360DigitalInfluence

When SXSW, one of the largest gatherings of minds and enthusiasts in the digital world, didn’t feature more than a handful of panels on the intersection between health and social media - an “unconference” event called SXSH sprung up to fill the void. Yesterday that event came together in Austin and included speakers and pioneers in using social media to communicate for health issues in regional hospitals, government agencies, health insurers, nonprofits, epatients and pharma companies. Just about every part of the healthcare world had some sort of voice in the discussion as everyone gathered to share ideas on how the industry as a whole might use social media more effectively by building greater trust.

The day long discussion featured many highlights, starting with a talk from Doug Ulman, CEO of Livestrong about the power of health based communities online and how important real time information is to improving healthcare and the patient experience. Greg Matthews from Humana shared how a health insurer can innovate internally and use that to improve patient relationships and Jenn Texada from MD Anderson shared how she and her communications team use social media tools to interact directly with patients for customer service. David Hale from the National Library of Medicine presented an innovative new database to help identify unknown pills called Pillbox and Fabio Gratton shared how to build a movement through a case study of the success of the #FDASM movement in November of last year around the FDA hearings. In the “unconference” part of the day, companies such as ReachMD and WEGO Health talked about their communities and content and how they help bridge the gaps between patients, doctors and healthcare providers.
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Day 2 of TED2010 covered everything from suspended animation in humans to the need for better democratic argument in our society.  What continues to be top of mind, however, are issues of id and identity.  These were touched on in some way by 4chan founder Christopher “moot” Poole, game designer Jan McGonigal, and multiple demos from both Google and MSFT.

4chan is an insanely popular and prolific anonymous imageboard that has no memory or archive - threads are deleted after a few days.  While I don’t know what the causal relationship is, obscenity, porn, and rage run rampant in the environment of anonymity and inpermanence.  Is it a collective online id?  If you could say or post whatever makes you feel good regardless of how it will make you look or impact reputation, who would you be online? Maybe, but its not entirely bad - the community has come together and organized to do everything from protest scientology to using online tools to find and punish a board member who uploaded a video of abusing his cat.  The community even organized to game Time.com’s voting system for 100 most influential people and got their founder a #1 berth. Now, “moot” is afraid that the coming specter of universal online identity will make havens like 4chan an endangered species.
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We often get questions about if and when brands can edit a Wikipedia article and I’d like to provide some background on Wikipedia’s format and clarify what is and is not an acceptable edit. I am not morally against brands editing Wikipedia articles and there are no rules against it but the acceptable instances are few and any edits should be done transparently and by someone educated in the format and citation process of Wikipedia. continue reading

Neatly six months after the feds officially dropped the “Swine Flu” term in favor of the scientifically-grounded “H1N1″, web users are finally showing signs of following suit as evidenced by recent shifts in keyword searches.

According to Google’s Insights for Search tool, worldwide searchers for the first time since the outbreak have searched for “H1N1″ in greater numbers than “Swine Flu.”

The data shows that while “H1N1″ never received the surge of search queries earned by “Swine Flu” during the height of outbreak, the science-based strain term has slowly climbed atop the level of swine searches.



So what does this mean for brands?

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For a few years at this point, I’ve written about Brands Worth of a Weekend - where the weekend in question is a one for enthusiasts to come together and bond with the people behind their passion brands.  Meanwhile, Influencer Events - where influentual bloggers/tweeters and the like are invited to spend a day or two having a brand experience - have exploded in frequency.  While each may be classified as events for content creators and there are some best practice similarities (make personal connections, send a thank you, be clear about where and how content can be tagged), I would argue that there are even more differences.

Click through the “more” break to view table of consolidated lessons shared in an internal discussion of 360 DI strategists across the network.

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A really interesting example of aggregation launched recently in the academic world. Fururity.org is a no nonsense aggregator, pulling the latest research from North America’s leading research universities, compiling the finding in an easy-to-digest interface complete with a by topic architecture spanning across major research disciplines.

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By now it is certainly not news to note that YouTube is already the largest on-demand broadcast medium for anyone with an internet connection, boasting over 71 million unique users each month and the 6th largest audience on the Internet. 75% of all Americans have watched at least one video clip online in the last month. These staggering numbers coupled with the rise of broadband adoption in the US (over 80% of Internet users in the US have broadband as of March 2009) mean that online video is no longer a niche activity and has squarely hit the mainstream.

When you consider the opportunities from a Pharma marketing point of view, YouTube is certainly tempting. The FDA has yet to create significant regulations governing YouTube and there have been many marketing efforts in the Pharma space over the past several years which have seen fairly good results. Novartis’ FluFlix video contest from 2007, for example, had nearly 800,000 views of the intro video. In 2008, Sanofi-Aventis launched their GoInsulin campaign video channel which now has more than 300,000 views. More recently, earlier this year AstraZeneca saw success with their branded MyAsthmaStory video campaign sharing real stories of Symbicort patients and how the product had transformed their lives.

Concurrently, many pharma brands including Johnson & Johnson, Boehringer Ingelheim and Novartis (to name a few) have launched their own branded official YouTube channels to share a compilation of videos about various products, patient testimonials, research and development highlights and other corporate produced information. These channels represent an ongoing commitment to the YouTube channel and signal an intention to make this a longer term part of their overall corporate communications.
WHY DOES IT MATTER? continue reading

I’ve been thinking and writing a lot lately about the power the “vocal minority” exert in social media.  I know it’s not a new phenomenon, but I’m still fascinated at the seismic shift it’s causing in the brand-consumer power dynamic.  And it’s not all cake and balloons.

The latest dust-up that has me back on my soapbox has to do with ESPN.   Last week it was rumored - based on a single vague Tweet from an ESPN reporter - that ESPN had enacted a draconian social media policy.  Some of the most influential bloggers in all of bloggerville rushed to wag their finger at the network. Tsk Tsk they said.

Big problem though - no one (by their own admission) had actually seen ESPN’s policy at the time they were passing some incredibly harsh judgment.  So this “reporting”  was based on, um … [crickets].

By the time ESPN actually released the policy, countless numbers had blindly re-tweeted and propagated the negative POV, based solely on the uninformed opinions of others.  In fact two days after ESPN released the policy, I heard someone say “ESPN blocks social networks.” Wrong, misinformed and damaging to a brand that did nothing wrong.

Funny thing happened on the way to the forum … turns out the policy was, for the most part, pretty reasonable.  But clearly the point of this post is not about arguing the merits of the fine print.  You can see the policy here and decide for yourself.

Yet another tempest in the teapot. The vocal minority strikes again.

Can’t we all just get along?  What is with this rush to judgment?  And why the snarkiness?  Why not a rush to truth?  Isn’t the culture of cruelty era over and done?

I have no allusions of changing the dialogue, or even the tone.  But I can do my own small part.  So here are five rules by which I’ll behave moving forward … think you’ve got it in you?

1. Get your facts straight before the bashing begins. Or at least get a fact (any fact) on which you base your opinion.
2. Put yourself in the brand’s shoes. Have you worked at a brand in the era of social media? If not, take your fingers off the keyboard for a minute and just try to think what it’s like to be a brand trying to navigate the new world of social media.
3. Don’t blindly pass along the uninformed opinions of others. Do your own thinking. If you agree, go for it. But at least put some effort behind it.  No lemmings allowed.
4. Consider the impact your words can have on an individual or organization. I’m not saying “if you don’t have anything nice to say …” but do try and put a human face on the target of your criticism.
5. Get over yourself.  We all make mistakes.

[this post is edited from the original that appeared on my personal blog]

Bloggers using creative commons licensed photos have reason to celebrate: Google has finally added a Usage Rights feature in the Advanced Image Search tool. I often use Google’s image search though, when I’m blogging, I usually am forced to go to Flickr and search for creative commons photos to make sure I legally use and credit the work.

Now, with Google’s new tool, I can search across photo sharing sites (Flickr included) as well as the broader web knowing that the images I’m browsing are okay use, assuming I follow the Creative Commons guidelines.

If you’re also searching for a particular color (or colors) in a photo, don’t forget about Flickr’s MultiColor Search Lab (powered by idee) to quickly scan Creative Commons photos based your pallet section:

**Image Pier Madonia for the International Red Cross**

One topic that I have written about extensively in this blog is consumer relationships with brands and, in special cases, Brands Worthy of a Weekend (BWOW).  When I started writing about BWOW, it was still a relatively lofty  bar - a brand for which you care so deeply that you would spend a weekend away from your family to connect with other people who feel the same way about this brand, learn more about the “inside” of the business, meet the people who make the magic happen, etc.   With the seismic shift in the blogosphere, however, brand “weekends” have become more and more common, but with a major difference - they are largely designed for influential voices versus passionate fans.   In the mom blogger space in particular, these events are happening in rapid fire succession with some players covering  multiple per month.  While these executions absolutely hold water as communications strategies - at least for the time being - they are no longer about “passion”.  I would argue it is very difficult to be truly passionate about more than a handful of things.

Enter compassion.  I’d never stopped to give compassion much thought, but having begun work on a project that centers on compassion, I am now hyperconscious of it in the world around me and there are a lot of business applications.  While we expect compassion in/from our fellow human beings, we don’t expect companies - with their one-size-fits-all policies and protocols for front line reps - to want or choose to show compassion.    But upon further reflection,  a lot of brand fan creation stories have an act of compassion at their core.  A couple of examples:

• This weekend, the waitress at Inside Park at St. Barts who came outside (where I was exiled with my toddler-gone-wild) to chat with me, suggest some places where I could entertain him, and take my order on the go made me a fan.
• My St. John Knit fan creation story is ALL about a VP of Customer Service reading my letter and breaking the rules to help a desperate bride (now customer for life).
• Every Twitter/online customer redemption listening story - from @comcastcares to the Dell outreach team or non-tech areas like the Vermont Teddy Bear Company reading a complaint I had made about some spam affiliate marketing and correcting the problem (that turned me into a supporter of their sister venture Pajamagram).

The first step in codifying compassion into your business or brand as witnessed above is listening.  You can not understand “the other” or “walk in their shoes” unless you pause to try to understand and consider an issue, opportunity or problem from their point of view.  In the examples above, “listening” took the forms of watching a situation visually, reading a letter from a customer, and blogosphere monitoring respectively (note: great post on active listening from John Bell here).

The second element is trusting those human beings who do represent your brand with the power to act.  Ritz Carlton famously gives front line reps a budget from which they can do whatever they need to do to correct any problems in a customer’s stay and send them away happy.  That not only creates customer evangelists, it proves that the brand trusts the human beings that they have selected to embody the brand.

So, next time something happens that turns you into a positive-WOM machine for a company or a brand, think about the role compassion plays and whether or not you are in turn entrusting your team with the power to pass it along to your own customers.