Today I gave a presentation on social media to the fantastic people at the UK’s preeminent healthcare think tank, the King’s Fund.
I gave a wide ranging presentation that discussed current trends in social media, case studies of our work and my slight obsession with the impact future technologies will have on this space. I’m pleased to report that it seemed to be well received and there were plenty of very insightful questions at the end.
I think updating social media statistics in presentations could easily be my full time job so I was more than happy to see this work done for me and include it in my presentation. It also reminded me of a very interesting article I recently discovered through one of my favourite websites, Art & Letters Daily. Art & Letters Daily is essentially a portal site, where the editors select the most interesting articles, essays and books from across the Internet.
Through the site, I found myself reading an article by Samuel Arbesman on Boston.com, not a regular read of mine! The article was about what Samuel termed ‘Mesofacts’. These he describes as ‘slow-changing facts are that change neither too quickly nor too slowly, that lie in this difficult-to-comprehend middle, or meso-, scale.’ Facts like the Earth’s population and how you stop a nose bleeding, facts we nearly always learn in schools when young and then hold onto even after they change.
Following the links in the article I discovered his website and I have since contributed to his newsletters by highlighting QI, which is a great show based on this exact premise and Pivot Microsoft’s answer to ever changing data. It seems obvious but I was happy to note that his website was predominantly a blog, a constantly updated online resource, pointing out these altering facts and illuminating existing misconceptions. This is, after all something social media is great at. No longer are children stuck in classrooms with outdated text books. No longer are marketers relying on their gut or what they learnt in business school. Social media brings information up-to-date. It is our job to then work out what it means.
