Hill+Knowlton Strategies

This is the third blog post in the series of nine, which follows on from the previous blog post, taking inspiration from the Cabinet Office commissioned report entitled MINDSPACE. Changing or shaping behaviour and inspiring or engaging people is often a perquisite of many of the work we do for clients at H+K. The MINDSPACE report sets out nine of the most robust (non-coercive) influences on our behaviour, which is captured in the simple mnemonic MINDSPACE:

MINDSPACE (Dolan et al., 2010)

+  +  +         #3  Norms         +  +  +

Norms – the power of social norms are such that if your brand sits outside of social convention it can deter consumers. Furthermore if your product is one that defies social norms, goes against it, then your potential consumer base becomes much smaller. Products and marketing have to stand out today in a competitive market place, but not go against social norms to the extent that it alienates the brand and turns away consumers.

However, social norms change over time and place. Often subtly or gradually, but it is for this reason why trends and different cultural appreciation becomes key to successful brand building. Local market PR and advertising activation is important to understand key opinion leaders and how to position a brand strongly in relation to social norms.

The Power of Social Norms

Indeed the subtle social norm differentials can be seen not just culturally and geographically, but also digitally. A random follow on Twitter is seen as great, but a random friend request on Facebook is seen at best somewhat eery. Furthermore, dating apps and websites invite a completely different type of social norm and etiquette to  everyday encounters in a bar. And also a different type of social norm with regard to other social platforms. Two seemingly similar online concepts of video messaging – Skype and chat roulette – but yet the social norms of these two digital spaces are stark. Parental caution is advised for the latter!

Brands also have the power to create social norms. In order to maximise the power of brands, these norms and reputations then need to be maintained. Looking at norms and product innovation – as is evident with countless examples – is a gradually, slowly changing process. A pod of vanilla in Coca Cola. A whiff of aniseed in Pimms.  A sprig of rosemary to Pringles. Adding a hint of coffee flavour to a Kit Kat, or a fifth finger, is something innovative, but not so far removed from the norm that consumers can’t still relate to the original product. Change the product from fingers of chocolate  to ‘toes’ of dried fruit and change the name to ‘Dit Dog’ and consumers don’t get it. Therefore, brands create norms in their marketing strategy – have a break, have a kit kat. Change the Kit Kat too much, and the hard work is undone. The power of the brands social influence can be diluted. Why is the Apple brand family evolving at what seems like a slower rate than mankind! Because actually consumers don’t like sudden change, and too much change can be bad thing for marketing.

New Product Development - Kit Kat Fifth Finger

It is to that end where brand management and brand reputation becomes crucial. To not allow hard work to be undone. To reinforce brand values and defend them when threaten. But also to create social norms and influence culture through branding and marketing. In brand messaging and communications, understanding and responding to the subtle social norm differentials that exist geographically, culturally and digitally are key to effective communication strategy and execution.

Follow me on Twitter @AndrewPCBarratt

In the past week, there have been a number of interesting healthcare stories that have been making noise in the digital world.

As we’ve seen on this blog, the number of healthcare apps are ever increasing and now this growth has been truly cemented and recognised by none other than Apple. For a while, Apple has been creating lists of its favourite apps for specific demographics, including children, parents and film lovers. The new Healthcare Professional (HCP) list categorises apps that HCPs can use for reference, medical education, imaging, patient education, personal care and patient monitoring. Although iTunes have only made these available in the US, what’s interesting is that the list includes apps from pharmaceutical companies, including Novartis and Medtronic. Understanding and keeping track of how to get onto the list could be crucial for pharma companies to gain more visibility for their apps and help bring greater HCP engagement to mainstream attention.

Another story that garnered significant attention was that of the world’s first live-tweeted C-section. The Memorial Hermann Hospital in Houston tweeted the whole C-section surgical procedure from beginning to end, with followers able to see the process in real time. Essentially an educational procedure, this garnered a large amount of traction, with an estimated 72,000 people watching the C-section live on Twitter and an additional 11,000 viewing it in another format. This is not the first time a surgical procedure has been live-tweeted, with the same hospital carrying out a live brain surgery and live heart surgery last year. The popularity of this is a clear sign of  the educational value this type of digital format offers as well as perhaps whetting the (somewhat gory) appetite of many online.

As communicators, when creating campaigns we know how important it is to target the right audience with the right message. Previously, studies have shown women to be the influencers and decision makers in the household, and the results of recent survey have now shown that women are more likely than men to search for health information and advice online. According to a survey from the Pew Research Centre, 79% of female internet users vs 65% of male internet users went online to look for health information. These percentages overall are quite high, proving the potential reach an online campaign can have. This also demonstrates that when considering a digital campaign, it is important to think about whether it is right for your target audience, and the stats below, although US focused, provide a useful breakdown of which demographics are most likely to engage in the online space.

Sometimes, nothing can help make a point better than some good quality raw data, which is why in this post we’ve looked at a few studies investigating different aspects of digital health.

This week it was interesting to see a study published investigating how patients were managing their chronic conditions and the extent to which they used digital to do this. The study, which came out of the Pew Research Centre in the US, found that 62% of patients that had two chronic conditions tracked specific health measures, with 56% of these people saying the tracking had affected their overall approach to maintaining their health. 53% of these people also stated that the tracking had led them to ask doctors new questions or to seek a second opinion. Whilst tracking health measures demonstrated a change in behaviour towards a patient’s disease, what was really interesting is the data the researchers found on the use of ‘health tracking’ apps or devices. They found that a minority 21% used some form of technology to track their health, with 34% tracking it on paper and largest chunk (49%) of patients did so ‘in their heads’.

Apps such as GSK’s MyAsthma app, which intuitively build in an Asthma management diary, tests to track the progress of the condition and various other useful content for Asthma sufferers, can offer a patient much more than simply tracking in their heads. The MyNetDiary Diabetes app goes as far as helping with diet planning, with a barcode scanner to allow for easier tracking of a diabetes patient’s diet, and the iBGStar product combines an app with a blood glucose meter as an attachment, which offers a seamless mix of blood glucose testing, tracking and sharing with HCPs.

21% is not a small number by any means, and the fact that a significant amount of people are using these apps after only a few years of them being available is definitely positive. But the data shows that while there is still a relatively large market for these types of apps, more needs to be done to get people engaged and using them. Looking on the app market place there is no shortage of these apps; it appears raising patient awareness of the benefits of using them could be key.   

Moving on to the evolution of public health, a trend that has been surfacing recently is how powerful Twitter is becoming at helping predict public health trends. A study carried out by Bringham University looked at over 24 million tweets from 10 million users globally, and concluded that by monitoring health mentions in tweets, health officials can track, and even use the site as an early-warning system for, disease outbreaks. The speed and volume of tweets meant the information could be gathered faster than ever. This has evolved drastically from the previous days of health professionals having to collect health data over time before analysing.

Building on this, another study showcased how by collating what people said in Tweets, where they were when they said it, and when they were there, researchers could go as far as to estimate potential spread of disease between two users or even between users and their environment. The video below shows how researchers are even developing a web application, called GermTracker, which uses Twitter information to allow people to stay away from areas of ‘high risk of germs’. This is all in early development, but it will be interesting to see if this prediction of high risk areas can help pharmaceutical companies keep ahead of the trend and engage with patients in the right areas more effectively.

For a really interesting look at social media in the pharma industry this week, check out this post on the Eye For Pharma website.

The article looks at how the pharmaceutical industry responded to the growth of social media as a new comms channel and suggests that those companies that were willing to dip their toes in the water in the early years are now reaping the benefits of being at the forefront, “having learnt from their experimentation and having started the cultural change process that this ‘new’ channel requires”. The majority of companies, however, who were overly cautious at the emergence of social media, perhaps waiting for more regulatory clarity, are now struggling to play catch-up.

This is certainly a compelling argument. Genuine engagement with social media requires a considerable shift in company attitudes and behaviour, particularly within the traditionally conservative pharma industry, that can take years to implement. Companies willing to take risks early on will have had more time to adjust to the changing environment and to lay the foundations needed to utilise social media within their organisations.

Another good point the author makes is that companies that dabbled in social media a few years back did so in a far more forgiving environment, when it was still considered a new channel. Social media is no longer new. It is now the elephant in the room. It can’t be ignored no matter how hard companies might try, and those that have been slow to respond are at risk of falling further behind.

It’s not all doom and gloom though. Many of the early frontrunners have become more cautious due to bad experiences, while others have lost momentum due to lack of tangible ROI and internal politics. Great opportunities exist for those now wanting to catch-up and use the experiences of others that have gone before them to inform their activities. The article goes on to give some great advice to those companies now looking to “jump on the social media bandwagon” and it really is a must-read for anyone involved in pharmaceutical comms.

Although not strictly a pharma company, GE Healthcare is one company that has pioneered the use of social media and digital and continues to lead the way. Their latest foray into the online world sees them teaming up with Spotify to launch the first in a series of health initiatives that will be powered by the online music streaming service.

The first of these, the “Give A Little Beat” jukebox, has been launched to raise awareness of breast cancer. Spotify users can share and listen to songs via the jukebox, which GE say “reflects the healing power and international reach of music”. As part of the campaign, the company has also produced a “Give A Little Beat” Facebook App. Having already made use of a number of social media and digital channels, including Pinterest, this is yet another example from GE Healthcare of the potential that exists.

This month, H+K TechlLabs headed to Regents Street Apple store for the launch of Little Miss Geek: Bridging the Gap Between Girls and Technology. The book by Lady Geek is the start of a national campaign set to address the gap between girls and technology.

Hosted by Belinda Parmar, CEO of Lady Geek, the campaign is created to inspire girls to become the next big technology pioneer. The five-strong panel of technology professionals were challenged to pitch to a panel of 11-15 year old girls from different backgrounds on why they should consider a career in technology. Kat Grant, an ICT teacher believes that with technology, students are able to create a ‘mash-up of personal interests’, a view echoed by Olivia Solon, Associate Editor of Wired.co.uk who said, ‘tech permits every industry and disrupts every sector’.

The book is brilliantly illustrated but also includes some hard-hitting facts:

• Currently only 17% of all tech jobs in the UK are held by women
• Male students account for 92% of those taking Computer Science A-Level
• Tech companies with more women in their management team have a 34% higher return on investment

What about technology marketing?

In response to the industry’s’ “Pink it and shrink it” approach to gadgets, Anna Fielding, Online Editor of Stylist and Emerald Street says:

“Tech doesn’t need to be feminised; it needs to be de-masculinised”

Olivia also argues that the use of booth-babes at key technology trade shows is ‘not relevant today’ but not only must brands change but women themselves need to take responsibility here.

“We have to shatter the perception that people who work in I.T. are sad, eccentric, pizza guzzling nerds. Our girls must be inspired to become equal players amongst the next generation of inventors and technology leaders”, Martha Lane Fox, UK’s Digital Champion

The debate continues online, and The Lady Geek Manifesto can be found here.

Not sure what is in the October air but my goodness it has been busy at H+K Towers this week

Monday saw the external launch of our Aviva S2S Mumsnet campaign which is  centred on encouraging parents to talk to their children about running away from home in order to  raise awareness of the issue, and of the Railway children charity.  As its such an important and topical issue, our launch story has gained lots of media interest including Yahoo.com, Female.First.co.uk and Radio 5 Live and is naturally all over the twittersphere

Mumsnet.com Running Away home page

Also on Monday, we launched Family Investment’s Hotspots report which has received widespread national media coverage including seven of the national newspapers reporting the story. If you have somehow managed to miss it, Wokingham is the best place to live to bring up a family.

Hotspots Report Infographic

Our healthcare team has been working hard at the European Society of Medical Oncology’s (ESMO) annual meeting (a huge event in the world of cancer research) which took place in Vienna last weekend. During ESMO the team supported a media roundtable where two leading experts in the field of bone metastases, a severely painful type of bone cancer often associated with advanced stages, were well received by the audience including 14 top-tier European journalists from Austria, France, Germany, Italy, Portugal, Spain and Switzerland.  Don’t just take our word for it, check out this infographic about the hot topics from the meeting

The Healthcare team also recently won some inspiring new business with The Harley Street Clinic in London. Earlier this week, members of the team had the opportunity to visit the clinic’s recently refurbished Paediatric Intensive Care Unit to see firsthand the importance of the unit in providing complex care to very ill children. The team is excited to be working with H+K offices in Kuwait on this project. See more of the great work done by the clinic here

Our Food + Drink team have also had a rewarding week, after over seven months of campaigning for public votes, yesterday the Transform Your Patch team took Fazer from N-Dubz to Dartford Skate Park to celebrate his triumph in Transform Your Patch – a regeneration campaign from Britivic and PepsiCo that has transformed around 165 outdoor spaces across the UK.  Since March, Fazer has been competing against three other celebrity faces, to win an additional £100,000 for an outdoor space he is passionate about, skate parks. Yesterday saw him emerge triumphant against Densie Van Outen campaigning for playgrounds, Robbie Savage squaring up for five-a-side football pitches and Emma Willis championing picnic areas and parks. The £100,000 will now go towards making sure communities get the most out of the transformed skate parks across the UK. Read more about the campaign here.

Our Energy + Industrials team have also been mega busy, not only did they launch Enphase Energy into the UK at Solar Power UK – we set up and staffed media interviews with the key trades to support the launch. Fantastic response so far!

… But they also provided media support for the launch of Sheringham Shoal wind farm off the coast of Norfolk – resulting in a lovely exclusive with Channel 4 News, take a look at the video

And as if that wasn’t enough, we also helped Pampers® and UNICEF launch their “1 pack = 1 vaccine” initiative for the seventh year running, celebrating that together they have helped eliminate Maternal & Newborn Tetanus (MNT) in eight of the world’s poorest countries.

Roll on the weekend!  Hope you all have a good one!

Pharma and healthcare has an image problem. Or at least, it has sometimes had a problem conveying itself in a compelling way through visual media. It’s curious then, that a number of prominent pharma companies in the US have set up corporate accounts on Pinterest, the latest much-hyped plaything of the social media world. Bayer US, Boehringer Ingelheim, Menarini Spain, GE and Novo Nordisk have all begun populating their boards with healthy-looking people and clinical researchers on a site more often associated with pictures of wedding dresses and cakes.

Let’s take a step back and explain Pinterest for those who may not yet have come across the site. Pinterest allows you to ‘organize and share things you love’ so your collection of paperclip sculptures can be ranked according to the number of prizes they have won and your photo albums of Iggy the pet stick insect can be shared with all of your friends. The medium is incessantly visual, as posts consist almost solely of either images or video, which can then be shared (‘repinned’), liked or commented upon by other users. While the site has grown at an exponential rate in the US, it remains to be seen whether it will have the same impact among the same groups of people in the UK and elsewhere when the site spends some of its recently-raised funds for international expansion. What does seem clear is that the site is growing fast and companies have begun to take note.

Now, back to that image problem. It may be exciting for pharma companies to have accounts across all the latest social media platforms, but it is important for companies to ask whether this will provide tangible benefits from a strategic communications perspective. Between them, Bayer, Boehringer, and Novo have a total of 355 followers. Meanwhile, the accounts don’t seem to have elicited much in the way ‘interaction’ or ‘engagement’ with these followers. 

 On the other hand, GE Healthcare has managed to capitalise on both the clout of its parent group and the innovative work done in other areas of the business to transform apparently visually unappealing engineering and energy operations into captivating images and video. By posting via the General Electric umbrella account, the healthcare arm already has an audience of over 9,562 followers, and the specialist healthcare Pinboards are original and well-populated. More importantly, they are also well planned with a clear remit and strategy.

 Of particular note are the Cancer Pintherapy and Pinspire boards, which manage to be both warm and engaging. The Pintherapy board features a collection of pictures alongside famous motivational quotes and experiences of ordinary people affected by cancer and particulalry breast cancer. Pinspire asks users to submit their own inspiring content on the subject of cancer experiences, one of which is then chosen to be featured each week. Just as with the GE Healthymagination Facebook page, the account is particularly good at interacting with users promptly and with a personal touch.

It remains to be seen whether pharma and healthcare companies can make Pinterest into a truly effective communication tool, or, for that matter, whether Pinterest itself will survive in an often faddy social media environment.

Welcome to this week’s An Apple a Day.

Firstly, I recommend checking out this post on the BMJ Web Development blog on the most impactful time to disseminate blog posts on different social networks to help them ‘go viral’. A really interesting piece and the sort of insight that might add real value when planning social media campaigns or blogger outreach for clients.

In other digital health news, a recent survey of around 4,000 nurses and nursing students in the US has found that around 71% use smartphones for work, with 66% of students using them at nursing school. It’d be interesting to see if the stats match up in Europe but these findings are a pretty compelling argument for the value of smartphone apps for this audience.

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Prior to our Demystifying Digital conferences, we survey our client delegates to measure interest in online platforms. Google+ always ranks in the top three results. Launched in June 2011, in the now familiar invite-only to build buzz mode, G+ opened up to everyone soon after. Brand pages were officially added in November 2011, although early adopter Ford famously got to keep their Page. Last month’s redesign and last week’s new mobile app, show the love and importance of G+ to Google overall. Admittedly a fan of the Circle concept, I think now is a good time to highlight some key points about the platform. Perhaps it was inevitable, but imho it was a major PR mistake to allow Google+ to be defined by the media as a competitor to Facebook. I believe it is something quite different.

1. Google+ is not ‘another Facebook’ — it is a social unifier for all Google products

Googler Paul Coffey, speaking at D2 Energy, officially described G+ as a layer, not another channel. Altimeter analyst and Twitterati Jeremiah Owyang agrees, “…all of google is one product.” Google’s recent move to reduce more than 60 privacy policies for their products (like YouTube, Gmail, and Search) down to one main policy is part of their stated intention to ‘treat you as a single user across all our products’. For brands, clearly this helps Google show more relevant search results and ads. And the social layer of G+ means I can look at a Search result page in ‘regular’ Google and see which products my connections have +1 or linked to. Another just announced integration is the ability to engage with G+ content (view, comment, +1, etc) through a Google+ notification email in Gmail. Destination sites are so old web. Google products with G+ functionality will be anywhere on the Internet a user is likely to want or need them.

2. The creative possibilities of Hangouts are ever expanding

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With almost 30 million users and major buzz for closing a $30 million financing round, Viddy lets users take and share bite-sized videos of 15 seconds or less. Viddy was launched one year ago and gained attention for its celebrity backers like Jay-Z, and celebrity users like Snoop Dogg. Available free for the iPhone and iPad, it is the iTunes app of the week for 12 May 2012 and one of the fastest growing apps around. Promises of an Android version will be under increased pressure to come true, although if I was Google, I would just buy them now.

Inevitably referred to as the Instagram for video due to the easy to add visual effects, soundtracks and other features in their Production Packs, Viddy got a huge boost last month when Facebook began highlighting them (and rival service, Socialcam). No post fails to mention that the fairly private Mark Zuckerberg uploaded a viddy of his dog. Even without the FB love, acquisition as a business model seems more lucrative right now than potential millions from in-app sales of premium Production Packs. I think someone will buy them soon.

So why should brands care about Viddy? First, I think the 15 second format has a lot to teach us. Like Twitter, it enforces message discipline. Plus, it is another wide open focus group to follow what what users are doing with video.  Southwest Airlines ran a contest around Sundance Film Festival time. Early adopter General Electric has also hopped on. For Mother’s Day today in the USA, Viddy teamed up with the National Breast Cancer Foundation to encourage users to post a ‘Thank You’ viddy for their moms, similar to their support for Movember. Celebrities as early adopters doesn’t hurt a start-up, but also reminds us that brand ambassadors have never been more in control of their own image, for better or worse. Add Viddy to the list for VIP social media training. While adult content is an au naturel risk with any video platform, there are lots of G-rated possibilities. Clean cut newscasters like Katie Couric are trying the platform and American TV icon Bill Cosby seems quite at home on the tiny screen. Even Disney partnered with Viddy to promote The Muppets. So grab your iPhone and your cat and give Viddy a try.