Hard-hitting question time: if you were an amphibian, what kind of amphibian would you be?

A newt! (I’d get better.)

Tell us about yourself! Are you a NOLA resident originally?

I’m from a town a little south of New Orleans, but I’ve been living in and around the city for the past 6 years or so. If I lived on Sesame Street, I’d relate the most to Burt… Although in real life, I’m probably more of an Ernie.
Apparently, I am pretty terrible at answering the question “tell us about yourself.” I don’t know how I got this job.

You’re one of our newer employees — how long ago did you start? How’s SI been so far?

I started at the beginning of August, so I’ve been at SI for a month and half now. It feels like I’ve been here longer, but in a good way. I really like my job– the work is challenging, and there is always coffee. And now that the hazing has stopped, I’m almost completely healed! Just kidding. The hazing was gentle.

What do you find yourself doing around the office? Any particular favorites or disliked tasks?

I do all the usual stuff that IMAs do, like submissions and lots of copying and pasting. But lately, I’ve been getting a lot of graphic design tasks.
I was a freelance designer off and on for about 7 years, and any freelancer will tell you that it’s soul crushing. Designing at SI is heaven. Everyone’s been really open and supportive, and I’ve done everything from massive infographics, to logo retouching, to making a baby-on-board Photoshop of one of our (male) co-workers. (I still feel like I have to apologize for that every time I see him, too. Luke, I’m sorry!)

How did you get into graphic design? Any favorite tools of the trade? Do you do fine art as well?

I think I’ve been using Photoshop to make graphics for my various websites since version 5.0, maybe? That was in the 90s. I know Photoshop better than I know most people, and we’ve come a long way together.
My favorite nerd tool of all time is my Wacom tablet (an Intuous4). I bought it last year, and it’s completely changed the way I think about design. It’s like drawing with pen on paper… but, like, way more amazing. I could go on and on about layers and tilt sensitivity, but I also still want to sound interesting, so… yeah. Wacom tablet. It’s awesome.
And I draw all kinds of stuff! I have a Tumblr that gets seasonally neglected, but I post illustrations and doodles when I’m in the mood. And I’m almost always scribbling on something.

Thanks to Kate for her tireless work making SI’s projects beautiful inside and out! Keep an eye on this space for many more informative and innovative graphic pieces in the near future.

Scott exemplifying the professional demeanor we strive for at SI.

He finds himself interested in the technical side of marketing and business and appreciates SEO’s demand for these skills on a daily basis. Scott’s also a longtime Influencer, tied with developers Luke Ledet and Doug Thomas for longest-tenured Production member — all three have been with us since the company was based out of Will and Angie’s living room!

What do you find yourself doing on a day-to-day basis? Any particular skills you’ve had to develop since joining SI?

One of my biggest responsibilities is making sure that approximately 600,000 words per month are in proper order, not misspelled and make sense, and that approximately 21,600 links per month are intact and functioning properly. I spend a lot of my time looking for issues, fixing some and having good training in place to minimize errors. We do a great job at getting a massive amount of work done and it’s mostly because the work we do as individuals comes together like a nice smooth roux at the end of every month.

At Search Influence I’ve learned a ton about management but also the technical skills required to work in this industry. I have also learned that you actually can go to Snake and Jake’s Christmas Club Lounge for several hours after work, with coworkers, and still have a job the next day.

You were recently promoted from an Internet Marketing Associate to Assistant Manager of the Bad Boyz of Production. Congrats! How’d the changeover go?

It wasn’t much of a change because it has been a constantly evolving progression for the last year. I’ve done almost everything in Production, from editing websites to being the subject of a horribly corny snakes in a can prank (Psych! I played along to be a good sport). I was here near the inception of the Production department and wanted to get my hands as dirty as possible from the beginning.

Is there anything you’d like to be doing more or less of around the office? In a perfect world, what would you be doing all day?

It would be pretty awesome if Will retired and made me CEO, but I don’t see that happening any time soon! It would be pretty cool to do some statistical research about correlations between all of the known SEO variables and rankings on search engines. I’ve also always fantasized about trading lives with Just Blaze or Diplo.

Does keeping track of the hundreds upon hundreds of content we process every month get overwhelming? How do you deal with it?

It’s usually not overwhelming because the training process is so thorough that we usually don’t make very many mistakes. On top of that, when I export task data from our project management system, I plug it in to one of the sickest spreadsheets known to man [=SUMPRODUCT(--(input!C2:C2000=""&A14&""),--(input!D2:D2000="Deferred"))], and it warns me about many of the problems we might be having.

Scott Shockley's own smoked pork shoulder.

What do you find yourself doing outside of SI? Any cool projects?

I’m trying to redesign my currently ugly, but juiced up website to promote 24 hour restaurants in New Orleans, mainly because I love SEO but I also love to eat. I’m also into cooking, especially smoking food, and will be roasting my first whole pig this Labor Day! On top of that, I manage to find time to tell all the jokes that are too inappropriate to tell at work.

The editor would like it to go on the record that she appreciates both inappropriate jokes and copious amounts of pulled pork. Thanks for all the work you put in wrangling writers, content and SI employees, Scott! We’ll be back in two weeks with another exciting Influencer profile.

Alligator dogs from Dat Dog's Yelp page.

As a stereotypical New Orleanian, I’m obsessed with great food. I have always noticed and been upset when a business doesn’t rank #1 for its own name, or even in the top 3. Recently I saw the phenomenon three times on the same weekend, so I had to blog about it.

I was hungry for something inexpensive, but really good and meaty, which means I had approximately 1,298,450 locations to choose from in this city. Many of these will never have websites. Somehow it came down to Courtyard Grill, Cowbell and Dat Dog (I have been to only one of these restaurants but can tell from the reviews that I’m going to love the other two). Since I only trust hours of operation posted on official websites, I searched for the restaurant names with city names behind them. These were the results (from 3/28/11):

Aesthetically, most would agree that these sites are beautiful, but since Google is a robot, it does not share this opinion. Of course I don’t expect a year-old restaurant to rank #1 for the term Courtyard Grill, but including the city name should be enough to make that happen. Same goes for the other two. Why are these restaurants not ranking first for their name?

Who dat? Ain't Dat Dog.

Yes, they all are getting outranked by Yelp and Urban Spoon pages with a bunch of reviews, but the big problem here is a lack of on-site optimization. Breaking the most fundamental rule of on-site SEO, Dat Dog and Courtyard Grill both fail to include any content on the home page. Furthermore, they all lack meta-descriptions and only one has a decent title tag. Cowbell performs the best in the results because “cowbell” and “new orleans” are mentioned next to each other twice in the text of the home page; not to mention the address is in text at the top of the page.

Unless you have a unique name, or a URL that perfectly matches your business name — (Bouligny Tavern has both, as you can see here) — you will need on-site optimization to save you from these problems. On-site optimization is so important that even Google, which is secretive about their search formula, has written a guide to this which can be found here. I highly recommend it to web designers and webmasters because it expresses the minimum that you should do to be favored in search results.

Who cares if my site isn’t first? I have 4 stars on Yelp!

You should be concerned about making sure that when people are looking for YOU that they can find YOU, and not another site that is talking about you. Otherwise, why would you have a website in the first place? You want to be in control of your own destiny, and it helps to lead the conversation. Let’s say you have 4/5 stars overall on Yelp, but the most recent rating was a 1; do you want a potential customer to have this information branded in their head so early in the relationship? Even if a customer has a good experience, reading bad reviews can lead to Yelp-fulfilling prophecies. Yelp is a great site, and if you want people to see your Yelp page, link to it with a banner, just like Lock Busters did.

I know I’m not first for my name and city, but x means the same thing as my city.

Even though I am talking specifically about NOLA, it’s a lesson we can all learn: think about the words people are saying when they search for your business, and optimize based on those words. Locals often call New Orleans Louisiana “NOLA” (and it happens to be a component of the URLs for the 3 sites we are comparing), but chances are that when someone is looking for you they are not using this word. The screenshot below is from Google Insights. Not only are people searching for New Orleans a lot more than NOLA, but as you can see at the bottom of the image, people are searching for “nola jobs” and “nola news,” which undoubtedly refers to our friends at www.nola.com, and the term “nola restaurant” probably refers to the Emeril’s establishment called NOLA Restaurant.

Nola What? Nola Who?

On-page optimization does not guarantee you will rank for your name, but you don’t have much of a shot at ranking for anything without content and metadata on your home page. There are other ways, like being linked to via anchor text from an awesome blog, which we are glad to do for 3 great local businesses, but small business owners should go for the low-hanging fruit first.

The world according to Facebook.

Following advertisements for a contest where Facebook fans can enter to win a 60” 3D television, anchors’ guffaws at “The Facebook” and “The Twitter,” and the third run of a talk about how Facebook and social media peacefully brought down a dictator in 18 days, FOX8, our beloved Fox affiliate network channel, ran a special report on Facebook privacy which showed how confused people are about Facebook.

Stirring up fears about Facebook’s lackadaisical attitude towards users’ privacy is almost as old as the site itself, but really took off after the introduction of the news feed, prompting this post from Michael Cera himself. But FOX8 reports that there yet is one more person who knows “everything” about you, even after 170 types of privacy options: the social media marketer.

We’ve determined a rough estimate of the gay population of the military using the tools they’re talking about. Dr. Kimberly Mason, cyber-bullying expert at UNO, claims:

“The majority of the individuals who use Facebook of course are on there to make their social connections and keeping in touch with friends and family. So looking at advertising and looking how they monitor that really is not in their realm of awareness.”

Strengthening this argument is the general concern about privacy that Facebook users have cultivated. Avoiding questions of survey design, there is no attempt by Gallup/USAToday to reconcile this data with the knowledge users displayed about the privacy settings even at an early stage of development for the site, nor with the skyrocketing membership and constant activity seen as the site has become the second-most-trafficked site on the web. Obviously we’re not dealing with an all-or-nothing situation, and maybe even analysis of risk perception could be appropriate, though of course not under the language of physical harm.

The FTC supports a browser-based “Do Not Track” system, while Rep. Jackie Speier (D-CA) offers a much more nebulous, but more proactive and far-reaching system. These proposals and recommendations are to protect the users of the site from their private lives being compromised.

But the privacy argument driving interest, polls, and media stories is too muddled to be coherent — there’s privacy, and then there’s privacy, and then there’s privacy. These three realms where users can unknowingly give out information — your network, the public, and advertisers — have different priorities and different interdependencies when it comes to blocking access.

The first kind of privacy — hiding your information from your own network — seems simply counterintuitive to me. Like having a private Livejournal, not using the social aspect of a social network seems a bit counterintuitive. There’s got to be some kind of control here — Reuben Foster of UNO says, “If I don’t want it to be public, then I won’t … click these things,” and that’s right on the money.

Found directly beneath the status box.

In addition, the News Feed is smart. That first variable, the affinity score, is user-controlled. If you don’t talk to someone, they won’t show up as often. To boot, the other variables, weight and time, simply fulfill the definition of a social network. Combined with easy to navigate deletion and blocking capabilities, it’s a hard sell to me that there isn’t enough privacy options for the user.

But that’s a straw man; privacy can be breached in other ways. While privacy settings can stop a lot, so many checkboxes to look at and discover over time might be overwhelming. Worse still, Facebook has a bad habit of resetting its users’ privacy settings when it updates its features. We’ve talked before about other people looking at your posts and online image branding. There are a number of news stories where someone posts something that unintentionally irritates the wrong people, all of which bring up the divide between what is or isn’t public speech.

While I’m not about to open that can of worms, two alternate court cases show the two likely outcomes of privacy issues: either an out of court settlement or a court siding with the company, who can probably show a solid link between loudly kvetching about work and “job performance.” The question on the level of privacy and anonymity of your Facebook profile has not been answered; best to tread with care, but not necessarily lightly.

Even with careful Facebook pruning, you still have your information going to advertisers, and it is this what puts Facebook in a unique position for privacy. Google doesn’t have the instant interest data to tailor their content offerings like Facebook does. Even Microsoft, whose use of Internet Explorer to strengthen Bing’s ranking pages is more insidious and less publicized, gets their data from Facebook

Obviously not the best tool for small fanbases...

WVUE reflects the average Facebook user’s view when it refers to all ads as “Sponsored Stories.” Ads are ads — it’s neither Facebook’s intent nor in their interest to try to fool you into thinking they’re not, and you’d have to ignore clear headings to think they’re from your friends. There is a difference, though: Sponsored Stories refers to ads that look more like regular news feed posts; however, they again have the telltale heading. They also can only be shown to people “whose friends are already connected to” the Facebook page or post that they’re connected to. Similarly, fan page ads can only be shown to people not already connected to the fan page.

See, nothing terribly creepy here...

Facebook’s ad targeting is much less sinister than it seems. You can filter by age, sex, and broad category of interest. While the Family Status category under interests is on one hand a bit questionable, it can heavily influence relevance of ads; you wouldn’t want to be showing ads for singles sites if a member is married with kids.

You can then target by Connection to a Page, Event or App. The next section, the Advanced Demographics, provides advertisers with better opportunities to provide relevant content and avoid marketing gaffes. Finally, you can target by education level or workplace.

And that’s it, right? You get your broad information, and nothing’s even tracked deeply enough to cause any concern. That doesn’t seem so bad.

... But we could make this comparison much creepier. I just like music.

But when something* happens with your account, the advertiser gets access to Likes & Interests. This narrows the interests so that it is more like traditional keyword bidding. This isn’t unusual, and follows the traditions from Google pay-per-click advertising. The advertising platform provides vague statistics to give advertisers an idea of how many people are interested in ideas that are related to your link.

But not only does the advertiser get this information. Another privacy craze was raised over Facebook’s Open Graph Platform, which began the rash of “Like” buttons on the site. Extending the simplicity of the “Like” from every kind of “Edge” — the term Facebook uses for any post, link, comment, or ad — to web pages seems logical and extends not only the brand, but the whole social media mentality.

Open Graph allows a content provider to, like Google Analytics, track his links’ likes and clicks on Facebook, even without having a Facebook presence. While this might seem like nothing new to your loss of privacy, an important distinction has to be drawn between this and Google’s tracking programs. Facebook offers this information with your personal information like your friends list in the unseen data. Obviously, this is used not for advertisers, but for the inner machinery. However, the concern remains that someone with a bit of knowhow can get that information.

But that information isn’t useful for advertisers right now. A list of friends might be interesting on a massive level, but then again, the individual is lost looking at larger trends. The other factors, publicly displayed on your profile

Through these three realms of privacy, it seems that there’s good reason to be afraid of Facebook and its privacy issues. But here’s the catch — who’s really looking at this? Advertisers and content providers, even among the slimiest of content farms, simply want to provide a better user experience. They, including us, are looking for the most people clicking on ads and, more importantly, interact with the content behind the ads.

There’s a tendency for people versed in Facebook to blame the user — we all see the inner workings, we know how easy the whole system is if you turn off your brain. We know that all you have to do is click the “Like” button and you’re giving us good information that we can use to give you more of what you already, at least in a marketing sense, “Like.” Those that are trying to target you are trying to give you more of what you’ve already said you want, even if it’s an admittedly selfish gift, since advertisers obviously get benefits from you clicking the link.

But the Skinner box that is Facebook, and particularly the games and apps that tweak and complicate privacy settings beyond the basic problems described, is ultimately something from which its users benefit. The on-first-glance underhanded data-gathering techniques are ultimately the way that Facebook serves its users, by providing content relevant to them, as determined by them.

Don’t forget to “Like” this page. We promise to do every creepy thing we can with your information and show you what you’re sending to advertisers and content providers in an upcoming blog post.

Who dat?

Who dat say dey gonna beat dem saints?

#whodat - from Maitri

The above is my best approximation of the phonetic for the entire “Who Dat” chant. Who Dat, used to be a very personal, private New Orleans thing. I was in New York a few weeks ago visiting my mother and she asked “What’s this ‘Who Dat?’ thing all about”?.

And yes, I use my mother as my barometer for ubiquity. For instance, when my mother’s on Facebook everyone is on Facebook.

The New Orleans Saints have been a source of pride and frustration for the city of New Orleans since their founding 40-some years ago. I did not grow up in New Orleans but have lived here better than half my life and New Orleans is my home and the Saints are my team.

“Who Dat?” was a direct opposition to the “Ain’ts” contingent who would go to the games with bags on their heads for shame.

The Saints are making our city proud, and the nation is screaming Who Dat?

Sorry Indianapolis, this wasn’t your year.

But what is this symbolic of really? It’s symbolic of a New New Orleans – the kind of New Orleans which is nurturing of Entrepreneurship. The kind of New Orleans where we have a Mayor’s race with nearly a dozen candidates with many great options.

And then, this. The best belated Christmas present imaginable. Better than 100 golden King Cake babies. The New Orleans Saints have brought it home for the WhoDat Nation and won the Super Bowl.

This surely bodes well.

Isn't that just awesome?

Now That's a New Orleans Saints Fan

Shame on you NFL.

Shame on you NFL

We’re talking business and Marc says to me “why do you stay in New Orleans”?

Look, if you live here, you know why I stay in New Orleans. But for the rest of you, here’s a few:

• I can often wear shorts in January
• When you go out to see music, people are dancing
• When you go to morning meeting at your kids’ school people are dancing
• It’s funky, eclectic, exotic and refined
• It’s a small town with an international vibe
• There is a warmth that’s real, I mean real
• There is a thriving business community who gets what’s important
• It’s easy

Why not stay? I’ll leave that for someone else, I don’t know where else to go, you know? I love New York, I love San Diego, I love Paris, but none of them is this easy.

And, regardless of what the papers say, it’s a great place to start a business.

Ok, enough rah, rah, how bout some facts!

• in 2008, Louisiana was 5th in the nation in Entrepreneurial activity
• The Louisiana Angel Investor Tax Credit
• The Digital Media / Motion Picture and Sound Recording Tax Credits
  Measures are underway to extend this to all technology firms
• Unlike the rest of the country our unemployment rate is going down

And finally, we have GNO Inc. who is putting together the GNO Digital Media Alliance to advance the cause of Digital Media and Media as the next growth industry in Louisiana.

Michael Hecht of GNO Inc was kind enough to come speak with us and told us that GNO Inc has put together a data sheet with some key facts about New Orleans. At our Net2NO meeting on Tuesday night I suggested everyone with a blog should take it upon themselves to spread the good news.

On their web site it’s an image. I had it transcribed below:

GREATER NEW ORLEANS: A GREATER REALITY

The Greater New Orleans Reality Check

• The Greater New Orleans region has international trade assets, such as six-class A railroads, excellent highway access and a location at the mouth of the Mississippi, that are unmatched anywhere in the country.
• Our port system, taken from Plaquemines to Baton Rouge, is one of the largest in the world.
• We have 88% of the nation’s oil rigs off our coast, and are in the top three in the country in oil and gas production. We are America’s Energy Coast.
• Every single manned flight that has gone into space since Apollo has done so with a massive fuel tank built in one of the largest and most advanced manufacturing facilities in the world, right here at Michoud.
• We are now the center of the third largest film producing region in the country, behind only Hollywood and New York.
• The GNO region has a collection of colleges and universities that is as good, in quantity and quality, as that of any city of comparable size in our country. And these schools have come back strong: admissions at Tulane is up 180% from pre-storm levels.
• 94% of our region is above sea level.
• And, the technology exists to restore our wetlands and protect the remainder.
• 9l% of the regional population is back.
• And the population that is back is filled with highly educated and motivated “brain-gainers.”
• Our region is experiencing a level of civic and business engagement that hasn’t been seen in decades.
• Our region is embarking on one of the most ambitious educational reform programs in the history of our nation.
• Here you can find a sense of place, a value for dollar and an overall quality of life that city planners have discussed since Jane Jacobs, but few actual regions can offer. In an ever more homogeneous world, the GNO region increasingly shines as a unique beacon of culture.
• While the rest of the country is reeling from a massive financial crisis, we are relatively better-off thanks to billions of recovery dollars, a surplus from formerly high oil and gas prices, and record-breaking exports.

This is our reality. This is Greater New Orleans.

• Voodoo Ventures

New Orleans Contemporary Arts Center Web Site

New Orleans Contemporary Arts Center graciously hosted the Social Innovation Conference called ‘The Feast’ put on by All Day Buffet. Social change entrepreneurs joined together to talk about the social change movement that is about to explode. As the entire nation in quietly experiencing the beginning stages of a business paradigm shift, New Orleans is growing into the next hot spot for the movement. Some refer to it as the next Silicon Valley because of the incredible opportunities that New Orleans has to offer start up companies, for profit and nonprofit alike.

Echoing Green Web Site

The conference started with a presentation from Heather McGrew of Echoing Green, a 501c3 organization that invests in “new leaders who have untested, smart ideas that deserve to be implemented”. They’re looking for great new social change agents or social entrepreneurs worldwide with new ideas. The focus of Heather’s talk was about ‘identity’ and what that means for an organization, company, and the third sector as a whole.

The cycle of identity goes like this: A start up organization realizes it needs credibility to get funding and investors, it begins to create a brand that people recognize, as the organizations grows the brand becomes more and more widely recognized (credibility) due to press releases, logos, website design, ads, completed projects, etc. The building of the brand can begin to dominate goals rather than the mission of the organization. So, the question becomes, how do we get back to the movement? How do we get back to the social change mission we started out seeking to accomplish?

The organization’s leadership must have the same vision, which must be congruent with the mission. Everyone needs to be on par with and seeking to accomplish the mission. In addition to the mission there are long-term goals that social change entrepreneurs are trying to reach. This one project will change a segment of the system in place but the entire system is the long-term goal. Many social entrepreneurs have this global ambition however; as an organization takes on an identity it becomes territorial of its resources and mission. For example, GTECH, Green Coast Enterprises, and SPOUT may all find themselves competing for some of the same grants, investors, land, etc. Competing over resources to accomplish similar missions is not what the organizations are about. Competition in the third sector, unlike the private sector is less likely to produce successful results. Ideally social change organizations would use the limited resources available to them in the most efficient manner. This means collaboration on a large scale, larger than we have seen yet in this sector; collaboration that is about identifying with the movement not the organization’s brand.

Rachel Botsman and Tamara Giltsoff from Social Innovation Sustainability Space presented a similar message regarding a business paradigm shift and the theme of ‘connectedness’. I thought the most illustrative example of the change that we hope to see more of in the business world is the collaboration between Coca Cola and the World Wildlife Fund (WWF). Coca Cola has the most water efficient manufacturing plants however the WWF was saying, it really doesn’t matter how efficient your water usage is if there isn’t any water left to use. Coca Cola and the WWF spent years spending money lobbying for their positions. Then Coca Cola understood and formed a partnership working to conserve the water we have now. This is an example of private and public sector organizations identifying themselves with the social change mission not their brands. The overall message being that everything is interconnected and people and organizations need to shift a large part of their identity and the reason they do business toward social change.

NOLA 180 Web Site

Speaking of interconnectedness, NOLA faces a hard battle improving its broken education system. John Alford spoke about NOLA 180‘s plans for implementing a school turn-around plan through out individual schools in New Orleans. Currently, the model is being tested on Langston Hughes Academy where students are held high standards and personal accountability. The students serve a 9-hr school day, have homework, and are taught strong moral principals in addition to academic lessons. Langston Hughes will likely serve as an incubation school for new teachers and administrators to be trained for the eventual take over of another school that seeks to be turned around. John’s models are impressive and daunting, there is a lot going on in them, which means an equal amount of work to do. But, they’re visible, the plan is accessible and all we need to do is execute. As he said, the New Orleans we are building now with young, successful talent cannot be sustained if the future generation of New Orleans is not being educated. The students are connected to New Orleans success.

Voodoo Ventures Web Site

Chris Schultz’, Voodoo Ventures, a local business and social entrepreneur gave an incredibly motivating and inspirational speech about start up organizations. He taught all of us how to execute ‘bootstrapping’ perfectly. That is pulling yourself up by your bootstraps and putting your ideas out there and in motion. Fear of failure should never enter your mind; everyone fails at least once and if you fail you pull yourself up by your bootstraps and move on to the next idea. Also, entrepreneurs often have the ‘impostor syndrome’ that is the fear of being considered an impostor. This, he says, needs to be shoved off as quickly as possible. Of course someone has thought of your idea before, but have they executed it?

Receivables Exchange Web Site

Nicolas Perkin honed in on this point in his presentation about his company The Receivables Exchange . He told the story of how his current investor had almost invested in someone with the same idea a couple years before but, the Receivables Exchange plan had the kinks worked out and the other didn’t. The investor invested in their company and the company has been and still is incredibly successful. Lesson: It’s all about execution. The idea isn’t what makes the company its how it’s executed. What we all need to remember is, as Chris said, ‘the one renewable resource we can all count on is our ideas’. We’ll always have new ideas and some of them are less than stellar but others are treasures. Now we need to ‘just do it’.

Hello Health Web Site

Jay Parkinson founder of Hello Health was the case in point changemaker. Dr. Parkinson is a doctor that has become fed up with the current way America practices medicine. He brought it to our attention that we’re really stuck in the 1970′ in the way America delivers healthcare. You make an appointment, go to the office, fill out a bunch of paperwork, see the doctor for eight minutes, he writes down what happens, tells you a number of things, you leave, forget 85% of what he told you, and then you have no further communication. Then the paper chart is filed away so you have no reference to that either. Insurance companies and other payment options add to the frustration of doctors and patients. In the most simplified way possible to explain the problem, there is no incentive for a doctor to care for their patients as well as possible. And, quite with the current system there is no way for a doctor to do so.

Dr. Parkinson took the social networking tools we use in this century and created a website that allowed patients in his area to look at his goggle calendar, make an appointment and he would make a house call. Billing would be done through PayPal and there was no need for staff, office, and the practice of paper documentation is now documented on your personal medical profile, available online. Now, the doctor is being paid upfront, quality care is provided to the patient, there is no hassle with waiting rooms, and you can communicate with you doctor and access your medical records with ease, at any time. It is revolutionary and is exactly the type of paradigm change that causes systemic change.

Slow Money Book Cover - Copyright Woody Tasch

Woody Tasch, author of Slow Money, introduced social changemakers that have accomplished systemic changes in their communities though years of persistence. An interesting example was organic farming and various other resource-accountable organizations that are working to sustain resources. The point that I took away from his presentation is that everyone needs to be aware of what impact everything we do has on our resources. Putting this knowledge in numbers that we can actually imagine and visualize is key. Let’s not talk in billions anymore, let’s break it down and talk in the amount we can all comprehend.

The type of ideas that Dr Parkinson and other social change agents have are what organizations like Ashoka, All Day Buffet, and Echoing Green invest in. Ashoka, based out of Washington DC, encourages and invests in social entrepreneurs. They offer them invaluable resources and a network that will allow them to stay sustainable.

New Orleans is a fertile ground for startups, nonprofit and profit alike, the plea I heard today is: as NOLA starts to take off, let’s keep our mission’s identity in mind. Let’s create a mission that changes the world because our entire city is working together to create social change. Let’s set the example of how social change innovation should be done for the rest of the world. Let’s create the social change industry that revolutionizes the way businesses, government, and public organizations operate.