Hill+Knowlton Strategies

On Rare Disease Day last week, a new online community was launched for patients with Idiopathic Pulmonary Fibrosis (IPF) on the existing patient website, RareConnect. RareConnect is led by the non-governmental, patient driven, rare disease organisation EURORDIS, and makes information available via patient advocacy groups from a variety of countries. RareConnect also provides a forum style platform for patients to meet and interact, allowing users to share individual experiences about how IPF has affected them, creating a sense of community between users. The website even has a translation service for all of its posts, making information available in five different languages and allowing its reach to be truly global.

Rare Disease Day also saw the announcement of Boheringer Ingelheim (BI) working with the online patient community Patient’s Like Me to enhance the website’s IPF community. Patients Like Me is a similar type of platform to RareConnect, but the main differences are that it has not been set up by patient advocates and is not just for rare diseases. With BI’s involvement, it looks like the IPF community now have online spaces on the platform where they can meet others with similar diseases, also allowing patients to input their health info and track their diseases. Although these communities have been around for a few years now, the involvement of patient advocacy groups and pharmaceutical companies to help strengthen these sites is new, developing the pages to be more patient focussed and giving them more of a ‘community feel’. 

Tracking patients’ health data in apps and online is a trend we have seen increasingly and now, patient data tracking company, Qualcomm, and patient information site, WebMD, have forged a partnership to track patient data and make information searched for on WebMD, more relevant for the user. Qualcomm partner with a large range of medical devices, such as blood pressure and blood glucose monitors that are connected to the internet and have a cloud based platform, which stores and tracks the health data from these devices. The idea behind partnering with WebMD, is that rather than receiving generic information when searching, you can receive information that is relevant to you. The idea is not new, and we have seen Google collect search information to make searches more relevant, but this is one of the first ways we’ve seen the potential for this style of tailored information for patients in the healthcare setting. The partnership is still early in its development, but it will be very important to see how this develops, and if this style of searching for patient information catches on in the future.

Last week, a study was released in the American Journal of Medical Quality, looking at the correlation between hospital Facebook likes and the quality of the hospital. Not only were the hospitals that had the higher number of Facebook likes more likely to be recommended by patients, it was also positively correlated with the mortality rate, meaning that based on this study, the more likes a hospital had, the better it was. This study shows the importance of having a strong and engaging Facebook presence as well as demonstrating that patients increasingly want more information from hospitals to make a more informed decision about where they seek treatment.

In the past few weeks, we have talked about the growing trend for articles and blogs, which are digging deeper into social media and digital within the healthcare industry, providing more specific and detailed insight as the industry continues to grow in this space, and it looks like this trend is set to continue,

We have selected some must-reads for anyone with an interest in digital communications in the healthcare industry. This article on PMLive’s Smart Thinking blog addresses this issue specifically, stating that while we all tend to judge how well pharmaceutical companies are doing in social media by looking at their presence on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, there are in fact many other ways of using social media that should be considered, including what is known as social innovation.

Although Twitter and Facebook are obviously parts of this, they are not the whole story, the blog argues. Other aspects of social media such as social bookmarking, wikis, virtual social worlds and crowdsourcing are also part of the equation and further inspection suggests pharma companies might not be as far behind as some people think when it comes to these less obvious forms of digital innovation. Indeed, the blog suggests that there are in fact plenty of examples of internal social media projects within the industry that are on a par with other sectors, with three of the top ten pharma companies (GSK, Janssen and Merck) using the enterprise social network service Yammer.

The article pulls out some encouraging examples of social media innovation within the pharma industry which back this up. Definitely worth a read.

Another article that caught our eye here at An Apple a Day was this one from Pharmafile, which covered some of the platforms more traditionally associated with digital and social media engagement such as Twitter and Facebook. The article looks at the ‘received wisdom’ that suggests pharma should be joining the online conversation and asks some very important questions about what sort of conversations are appropriate and inappropriate, as well as conversations actually worth engaging in.

As social and digital media continue to secure their place on almost everyone’s agenda, communications professionals will increasingly be expected to show they are capable of answering these sorts of questions and provide genuine insight, to ensure they are not just suggesting digital for digital’s sake, but are actually able to identify the most appropriate and effective solution to meet specific objectives.

(image: Cancer Research UK: Cell Slider)

In other news, Cancer Research UK has teamed up with Amazon, Facebook and Google to create a mobile game for analysing genetic mutations. Data is integral to finding a cure for cancer, however the challenge is getting the data investigated by human rather than machine eyes in order to be properly analysed. With this in mind, Cancer Research UK has teamed up with these US tech firms to try and build an engaging, fun and user-friendly mobile game, which can be used on the move. The charity has already developed a web-based game called Cell Slider where users look through archived tissue samples.

Finally, if you work in the oncology disease area, this interview on the Cancer Network website is really worth checking out. Dr Michael A. Thompson, an oncology specialist who writes a blog for ASCO (American Society of Clinical Oncology) Connection, talks to Cancer Network about the use of social media by oncologists, providing some great insights into the dissemination of research results, clinical trials, and other oncology news using social media.

At our Demystifying Digital conference on content marketing (#HKD2), I spoke about the concept of brands becoming Contentrepreneurs. Taking advantage of the super smart people on our stage that day, we asked them to give us a soundbite worth of advice for clients who want to become Contentrepreneurs. In fast, furious D2 fashion, here are some great tips, including these wise words from Tumblr:

“Have fun. And don’t be afraid.”

Enjoy the video and share your tip below or via tweet.

Yesterday, I went over to Google for a different kind of APG event. Titled “Dark Arts of Digital: Video Masterclass,” this hands-on session covered the practical principles of YouTube. We all know how important video is in content marketing. And, in the never ending quest to uncover the secrets of what makes something go viral, it’s smart to hear directly from the people that own the data.

The best part of the day was making, uploading and annotating our own video. Unfortunately, we didn’t get to play in the YouTube creator space studio, but I’ve had a tour of it earlier and it is enough to tempt you to into vlogging full time. However, it was the following tips from the YouTube experts that are of most value to our work with brands.

Not surprisingly, Authentic Content (aka a video made specifically for YouTube or online viewing) works best. They listed these five winning categories below: Read the rest of this entry »

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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Another week, another set of people yapping away at each other on the internet in the mistaken belief that what they say matters. Earlier this week, the web watched AGHAST as two sets of people pitted themselves against each other in a BITTER WAR OF WORDS, in what turned out to be a massively unedifying spectacle both for the journalist involved and, frankly, for everyone else who participated.

I am, of course, referring to this – oh, Barbara Ellen, what were you thinking?

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H+K’s Healthcare team set out to break new ground in January with the our first deep digital workshop focused exclusively on the needs of healthcare companies.

Delegates from Amgen, Pfizer, AstraZeneca and MSD attended from around the world and heard from an impressive list of speakers, including participants from Google, Kantar Health and digital experts from the H+K network.

Our 5 Key Take Outs:

1. Manufacturers of medicines should stop trying to think of compliant ways to talk to patients directly on social media platforms. It isn’t allowed. Instead focus on partnership and supporting good quality sources of independent information. Customers respect this.

2. Optimise new content for use on an interactive platform as required. For example, make videos that work for YouTube or mobile…

3. Content needs to be ’sticky’ and inspire people to share. If it isn’t worth sharing, it probably isn’t worth making!

4. Think mobile – BUT this doesn’t automatically mean an APP. There’s an APP for everything these days.

5. Content needs to be fresh and regularly updated. If you have no desire or capability to do this, think very carefully before employing interactive tactics.

So we near the end of the first month of 2012 – WELL DONE US. Except that Italian captain. And Tom Watson’s intern. And all those naive enough to believe that the SOPA/PIPA thing has gone away (if those words mean nothing to you then read this). And Snickers. And unwitting singers at American churches. And the Russian police. And Bayern Munich. And Uzbekistan. Everyone else, though, pat yourselves on the back – especially me, who found my very own doppelganger last week! We survived the most depressing day of the year, and from hereon in everything will be just peachy.

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New Year, everyone (I feel that it’s inappropriate to bother with the ‘happy’ charade after nearly two weeks of workaday tedium). Well, it’s been a while. HOW THINGS HAVE CHANGED! A new era has been ushered in, where a man’s political fate can rest on a small-if-perplexingly-executed typographical error, and where said typographical error causes the entire country (or at least the white-collar, desk-bound, twitter-using part of it) to down tools and descend into some horrendous infinitely recursive spiral of non-humour; in which a new way of drinking whisky is almost certainly the first harbinger of the forthcoming Mayan apocalypse;  in which a bunch of apparently sentient adults chose, of their own volition, to spend a night in a furniture warehouse; and, hopefully, in which this particular Italian politician will never again be allowed to make videos.

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I believe it was contemporary urban philosopher Ferris Bueller who once said ‘Life moves pretty fast; if you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it’ (NB – on reflection, I don’t know why I wrote that; I hate people who ascribe deep significance to the throwaway utterances of fictional characters. IT WAS WRITTEN BY A SCREENWRITER, YOU CHUMP). This edition of Web Curios is brought to you by the whooosh-ing sound that time makes as it flies past your ears; it seems like only yesterday that I was writing the last one of these, talking about holidays and the end of summer and stuff. All of a sudden it’s December, I’ve not written a Curios for a month (not that any of you CARE, you unappreciative whelps), and you can’t turn on the television without a famous trying to sell you stinkwater. On an unrelated note, I am yet to eat a mince pie in 2011. If anyone would like to courier some over to H&K towers, I will be very grateful and possibly do a small happy dance in gratitude; thanks (in the unlikely event that HRH Prince Charles is reading this, I am a massive fan of Duchy Originals).

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