text & numbers, etc. There’s even an HTML-only version of the site for maximum compatibility.

On top of this, the team at Pillbox has created an open API, to provide other developers with access to their cleaned-up data. Already, some savvy hackers out there have created a (more than a little irreverent) Facebook app, and even a realtime text-to-speech IVR system for over-the-phone pill identification (neither are yet available to the public).

Check out Pillbox at http://pillbox.nlm.nih.gov/

That’s it for the afternoon speakers; stay tuned for Part 3 on the breakout sessions.

Yesterday was the first annual #SXSH un-conference (for legal reasons, the S-X does not stand for “south by”). Organized in two months by a small team of passionate individuals who had never met each other before in real life, the event brought together some of the leading minds in the Social Health / Health 2.0 space from around the country. As someone who is still extremely new to the healthcare industry, I can’t even begin to quantify how much I got out of this event.

Thanks again to Shwen Gwee, Dana Lewis, Reed Smith, and Tom Stitt for organizing such a phenomenal event.

I have pages and pages of notes from the event, but unfortunately I don’t have time to turn them into a full narrative, as that “other” conference is starting today. What I’ve tried to do is provide links to the resources that were discussed, for those who were unable to attend the event — mostly in outline form.

Keynote Speaker: Doug Ulman, President and CEO of Livestrong (@LIVESTRONGCEO)

Doug is a 3-time cancer survivor, non-profit and social media icon, and just a really nice, down to earth guy. He kicked off the conference, talking about his battle with three types of cancer, how he got connected with Lance Armstrong (Lance emailed him; Doug had never heard of him), and how he wished social media had been around when he was first diagnosed: “Throughout this whole experience, all I wanted to do was connect with someone who had been down the same path.”

Three reasons social media will change health care:

1. Free and accessible
2. Real time: can get answers to things right away; no more “I wish I would have known X six months ago”
3. Patient-centered, patient driven

Cancer is 400 diseases; there will be no silver bullet. “At the end of the day, it’s people coming together and interacting, that will change this paradigm.”

Doug urged participation in clinical trials: “Only 3% of adults participate in clinical trials. If that number was 6%, we could shave years off of clinical developments.”

A patient’s point of view on HIPAA: ”This may be controversial, but…As a patient- HIPAA doesn’t matter to me at all. I’ve had cancer; I’m already discriminated against in so many ways. I already can’t get life insurance.”

Examples of how social media has impacted their work & business:

1. The @LIVESTRONG Twitter page is the top referrer to the Livestrong website; ditto for grassroots advocacy page, LivestrongAction
2. In one of the worst economic years we’ve seen in our lifetimes, Livestrong raised 17% more in 2009 than in 2008 (2009 was the first full year of having an active social media presence)

Highlight from Q&A

Q: “When you first started with Twitter/Facebook, did you have strategy or did you just jump right in?”

A: Someone on Doug’s team signed him up for Twitter. When Lance asked what it was: “I don’t know what it is, but they put it on my Blackberry…. There was no strategy, at all.” But “there is incredible authenticity. With Lance, there are times when he posts things, when I’m like, ‘Did he really just post that?’ But it’s real.”

Speaker: Jenn Texada, M. D. Anderson Cancer Center (@jenntex)

Jenn runs social media for M. D. Anderson, and social media listening is a 24/7 activity for her. She shared some great success stories, and a was also gracious enough to show some situations where things were trickier.

Getting things up and running was tough; lots of ‘nightmare scenarios’ where explored. (“What happens when…”)  It took going down to the finance, customer service, etc., departments and telling them, “OK, we have these new channels. And this is a good thing.”

The Mayo Clinic’s work in social media paved the way for Jenn to sell in her own program.

Great success story from Facebook: A man posts, “Just diagnosed with cancer, can’t talk to family and friends. Want to curl up in a ball and cry.” MD Anderson immediately shares a resource and a number he can call to talk to someone, and other patients chime in to offer support. (See the actual post: http://www.facebook.com/MDAnderson?v=feed&story_fbid=348390749910&ref=mf )

Jenn’s advice to those trying to get a social media initiative off the ground at their own company: Find the people internally who really understand communications (and hopefully really understand social media).

Speaker: Greg Matthews, Humana (@chimoose)

Greg Matthews is Director of Consumer Innovations at Humana.  After spending a career helping to build and operate businesses, Greg is now focused on using social media to create different kinds of interactions with consumers – with the goal of supporting a social revolution in health.  Most recently he launched the health industry’s first twitter search tool, myTPSreport.com , and designed and launched CrumpleItUp.com , where he blogs regularly.

Greg’s task at Humana, and the question that led them into social media: “How can we, Humana, build a deeper level of commitment with our consumers as an insurance company?”

Key insight (possibly one of the best insights of the whole day): When thinking about all the times when an insurance company actually comes into contact with its members, Humana (via Greg) realized, “we are part of a sickness industry” (as opposed to a health industry)

One of the questions became: “How can we engage with healthy [health-minded] communities?”

• Build our own community? “Trying to move us away from that sort of thinking”
• Asked permission to participate in Twit2Fit
  • Had already been members, personally, for 6 months
  • Embedded a professional marathoner in this amateur fitness community
    • Training logs, tweet chats, etc
  • Engagement in this community went up 300%

“One of the things that people don’t think about, when they think about social, is that gaming is a social activity.”

• Created a social game built on web-enabled pedometers for kids
  • Kids got together at recess to do exercise to get their step count up (!)
  • Kids were exercising with families at home to get their step count up (!!!)
• Called “Horsepower Challenge” – horsepowergame.com

Along the way, Greg demoed a very cool Twitter/geo-mapping dashboard they developed — try it yourself at http://www.mytpsreport.com/

Greg’s #1 target for 2010: communities of care

• Ex: CureTogether.com
  • 6-7K members
  • Over 400 conditions represented
  • All about helping people to find people in a similar situation and figure out how to work through this thing that’s happening to me
• “There is tremendous power in this model… I don’t yet know how a health insurance company can play here, but I want to support it, I want to be a part of it”

Q&A Highlights:

Q: “How did you pull this all off at Humana?”

A: “A little bit of stealth, and a quick win.”

Q: “Does social gaming as vehicle for behavior change translate to adults? Is Nike+ the model?” (Kids examples include Humana’s Horsepower Challenge, and the recently launched glucose meter for Nintendo DS)

A: There are a lot of sensors out there that can provide personal data related to health. Nike & iPod is a great example. What’s missing is the experience that ties the raw data, the social aspects, and the tracking of behavior change together in one place. “I think the market is there.”

More to come: the second set of speakers in the afternoon — Fabio Gratton, Marc Monseau, and David Hale — as well as the breakout sessions I attended.

It should be an exceptional event. There are so many unbelievable speakers and panels lined up; unfortunately, many are in concurrent time slots, and I’m already frustrated that I won’t be able to see them all.

I’m particularly excited about an event I discovered merely a week ago: SXSH (Social Health 2010: Sharing. Exchanging. Social Health.) Taking place the day before SXSWi kicks off, SXSH promises to be an incredible opportunity to connect with and learn from some of the country’s top Health 2.0 leaders. The “un-conference” kicks off with a keynote from Doug Ulman, President and CEO of LIVESTRONG, and it’s all uphill from there.

If you’re going to be at SXSW and we’ve never met, please reach out to me on Twitter at @scheuguy — I’d love to connect.