brown2020

If you are one of the 8% of online Americans who used Twitter in 2010, you probably understand hashtags as a convenient way of tagging and organizing ideas simply by sticking a number sign in front of any word. In Twitter, hash tags automatically become links to the entire stream of Tweets that share the same #hashtag.

But for the 92% of online Americans who did not use Twitter last year, including some of my friends and family who asked me “What is a hash tag?” over the holidays, the answer might not be as obvious.

Hashtags emerged because Twitter only allowed posts comprised of 140 characters of free text without any obvious way to organize and categorize the content. The beautiful simplicity of Twitter fueled rapid and viral growth, and the Twitter community looked for ways to organize the flood of information within the 140 character constraint.

Hashtags became a fundamental organizing principle because you only needed to sacrifice one character of your 140 free text field, and putting a # in front of any word gained an easy way to associate information into relevant topical streams.

Hashtag example from Catch Notes for iPhone

Catch Notes uses hashtags for the same reason: The notes field starts as a simple free text entry field, without the need to add special titles and categories. The first line of each note automatically is considered the title. Any word with a hash sign in front of it automatically becomes a category and tag for organizing and associating your notes.

I use hashtags in Catch to create interlinked streams of related information about topics ranging from restaurants to recipes, from ideas to expense reports, and just about anything else that I might want to remember and come back to later.

Whenever I find a restaurant I want to go back to, I take a quick geo-tagged photo note using Catch Notes on my iPhone, and I drop a # in front of the word restaurant. Now the note is in my #restaurant stream. Once you have created a few hashtags, the most frequently used hashtags automatically pop up in the hashtag picker when you click the # symbol on the screen.

I also might sprinkle in hashtags like #local or #roadtrip to indicate other associations with a particular restaurant note. Maybe the chef came to the table and told us how he made a dish, and I add a note with the #recipe, automatically linked to all of the other recipes that I have collected or clipped from the web. Or maybe the #restaurant note also contains a business #expense that should land in my expense report, or we talked about an #opportunity and I want to set a reminder to follow up.

Hashtag example from synced notes at Catch.com

Hashtags in Catch appear as links in the sidebar, like categories. They also appear as links within the note itself, as hashtags. We designed Catch for people who don’t necessarily have an elaborately planned filing system, and and who want to keep their organizing principles fluid. The world around us keeps changing with new information, new topics, new ideas, and it is hard to define a fixed filing system.

The idea behind hashtags in Catch is to allow users to think freely and capture their ideas in the moment without fretting about how to organize them or which folders they should go in. Organization emerges with increased use of Catch, and it is easy to change simply by adding a # in the right places.

As we enter the new year, here is a goal setting worksheet that a friend shared with me last year. I found it very helpful for 2010, so I thought I would share it here. This year, I think it will be even more effective because I am recording and monitoring my goals using Catch.

After setting up a free online notebook at Catch.com, create an entry where you write down the following things.

1) Guiding Intention: Choose one word to describe an overarching intention for 2011.

2) Special Focus: What would you like to report in January 2012 about your progress and results with this focus and what you expect to achieve in the year?

3) Goals: Create at least one goal in each category. Where possible, make sure these are “SMART” goals – Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, Time-based.

• Career/Financial – Can be both business and personal
• Relationships – Usually has to do with family/friends
• Well Being – Usually has to do with physical condition
• Spiritual – Anything that deals with spiritual/intellectual growth
• Personal – What are you going to do for yourself?
• Wild Card – What doesn’t fit anywhere else?

4) Business Financial Reporting: Create a one-page spreadsheet with rows for key financial indicators and columns for each month and totals for the whole year. Each month, track your budget, forecast, and actuals on this spreadsheet and keep it handy. If you do this using Google Docs, you can create a secret link to the document and include it in your Catch Notes entry.

• Revenue
• Gross Margin
• Profit Before Tax
• Cash Flow
• Cash
• Net Worth/Equity

5) Key Performance Indicators: Write down what you will be tracking as your Key Performance Indicators this year. What are the metrics on your financial/company-performance dashboard that are leading indicators and help you predict your performance? These leading ndicators can be integrated with your one-page monthly financial tracking sheet.

Be sure to write down your goals and keep them someplace that you can easily reference. Catch is useful for this purpose because you will have the key information handy on your iPhone or Android phone and synchronized with your account online.

For the spreadsheet with your financial metrics and key performance indicators, take a screenshot and attach it to your Catch note as an image. That way, you always have a fixed picture of what you were thinking at the beginning of the year.

Another advantage of using Catch for your goals is that whenever you put a hash or number sign in front of a word in your notebook, that word automatically becomes a “hashtag”, which is both a tag or category for organizing your content and a link to all other notes with that hashtag.

I am using the hashtag #Goals so that whenever I make progress with my goals or want to record any related thoughts and ideas, I mark them with the same #Goals tag. Both my original goals for the year and the stream of events, ideas, and progress notes throughout the year always will be with me.

This presentation accompanied a talk I gave recently to a group of health care executives at an ABL Roundtable event in San Francisco. I was asked to discuss the meaning, importance and potential application of social media in health care.

Social media is often defined as “people having a conversation online.” In contrast to mass media produced by a few, social media is generated by grass roots efforts of millions of people. It has become the largest and most interesting use of the web.

Despite the fact that health care is one of the most information intensive fields, the health care industry notoriously lags behind every other industry in its adaptation of information technology. To get our initial bearings, we decided to kick off the discussion by asking the audience to describe their own personal use of social media.

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In 1853 when Giuseppe Donati invented the classical wind instrument he called the “ocarina” in his workshop in the village of Budrio, Italy, people tended to know the daily activities of their neighbors. When someone in your neighborhood played the ocarina in his or her home late at night, not only could you hear it, but you also might have recognized the player and the tune. Maybe you would join in on your own instrument.

You would probably have much less of an awareness of the world beyond the vicinity of Budrio, not much past the big city of Bologna. But you knew your neighbors: Their stories, their experiences, their music, their relationships, and their gossip all had a place in your brain.

In the next century people would gain an ever-expanding awareness of the world beyond their local community through the virtual experiences of mass media. Starting with motion pictures, then television, 24-hour news channels, and the Internet, the world would become a lot smaller. We now live in a state of continuous awareness of the entire world. At the same time, we have become less aware of and connected to the people in our own local communities.

There has been much written lately about brain training and brain plasticity, and how we are entering the brain fitness age. If our experiences with the world can change the wiring of our brains, then how is our immersion into the constant stimulation of digital media affecting us? Is our continuous experience with the larger world through digital media impairing our ability to socially connect with our neighbors?

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