Hill+Knowlton Strategies

Last week, H+K Strategies held its first D2 event of the year which was also our first sector-specific D2 for the healthcare sector.  Demystifying digital in the healthcare sector provided a wealth of interesting and insightful tips for healthcare communicators to use in the future.

H+K was joined by Kantar Health, Orital Consultancy, H+K Denmark, Kai Gait (former digital commerce marketing manager, GSK)and Google+ each of whom gave presentations highlighting the key challenges, developments and tips for healthcare PRs looking to extend their communications strategy into the digital sphere.

Kantar Health informed our attendees key stats about healthcare consumers. 47% of people write comments about brands, mainly to share or offer advice. Further to this, 70% of people surveyed said they are influenced by ‘social comments’, mainly from other users rather than from the brand. This insight reiterates the importance of social media and the challenges that brands must to respond to, listen to and engage with.

Arve Overland from H+K Denmark talked about Mobile Health. Digital’s move to mobile apps is an area in which the healthcare industry needs to assess whether the platform is right for them. Healthcare app devices generated $718m in 2011, although this figure is impressive, how can PR’s ensure they are creating a good mobile app in a cluttered environment.

1. Does it solve a problem – is there a need?
2. Does it extend product offering onto phone?
3. Does it provide information, reference or education?
4. Does it increase productivity?

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Tomorrow,  H+K Healthcare takes centre stage in Soho Square, with H+K Strategies‘ first-ever sector-specific Demystifying Digital (#HKD2).  With a formidable list of participants and speakers from major platforms as well as industry leaders from the public and private sector, the event is poised to make a real difference to our understanding of what’s possible and where we should be heading with healthcare digital communications this year. Kantar Health and Orital will talk about how patients and physicians really use the internet, Google will help us understand how we can make the most of Google+ and key note speaker, Kai Gait, Former Digital Commerce Marketing Manager, GSK will share specific examples of how to add value to our work with healthcare communities through digital initiatives. If you’re not able to come along tomorrow, don’t forget to follow #HKD2 on Twitter or check out the blog for a post-event summary.

We’ll be back on the blog after the event to let you know how it all went!

I’m excited to be here at our office in Copenhagen polishing my presentation for tomorrow. This is our third full day D2 conference of 2011 following on the London event in June. We are blessed to once again have top shelf speakers from Facebook, Google Mobile, TNS, Wikipedia and especially welcome a new addition: Google+. In an input survey we are doing with our clients to structure the next conference, we had more clients asking to learn about Google+ than any other platform.

Follow #HKD2 for snippets from the day. We will be posting some of the presentations afterward. My short but sweet talk below to get the ball rolling. It explains what we mean by Demystifying Digital; feel free toping me if you want the voice over.

As you may know from previous posts, I’m a devotee of Lucy Kellaway’s weekly column in the FT on working life. Her missive last week declared war on the use of Powerpoint by presenters. As she sees it, Powerpoint leads to boring, ineffective presentations which “lower the quality of discussion and lead to bad decisions”.

We wouldn’t go that far, but we do recognise there is a definite art to the use of Powerpoint to make sure that it’s a useful tool for supporting your delivery to an audience. So, below are a series of top tips from across the agency on how we believe you can get the best out of it.Thanks to Ed, Nick, Matt and Candace for their thoughts.

Powerpoint - making best use of it can be tricky (Image: PresentationMagazine.com)

1. Know when (not) to use it – Powerpoint isn’t Word, and similarly Word isn’t Powerpoint. Sadly, they’re often mistaken as being interchangeable. They aren’t. Powerpoint slides and lots of text are a very unhappy couple and serve to do only two things: bore your audience, and distract them from your speech as they struggle to read all the information on the slide. This is something Lucy Kellaway’s colleague noted in a defence of Powerpoint this week.

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Thursday was one of our big events of the year. Demystifying Digital—affectionately known as D2—is an ongoing, invitation-only H&K EMEA program that brings social platforms and our interactive communication experts together with brands. The content is geared to to live up to our goal of ‘demystifying’ and to offer H&K clients practical, hype free information.In other words, ‘news we can use’.  (I think too often the digital brotherhood falls into the trap of every religion where a layer of mysticism ensures the need for a guru to translate.)

The funny thing about a private event, though, is of course it is also public. We taped, pix and tweeted the day. Tony Wang, the head of Twitter’s new London office, was one of our speakers and in his honor I collected some of the #HKD2 tweets via Storify.

(More presentations and video content to come over the next week.)

More goodies from our Demystifying Digital client symposium. Speakers Jory Des Jardins, founder of BlogHer and Mascha, founder BeautyGloss.nl (one of the top blogs in the Netherlands), continue their conversation from this earlier post.

Not to get all Freudian, but to understand bloggers, it is good to start with our motivations for blogging. There is such an amazing mountain range of blogs, yet there is a common thread. (Hint: it’s Passion.)

I asked this question at H&K’s recent Demystifying Digital client symposium. Two of my favorite star bloggers, Jory Des Jardins, founder of BlogHer (the largest network of women bloggers), and Mascha, founder BeautyGloss.nl (one of the top blogs in the Netherlands), shared their view.

All this social media madness comes down to the same vital ingredient for any form of human communication. People. Cast the right talent to the task and you will succeed. Our own David Jones shows you how with his star turn five minutes on stage at Demystifying Digital.

We naturally followed his advice. Can you spot these characters on our own H&K London team? Reconnaissance | Mad Scientist | Communications General | Community Manager

Take an insightful 5 minute spin through today’s top trends effecting communication with H&K’s Kati Sulin. (There has never been a more exciting time to be in PR imho.) For Finnish speakers, there’s lots more from Demystifying Digital on the Helsinki office blog.

Here is a five minute case study from one of the top charities in the UK. Dogs Trust makes great use of all the different tools and platforms — from Twitter to Flickr and more — to connect their brand (and their dogs) with their audience. Alex, their Digital Marketing Officer, bravely did her first ever Pecha Kucha / Ignite presentation at Demystifying Digital to rousing applause. Clearly she also had the cutest visuals of the day.