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This is my second blog from the Information Standard event, held in partnership with Patient Information Forum, and the third of four from the session that I presented with Scott McLean, MD at Speed Communications.
Last Wednesday saw the second event organised by The Information Standard, in partnership with Patient Information Forum at the Wellcome conference centre on the Euston Road.
I had the chance to do a double-hander with super social-media whizz, Scott McLean, managing director of our sister PR and social media agency, Speed Communications. The subject: How to build and project your brand using social media. This is the first of our four blogs, two by me and two by Scott.
The opening lines of Susan Sontag’s oft-quoted pre-AIDS essay for The New York Review of Books in 1978, Illness as metaphor, are perhaps necessarily harsh, although ultimately fair metaphor themselves.
I have been interested, as many have, since the publishing of the eponymous publication Nudge, in behavioural economics. Yet I have also realised that I had been interested much longer than I knew what it was called. So, thank you, professors Thaler and Sunstein for enlightening me.
Behavioural economics is about getting people to change what they do. We mostly hear about the well-trumpeted social examples of new ways to get us to pay our taxes on time, ways to cut down the alcohol we consume and to recycle more.
The Information Standard held its first member event last week. It was really well attended and it’s fantastic to see so many people animated and interested in the creation and promotion of information for, about and from patients.
BBC Radio 4 aficionados (I’m not middle-aged, middle-class and middle-of-the-road at all, really) will know of continuity announcer, Charlotte Green, she of the dusky voice and velvet tones. But how tall is she?
This was the question posed by Professor Neil Stewart from Warwick University of Claudia Hammond during her with him interview during All in the Mind, a splendid series on, well, BBC Radio 4. Claudia had never met Charlotte, but before giving her guess Neil asked her if she believed that Charlotte was more or less than six inches tall. The point he made was that the final guess would be less than if he first asked her if she thought Charlotte was shorter or taller than nine feet. How we pose questions can suggest how we think and behave, he proffers.
Years ago I worked for a bank. It was just an ordinary high street bank, albeit a little unrecognisable today. Our computers were the size of washing machines and we only acted on instructions by fax if we also received the original document the same day. We had messengers and very shiny French-polished counters.