Tag: Wellness

Tech Needs a Posture Check

Posted on by Deanna Utroske

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If you’re reading this on a mobile device or while sitting at your desk, I’ve got bad news: “The moment the spine collapses the brain collapses” (B. K. S. Iyengar).

We sit 9 1/2 hours each day. And though our minds accomplish feats of strength in front of the computer, our bodies and our brains suffer when we slouch at our desks and sag our heads forward over our phones.

Your Spine Online: The upstanding team of Breathe Repeat bloggers — Joyce Englander, Tracey Toomey and Jamie Lugo — led a masterclass on the hazards of tech neck and text head and how to remedy these nasty evolutionary adaptations of the digital age. “When you go online, your spine goes offline,” Toomey warned during Social Media Week 2014.

A better view: Your spinal alignment correlates directly to how others see you and how see yourself. Better posture makes you more confident, more memorable, and more likely to be viewed as a trustworthy leader.

Clever you: Good posture gives your lungs space to breathe fully and your brain nourishment to think clearly. Find your best alignment, and the creative solutions will flow.

In a slump?: Notice how you’re sitting. Yes, you. Now.

Being mindful of your alignment is the most important technique to improving it. Breathe Repeat recommends simply noticing your posture periodically, as well, as occasional field trips to the wall: with your heels, backside, shoulders, and back-of-the-head lined up, you’re standing tall!

Time is of the essence: You stay focused on your work; there’s an app for posture. Several, in fact. Posture Track monitors you through your computer’s camera and alerts you when things begin to collapse. StandApp reminds you to get up from your chair. And, Kripalu Yoga Break is a collection of 22, 5-minute yoga activities to keep you fit and refreshed throughout the day. And Perfect Posture is made for our Windows fans to mimic posture building exercises. Maybe tech is good for your posture after all.

Can I get that delivered?: Yoga’s more nourishing than the same old lunch from your local takeout joint, and it’s restorative too. You can get all the benefits of yoga from the comfort of your desk and share the goodness with your colleagues. The pros from Breathe Repeat will gladly drop by your office, and then you’ll be sitting upright, exuding creativity and productivity in no time.

Send them a quick note, and they’ll deliver yoga to you. It’s like Seamless for your spine!

Deanna Utroske is the Social Media Brand Director for New York Women in Communications, where membership includes a YogaWorks discount.  Deanna writes on women’s career issues, lifestyle topics and more. Follow her on Twitter @DeannaUtroske.

5 Reasons You Need To Attend SMW NYC

Posted on by Nicky Yates

We hear it all the time — but isn’t every week social media week? Social Media Week is much more than just a discussion on social media. We know you’re smart enough that you don’t need that. You get it. What SMW is though is a look at how and where humanity and technology converge. And it goes much deeper than just your Twitter feed.

Here are just five of the areas that we’ll be elevating to the surface and how you can join leaders to see what’s changing:

  1. Health, Wellness and Your Spine Online
    With our focus on the Future of Now, we’d be remiss if we didn’t have a steady focus on how technology is changing our relationship to health and wellness. With classes from SoulCycle, morning yoga, Breathe Repeat’s look at how being online affects your spine, and even a special track on innovation in health from Merck, we want SMW to have a holistic approach. And you can get in on it here.

  2. Content Marketing and the Machine
    Let’s face it: content marketing is THE buzzword for 2014. But that doesn’t mean it’s not critical to your brand’s marketing strategy. Which is why we’re hosting a pretty hefty grouping on events on this topic, with leaders like Percolate, Unruly, Click 3X and more sharing their insights. We even have true[X] examining how we can prevent the online digital advertising economy from losing an estimated $6 billion a year.

  3. Music, Travel & Entertainment
    It's not ALL about ROI and the bottom line. In fact, this SMW we're looking at all aspects of how technology is shaping our experiences.From Spotify’s special track on music’s future to Chipotle’s look at unbranded film to our travel gurus, if you’ve got a passion, this is the list you want to explore.

  4. Data and Analytics and the Search for Meaning
    Most of us are familiar with famous quote by historic department store owner, John Wanamaker, “I know that half my advertising works; I just don’t know which half.” This need no longer apply, when you have skills from these events.

  5. Social Impact and Doing Good
    One area we love seeing the impact of social and technology is definitely on our society. Social impact has changed drastically over the past few years, giving NGO’s and philanthropists more tools to create change. Few get this like Deanna Zandt, and she’s curated the perfect SMW Social Impact Guide. If that’s not enough, here are some we recommend, including the launch of Mission 31 with Fabien Cousteau!

And if you need more, we’ve got a masterclass lineup you can’t resist, including Big Fuel talking the participation economy and the opportunity to build your own wearable tech.

Friday is your last day to grab your SMW NYC Pass at the standard rate. Join us, Nokia, and MKG for what we know will be our best SMW yet.

What’s In Store for Health? Merck Joins SMW NYC

Posted on by Nicky Yates

Technology and social innovations are revolutionizing the healthcare industry. While start-ups and consumer facing brands have been able to more quickly adapt to these changes in business, healthcare is just beginning to scrape the surface of bottom-up innovation. As these new ideas take hold, what’s exciting is the massive potential that exists to drive social change — not just in our everyday life but also in longevity, happiness, and with medical accuracy and efficiency.

Value creation in the healthcare arena is now inextricably connected to digital, data, and more recently, hardware technology. Through quantified-self innovations allowing users to take control of their own data, technology is now the fiber of the 21st century health care organization. It is this understanding of the challenges and potential that has prompted us to focus more deeply on this issue this SMW14. And we are honored to have Merck onboard as our City Supporting Sponsor as the creative force behind this.

Featuring a half day track at our new Campus this February, we will be diving deep into how healthcare is changing, innovating, and who is leading the charge in the industry.

merck

5 Minutes With LiveWorld

Posted on by Lindsey Taylor Wood


Photo: LiveWorld CEO, Peter Friedman

Our NYC Opening Party Supporting Sponsor and Event Host, we sat down with LiveWorld to talk all things social media. A user content management company, LiveWorld is a trusted partner to the world’s largest brands, including the number-one companies in retail, CPG, pharmaceutical, and financial/travel services.

1. What is LiveWorld’s greatest success with social media to date?

LiveWorld has hundreds of success stories from our stellar roster of Fortune 500 clients. To name just one story is tough, but to highlight our capabilities: we brought a Fortune 10 brand from an initial social media presence to being the #1 most engaged brand on Facebook worldwide, #1 brand for fans in the US and #1 share of Twitter voice in its category. We achieved this by deploying our proprietary user content management technology and working closely with the client on social strategy, insight analysis, engagement content and moderation.

2. What do you think is the most exciting thing happening in the emerging technology and/or new media space right now, as it relates to the health and pharmaceutical sector?

Healthcare is undergoing significant change in this country. Everyone is feeling it, and consumers have more questions regarding their healthcare and an increasing need for emotional and content support from other consumers and brands. Healthcare and Pharma have an unprecedented opportunity to become trusted sources of information and support for consumers, but are constantly caught battling legal and regulatory stipulations that hinder their ability to engage in social media. At LiveWorld, working these issues is our core strength. Our solution ensures regulatory and legal considerations are met through careful content monitoring, moderation, engagement, and crisis management protocols.

3. Tell us about your goals for SMW? What do you hope attendees will take away from your installation and reception?

All brands, including those in healthcare, must be actively engaged in social media across all of their strategically important markets. This worldwide and highly targeted approach to social media can seem complicated and intimidating to many brands that lack the internal resources or knowledge to implement such a program.

Our goal is to impress upon our attendees the importance of a comprehensive social media strategy, integrated implementation approach, and keeping the human element at the forefront.

LiveWorld’s brand clients go beyond just being on social media – they achieve something. The programs we develop with our clients are world class. They protect the brand, obtain actionable insights, and true engagement.

4. What is the most creative way you’ve seen social media used? (This could be a meme, campaign, installation, etc.)

We highly recommend the Walmart Elves Twitter Program and Sprint/Unilever Suave Shampoo In the Motherhood Program. Through creating a dialogue and relationship with consumers, both social media programs have had a transformative power to positively affect the consumer experience and brand loyalty.

5. This year, our global theme is “Open & Connected: Principles for a Collaborative World.” How does LiveWorld support this idea overall?

“Open & Connected” is what we at LiveWorld have been evangelizing for over 28 years. User content moderation and true engagement is a challenging element of social media for many large brands, and we work hard to make sure that everyone’s voice is being heard. Sometimes, however, we encounter harassment, spam and other comments that do not contribute to the conversation. In fact, they detract from it. This is where LiveWorld steps in so that our clients’ fans have a safe and respectful atmosphere in which to interact.

We like to think of social media as the brand’s big, online party. You want to create an engaging memorable party that your customers will recommend and want to come back to. We always ask our clients to consider questions like: “What kind of party are you throwing?”, “Who is invited?”, “What is the topic of conversation?”, “How will your customers experience your brand, when the primary method is through conversations with other customers?”.

Social media is all about human beings connecting, dialoguing, and building relationships. Our approach from strategy, to moderation, to engagement, to actionable insight, keeps that human element at the forefront. If social media is a brand’s party, consider LiveWorld a brand’s party planner who brings the bouncers, ushers and DJ, all to create the best customer experience.

LiveWorld partners with Fortune 500 brands to develop social media strategies user content moderation, engagement, and insight that span across 70 different country-language combinations, over 4,000 social media properties and over 1 million pieces of user content/month. We leverage our backend social content management system technology for scale, quality, and flexibility.

Every piece of user content is seen by a real, human LiveWorld moderator. We create true relationships and understanding among consumers and with the brand.

Make sure you check out Liveworld during SMW NYC when they join up with Pfizer to talk How to Improve Social Media Engagement in Regulated Industries and Consumer Sensitive Markets. It’s bound to be a day full of knowledge and information.

See you Tuesday! A guide for Day Two

Posted on by Sara Haile-Mariam

We hope you enjoyed your first day of #SMW12– now on to day two!

Below you’ll find a list of solid events that, as of publication, still have some slots left!

9-11am at JWT Panel: Why Engagement Should Be Spelled A-T-T-E-N-T-I-O-N hosted by SocialVibe

9-10am at Saatchi & Saatchi Wellness Keynote: Frank Moss on The 2012 MIT Health and Wellness Innovation Hackathon

9-11:30am at Thomas Reuters Interview: John Katzman and Jeremy Johnson on The Future of Higher Education: Will Colleges Survive? followed by Panel: The Classroom of The Future: How Social Media Can Better Our Education System

10-10:45am at Saatchi & Saatchi Wellness Keynote: J.C. Herz on Unpacking the Quantified Self followed by Panel: The Sensor Continuum

10-11am at Hearst Digital Voyeurism: How Sharing Real Homes in Real Time is Changing the Way We Decorate

12-12:30am at Big Fuel Jon’s Fireside Chat: Joseph Jaffe and Social Media 2.0

12-2pm at Thomas Reuters Keynote: Rachel Lloyd, Executive Director & Founder of Girls Educational & Mentoring Services

12-2pm at JWT Beyond the Like: Using Real People’s Real Stories to Drive Brand Awareness

1-2pm at Saatchi & Saatchi Wellness Fireside Chat: The Rise of the Patient Platform

2:30-3:30pm at Big Fuel Connecting disruptive business models with innovation in business

3-4pm at Saatchi & Saatchi Wellness This game will make you healthier

3-5pm at Hearst The New Ghostwriter

3-5pm at JWT Social Media for Social Good

4:30-5:30pm at Hearst Social Syndication in 2012: Experiences First, Networks Second

5:30-6:30pm at Saatchi & Saatchi Wellness Women, Money & Social Power: What Made The Komen Debacle A Win For Women

6-8pm at JWT Deep Focus Presents: An Evening of “Connectedness”

 

Bring Your Coats for Regina Holliday’s Walking Gallery Exhibit

Posted on by Nicky Yates

Interactivity. Engagement. Participation. Empowerment. These are all things we value in a SMWNYC event. And this is embodied in a special interactive exhibit taking place on Monday, February 13th from 2-8 pm at Saatchi & Saatchi Wellness. But you should bring a coat with you to participate.

The Walking Gallery: An Exhibit
Regina Holliday is a patient rights art advocate, who paints series of murals depicting the need for clarity and transparency in medical records. Regina will be screening her film, “73 Cents” at 1 p.m. and will remain on site from 2-8pm for the Walking Gallery Exhibit, where she will to listen to and paint people’s patient stories on coats, which they can then wear to tell their story to the world.

What should I bring? A business jacket or Doctors Lab Coat. Best fabrics are poly blends, linen, cotton or wool (NOTE: No denim, leather or pleather garments please). Also you might want to bring a jacket a size larger than you usually wear, as the painting will may stiffen the material and make it harder to close the buttons.

When can I tell my story? Email your patient story to Regina along with pictures of yourself and the people involved in your story. If you do not want to send photos, Regina can use her imagination to create an image. You can also visit her at the Walking Gallery at Social Media Week’s Health & Wellness Hub from 2-8pm on Monday, February 13th to tell her your story.

How will I receive my painted garment back? She will finish a handful of garments at the event and can ship the remainder of work to participants following the conference. Donations of $10-$15 to offset the cost of shipping and paint are appreciated (but not expected) and can be left in the pocket of the jacket for along with an address or business card. You are joining a movement, and this is a sacred oath to walk the walk and spread the word.

Who is Regina Holliday? Regina Holliday is a DC-based patient rights arts advocate, who was inspired by her husband Frederick Allen Holliday II and his struggle to get appropriate care during 11 weeks of continuous hospitalization at 5 facilities. After his death in 2009, she began painting a mural entitled “73 Cents”, which has been adapted to a film that will be screened at Social Media Week. “73 Cents” is an 11- minute documentary that tells the story of one woman’s grief with her husband’s death; her ability to turn tragedy into change; and her transformation into an influential advocate for patient rights. Learn more about Regina.

You can keep up with the conversation with these Twitter hashtags:
#SMWWalkingGallery
#TheWalkingGallery
#SMWHealth

Defeating the Enemy of Wellness — You

Posted on by Michelle Welsch

Guest post by Jacob Braude, VP of Planning at Saatchi & Saatchi Wellness

Wellness has an enemy, and despite what you may have been told, it’s not Voldemort – it’s you. And me. It’s all of us. When it comes to wellness, we are often our own greatest adversaries. But don’t get down on yourself, because it isn’t really your fault. The fault lies in your unconscious – or rather in the way your brain has evolved to divvy up responsibilities between your conscious awareness and your unconscious. First, let’s recap some of the more staggering evidence that you are the enemy of your wellness. Then we’ll talk about how your brain gets you into this mess, and we’ll introduce some of the new research and technologies that are making it easier for you to get out.

We already know that poor choices in what you eat and how often you get some exercise has led to a staggering rise in obesity – and all of the health risks and costs that come along with being overweight. But beyond that oversaturated story, we are learning that even something as widely consumed as sugar may have dramatic negative effects on our wellness – regardless of our weight. According to this lengthy and terrifying piece in the NY Times, some research indicates that sugar (which is in pretty much all processed foods these days) may be the poison that has been behind the rapid rise of heart disease, hypertension, and even cancer. In the article, they claim that sugar and high fructose corn syrup, could account for up to 80% of all cancers. There’s way too much science for me to explain that claim here, so go read it for yourself – it’s worth it (and yes, I still eat a ton of sugar).

Now that you’re sufficiently freaked out, let’s talk about your brain. The human brain is the most complex structure in the known universe. There are more connections in your brain than there are atoms in the universe. And all of that magnificent processing power runs on approximately 20 watts of electricity. Compare that to the 85,000 watts required to run IBM’s Watson (the super computer they built that recently dominated past Jeopardy champions), and you get a sense of just how remarkable your brain is. One of the most important ways your brain conserves power is to automate as much of your behavior as possible by shifting it into your unconscious. It takes a lot of energy to make a conscious decision – to sort through all of the options and make a choice. It takes very little energy to follow a pre-programmed script.

Here’s a good example: have you ever gotten in your car with the intention of going someplace, then you zoned out and realized that you had driven yourself somewhere else? Driving is a decision-intensive activity. You have to take in a lot of sensory data and make a lot of choices. How much gas, when to break, where to turn – but almost all of us can make these decisions while thinking about something completely unrelated, because these behaviors have become automated and are handled by our unconscious.

Wellness behaviors are handled the same way. What you eat. When you exercise. How you handle stress. All of these behaviors are largely automated, and once they are programmed into your unconscious, it’s ridiculously hard to re-program them. It requires persistence, effort and repeated failure. It requires willpower.

Luckily for us we live in an era where we are not just becoming aware of how our own automated behaviors are sabotaging our personal wellness, we have new technologies (like the passive monitoring FitBit or UP) and insights to help us be more successful at reprogramming ourselves. I’m going to talk about three of the big ones at Social Media Week and run a live experiment to help you understand this, on Friday 2/17 at 11am. If you can’t make it, I’ll follow up this post with more info on what I spoke about. The three I will tackle are:

Willpower. We now know from a number of experiments, that willpower is a real thing, and that it functions under similar rules as your muscles. It is fueled by glucose, it gets stronger with training and it has a finite amount of strength – meaning every conscious decision you make will make the next choice harder.

Social influence. Lots of research has begun to unearth how the people around you influence your programmed behaviors – often without you even knowing it is happening. This has big consequences for the role of social media in health and wellness.

Feedback loops. The proliferation of devices that measure our behavior, and the use of data visualization to reflect that behavior back at us in totally new ways, has rapidly accelerated our ability to deliberately reprogram our behaviors.

I’m going to wrap all this info inside an experiment to test one of the key hypotheses: that socially-enabled feedback loops can strengthen your willpower. Remember to register to attend and look out for an announcement for the beginning of the experiment. We won’t have any idea before the talk whether it will work or not, so it should be fun to see the results live.

In the mean time, please visit our Quora board on willpower and feedback loops to learn more and contribute to the conversation.

Hope to see you there.

Five Reasons to Visit the Health & Wellness Hub

Posted on by Nicky Yates

In 2012, Social Media Week New York introduces the first Health & Wellness Hub to serve as a platform to empower change in health through collaboration. Hosted by Saatchi & Saatchi Wellness and curated by Luminary Labs, the Health & Wellness Hub will take place at Saatchi & Saatchi’s ground floor auditorium, and offers seating for 400 guests as well as a livestream. The event runs from February 13-17, 2012.

We spoke to Luminary Labs CEO Sara Holoubek on what’s hot at the Health & Wellness Hub.

 
1. It’s about people.
Given the rate at which social technologies are changing the face of healthcare, it is quite easy to get caught up in the tech. And yet solving for health is about humanity. Or as keynote Michael Graves says “People first.” We’ll kick of the week with a human-centered approach to health, from a big data to hospital design to Regina Holliday’s personal story of how she became a patient advocate. Later in the day, participants will roll up their sleeves with Jessica Hammer to learn how to design for desire in health. Also in the spirit of humanity, Johnson & Johnson will close the day with a networking cocktail reception.
 

2. It’s about tech.
We’re going to explore, demystify, and even challenge the role of the technology that is changing the face of healthcare. Frank Moss kicks off the day with a lively discussion of the 2012 MIT Health and Wellness Innovation Hackathon. J.C. Herz will help us unpack the quantified self, followed by a panel on the role of sensors in health. We’ll also explore gaming in the panel, “This Game Will Make You Healthier.”
 

3. We’ll collaborate.
There is no silver bullet in health, and change requires partnership and collaboration. Michele Polz of Sanofi and Aman Bhandari of Health & Human Services will detail how their two organizations partnered to identify new innovations in diabetes. In the afternoon, well take a look at the role of collaboration in wellness, with a keynote from Dr. Roizen of the Cleveland Clinic and a panel on how our perception of beauty affects our behavior and purchase patterns. Last, but not least, participants will get a chance to crowdsource the ideal FDA social media guidelines, as well as comment for the Physician Payment Sunshine Act.
 

4. We’ll Accelerate.
Jay Walker, founder of Priceline and TEDMED chairman & curator will set the stage on Thursday as startups, investors, and strategic partners converge to make it happen. We’re putting the investors in the hot seat, asking them to “pitch” the startups. Later in the day we’ll connect strategic investors and startups via an interactive matchmaking session.
 

5. We’re going to change the game.
We’ll wrap up the week with the ideas and case studies. Participants will get the opportunity to take part in an socially-enabled feedback experiment, learning how little acts of willpower help train your willpower muscle. The week will wrap up with Feast on Health, hosted the fabulous Jerri Chou.