New Online Therapy Social Network bridges the gap using Video

A new think-tank out of New Mexico has changed the world of counseling and therapy forever. They have mixed the worlds of social networks and video like many other web sites, but with a focus on counseling, therapy, psychology, and overall mental health. CounselingWorld.com is the name, and online video counseling is their game. They could be the next Facebook of the online mental health world.

NewsBubbles caught up with Roger Aguiar (MA, LLPC,) the owner of CounselingWorld, LLC.; the company which owns the website. We interviewed him in a free video session he offered us from his site. Dr. Aguiar has been providing mental health counseling for over 9 years and says that he got the idea when he "saw the need for a better and easier way to provide his services online." He realized that there was nobody doing this and started the long road to development of a new web application that we got to play with.

The basic features of the system allow a mental health provider or someone who's seeking a provider online to connect and schedule video counseling sessions. The cool part is that it provides a full payment system through PayPal to facilitate the transactions allowing the provider to have full control over how much she makes. Their providers cover a wide range of fields of mental health and there are communities for these fields with chat rooms and message boards so there's a common meeting ground. CounselingWorld also gets into the matching game with a basic and advanced provider matching system that provided us the most qualified counselor to get in contact with based off of what we told them in our signup information.

We were able to contact the counselor through the secure CounselingWorld.com messaging system and although we did not buy a session with him, he responded quite quickly and his profile automatically told us when he was available to do a session with us. Dr. Aguiar mentioned that the system is ready to go big and that the beta testing and idea in general was well received by the mental health community. There was an overall feeling of excitement in the virtual air (cyber air?). He said that one of the greatest innovations this site provides for people seeking counseling is that "they don't have to even leave their homes anymore. This allows providers to reach people, who were until now, unreachable by the mental health community on a face to face level." When we asked him about the social networking features of the site, he had this to say:

"We offer the main features that people like about social networks, provider blogs, profiles, who's online, and the communities. The community chat is also nice because it puts everyone in a meeting place that allows them to get to know the counelors in that community. In the future we plan to also provide Twitter like services."

The venture looks promising and already seems to be getting an upswell of new accounts and more providers signing up. People looking for online video counseling or therapy can get an account for free and get started with a counselor within minutes, and providers are also welcome to join. The company does a full background check and certification verification on all of their providers, and they continue to find new ways to insure that they offer public access to "the best quality and standard of mental health providers." Here at NewsBubbles we're going to keep an eye on the company as it moves forward in it's quest to revolutionize the mental health industry.

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Twitter, Guy Kawasaki, Obama, and your mother

What's the difference between Guy Kawasaki, Obama, and your mother? Hint: 2 of them have big ____s.

• Guy Kawasaki: 55,000 something followers on twitter
  
• Obama: 100,000 something followers on twitter
  
• Your Mother: 3 followers on twitter
  

If you were thinking something else from the hint... pull your mind out of that gutter! Even if that was the case, the old "It's not the size of the ship that counts, it's the motion in the ocean" addage would come into play. The real answer is "follower counts" :) Now, the question is, does that really matter?

Over at the blog A Big Victory. There is a serious divide on people who are using twitter. The divide is so strong that I've been literally torn between my original goals of marketing my product on the system and just using it for "fun time" which I have not too much of online at the moment. For me, it seems to be this... You seem to have gotten a LOT of hits to your blog through twitter, but you are not a marketer and you don't have anything to sell. This is simply because you had something worthwhile to say and it seems that you spent the time to actually write this article from your heart. That being said. I'm currently analyzing new trends like this. I'm trying to find some common thread or some path/go-between for marketing and conversation. Here's what I've observed so far:

1. Twitter can be used for traditional marketing techniques, but often that gets you banned, or you only get followers who are also marketers. (in my case this is good since I have a product to give marketers too :))


2. Most marketers do not get this fact, and most of them continue to see it as a numbers game


3. This numbers game is something of a dinosaur when it comes to twitter because there is serious conversation for the more tight-knit groups of actual friends who also have followings of tight-knit friends


4. People tend to follow me more when I'm just being myself and I'm conversing with them.


5. This has been really hard to explain to most marketers and businesspeople who are so trained for numbers as the bottom line that they do not really get it at first


6. Whenever I had something really interesting for people to post in my different blogs, I got more people following my blog, but less hits

So it seems like Twitter is not just a social marketing tool, and maybe people who have been using it for the numbers game can gain influence, and maybe faster, but are they really gaining relationships and real fans of their work?

As far as Guy Kawasaki goes, he had written books before he was on Twitter. I don't think his twitter fame came from the marketing techniques he's using now, but the fame that he already had before he was on twitter... like Obama. He didn't even need to do anything, just have the name Obama, and blam... tens of thousands of followers. However, if your mother joined twitter (assuming your mother is not famous), then she would start out with 0 followers and it probably would grow at a normal pace depending on how much she used it... but let's say without the help of bots, etc. she would maybe have some friends on there for a total of about 50 - 60 followers.

How many of Guy Kawasaki's followers will actually re-tweet his posts and links? I'm sure a lot of them, but they are qualified followers for a different reason, because they were already fans of his book.

People who are just starting out on twitter like myself, are mainly confused at first as to why it's such a good site... but given time and conversation, they usually tell me... wow! I get it now!

One other demographic that I'm looking at for you numbers people is how to really guage your real reach on twitter / blogspot / whatever social media tickles your fancy. The equation should be something like:

for blogger
how many new people follow you or subscribe / number of visits

for twitter
how many people retweet or reply / number of friends you tweeted to

The outcome of this equation will change based off of what you say. If you use this ratio that's created to measure your reach, you can see the real difference between the things that you say and how your following or viewership responds to it. For instance, If I had 735 followers and I tweeted "(some url) please retweet" and maybe two people retweeted it... the reach ratio is somewhere around 0.2%. If I tweeted some joke like "Obama was found tripping on LSD today. Upon questioning he replied 'I beat up James Brown!'", and I got 5 replies and 3 retweets... the reach ratio of that message is 0.95% which is much better.

If your reach ratio is low like mine, then maybe you have too many followers, and a lot of them are not paying any real attention to you. For example: if you had only 55 followers, and you said these things and got responses about the same, your reach ratio would be somewhere around 4% and 12.7% meaning that you have had to do less work yielding better results.

That being said, your reach ratio is just a part of the whole reach equation, because on Retweets, you have to take into account the people who retweeted you, for second-level retweets, etc. The whole algorithm itself is somewhat mind-boggling because of the simplicity of the system in which it is generated.

In the end, I think that twitter can be used for marketing and fun... both at the same time. What we need is a new way to look at indirect social marketing and how that can be measured, controlled, and utilized to give both sides of the twitter divide a better experience.

P.S: I followed your mother because she was hot.

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