On Bonnaroo, Healthcare, Trust & Facebook Connect

I Trust Bonnaroo & Facebook Connect – maybe more than I should.

Last week, while Danny and I were speaking at CPM’s Client Symposium, the schedule for this year’s Bonnaroo Music & Arts Festival was released. Sure, on it’s face the two things don’t have much connection (except for an over-excited concert-go’er and new media speaker like myself) but a few tricks Bonnaroo employed made me think about how healthcare could apply them. Bonnaroo’s schedule was available for browsing in its plainest form, but there was also the option for using Facebook Connect.

Facebook Connect, for the uninitiated, is a way for sites outside of Facebook to let you use your Facebook account to quickly log in and interface with a website. Think of the blog where you don’t have to fill out a lengthy registration process just to leave a comment, but rather just click a couple of times and link your Facebook account. Even more helpful and potentially cool, Facebook Connect can use some interesting integration with your friends and such.

How did Bonnaroo use Facebook Connect and what does it have to do with healthcare? When you chose to log in with Facebook Connect to plan your schedule, it sped you past any registration screens and Bonnaroo quickly gave you the option of telling all your friends via Facebook or Twitter that you were planning your schedule. Even better, the schedule was part of a dynamic interface showing you a grid or even a map view of where you’ll be when. Your Facebook friend’s profile pictures gathered at the bottom of the screen, indicating that they too were planning their Bonnaroo experience. One click let you browse their schedules and it was cool to see others as excited as I was about our impending vacation. There were only about 7 of my friends in that list, but hey- it was only the first two hours since the scheduled had been released.

A few minutes later I was sitting in a presentation about health screenings and I thought about how potent the peer and family influence is on medical decisions. What if your health screening registration system used Facebook Connect? What if you could encourage your peers to attend screenings with just a click? Or at the very least inform them that you were taking that step. Aside from screenings you could track walk-a-thon’s, promotions, class registrations… maybe in similar ways to what you already do, but all within the peer bubble of Facebook. A place many hospitals find themselves having a difficult time getting into.

What else was pretty cool?

When the hotly anticipated (by fans) schedule came out, Bonnaroo.com promoted it in one clear way: the use of a widget they developed to help you plan your Bonnaroo experience. It was based off the old carnival fortune-teller machines – think the movie “BIG”- and called “Zoltaroo”). This simple widget, combined with a contest for those who publicly share their schedule, had hundreds of people on Twitter and Facebook telling all of their friends they were excited about the upcoming festival.

The map feature is great too – as both an interactive map and as something that interacted with my schedule. Imagine interacting with a health fair map and where your various screenings, freebies and info sessions are… or a recruitment fair?

Point being, Facebook Connect can be used incredibly slyly, and help dovetail neatly into other initiatives. It gives a clue that you’re in the networks they are in and that you’re interested in saving time in helping them connect to you and interact with content (all the while helping you connect with them in a way that doesn’t have the sometimes high-brand barrier of being a “fan” of a hospital or healthcare entity). And be sure to add this to your Generation Authentic quiver, who won't bat an eye at being able to register and connect their social world(s) quickly.

More on Bonnaroo, I’m sure, later this summer. It’s my one time of year where I unplug from my job and yet it’s also a heavy new media experience. And hey, check out my schedule!

-Dean