HealthEd Blog

Tweet Your Way Into 68 Million Hearts During High Blood Pressure Awareness Month

 

If you’re reading this, chances are you’ve also spent some time today on Facebook, Twitter, and maybe even YouTube^T.

And if you were paying attention, there’s also a good chance someone you follow posted or tweeted about High Blood Pressure Awareness Month, designated for the month of May. Did you notice?

If you did, it may have led you to the American Heart Association (AHA) Web site  where some pretty cool stuff is going on. The AHA is currently running a campaign to create and upload your own video on your heart-healthy eating habits. The creator of the video that receives the most votes will receive $500 in AHA merchandise.

Why is it so important to pay attention? Well, that video could reach a lot of hearts. About 1 in 3 US adults—an estimated 68 million—has high blood pressure (also known as hypertension). This increases the risk for heart disease, stroke, congestive heart failure, and kidney disease.

Men are at greater risk for high blood pressure if they are over 45 years old. For women the risk is higher if they are older than 65 years old. African Americans develop high blood pressure more often, and earlier than whites and Mexican Americans.

There are some easy steps to help prevent high blood pressure this May, and all year long. Maintain a healthy diet low in saturated fat, sodium, and cholesterol. Get regular exercise, quit smoking, and limit alcohol to help lower your blood pressure. That’s 139 characters of great advice, perfect for Tweeting.

Now that you’re in the know, what are you going to do about it?

Designate one day this May to make just 1 post or tweet on your favorite social networking site to spread the word on high blood pressure and you can educate millions of people. Don’t forget your doctor, too – it’s important to talk with your doctor about your health and get regular screenings.

The average Facebook user has about 190 friends and the average Twitter user has 127 followers– that’s a lot of hearts.

Michelle Yered
Senior Account Executive
HealthEd

 

 

Mobile Healtherati Convene in New Jersey; Pharma Forgets to RSVP

At last week’s mHealthcon, the soon-to-be-annual event that brings together mobile health entrepreneurs, marketers, patients, and investors to talk shop in New Brunswick, NJ, I couldn’t help but think, “Where is pharma?”

Yes, there were a couple of representatives from manufacturers like Bristol-Myers Squibb. But they were vastly outnumbered by their healthcare peers:

• Managed care organizations
• Large healthcare providers
• Physicians and researchers

Mobile is potentially the greatest opportunity for pharma to break out of its innovation funk. And “The Healthcare City,” as New Brunswick bills itself, would have been a great place for pharma to stoke its creative fires—right in the industry’s backyard.

It’s not as if patients aren’t asking for mobile solutions …

“We have the opportunity to drive an ‘Arab Spring’ in healthcare,” said blogger Casey Quinlan, author of Cancer for Christmas and an outspoken patient advocate. Quinlan, diagnosed with breast cancer in 2007, said there were not enough tools available to help her manage her disease and treatment side effects.

“If there had been an app that would have helped me manage my neutropenia (low white blood cell count) and anemia (low red or total blood cell count),” Quinlan told the audience, “I would have easily paid a couple hundred dollars for it.”

Amy Gurowitz, who is launching a learning community for people with MS, said she surveyed her beta testers about their use of tracker apps. Only one person reported using one. “They didn’t even know that these tools are out there,” Gurowitz said, suggesting there is a market for such tools if they can be promoted effectively to patients.

It’s not as if pharma companies are ignoring mobile opportunities…

To be fair, pharma has produced a growing number of mobile apps and tools. (Quick plug: You can read about some mobile pharma case studies in an earlier blog post I co-wrote with digital buddy Megan Beardsley). Some have been built for patients, while most target healthcare providers. 

Still, I’m not convinced that pharma is fully prepared for the coming mobile onslaught. And I’m not the only one.

At a conference break, I caught the attention of Paulo Machado, a leading voice in pharma innovation and the former Innovation Director at AstraZeneca. During our conversation, Paulo really helped crystallize pharma’s conundrum.

In essence, he said, pharma companies are manufacturers. And it’s much harder for manufacturers to evolve away from a product-centric mindset than it is for service providers—your payers, hospitals, clinics, and most other health organizations.

Paulo said that healthcare reform is driving service companies away from the fee-for-service model. “They actually have to run profitable businesses now,” he observed.

Translation: Payers, not pharma, may end up leading the charge into mobile health.

Any tool that helps patients improve outcomes and lower costs will be mission-critical

Sure enough, later in the day Michael Monson, SVP Performance & Innovation at the Visiting Nurse Service of New York (VNSNY), encouraged mobile health entrepreneurs to bring him innovative ideas… like, now.

Headquartered in Manhattan, VNSNY is the country’s largest not-for-profit home healthcare service. It is both a provider and a payer. Monson explained that innovation is a large component of the company’s strategic approach. As healthcare evolves in the US, mobile seems to be a major way forward.

 “We really like using behavioral science,” Monson said, referencing partner Welldoc, which is running a mobile adherence pilot for VNSNY with diabetes patients. Welldoc was in the news recently when Ford announced a beta test in which diabetic drivers could “ask” their cars to check their blood glucose levels. The Ford beta is being powered by a Welldoc wireless health monitoring platform.

It’s innovations like these—“software devices that enhance consumers’ lives,” Monson said—that are going to power the future of mobile health.

Mobilization can work for pharma too

The economic rewards for innovation certainly favor companies like Monson’s. But I believe pharma also needs to stand up and put the industry’s significant weight behind mobile health initiatives. Apps would be the logical place to start—they are the most “product-like” side of mobile—and the FDA already issued guidance for health apps this summer.

For pharma innovators interested in going mobile, some next steps should include:

• Familiarizing yourself with the FDA mobile app guidelines
• Getting outside the pharma space
  • Download and use some of the mobile tools that other healthcare organizations have built
  • Look for parallels that could be applicable to branded/unbranded product marketing

Finally, challenge your agencies to think blue sky—have them bring their strongest ideas for mobile to the table, and explore opportunities to pilot in 2012.

Jeff Greene
Director, Digital Strategy
HealthEd

 

 

Why Nurses Need to Share their Knowledge

Why More Nurses Need to Get Social

Nurses are the largest group of healthcare professionals and the largest group of health educators. Because of their prominent role, they’re often needed to interpret and share their vast knowledge, yet they fall behind other professions in terms of adopting new communication technology. Having worked in an academic cancer center for several years, I observed many nurses doing innovative work without ever sharing their knowledge and expertise outside the walls of the center.

Since 80% of patients use the Internet for health information, patients clearly are expressing a need to enhance the education provided by their care team with medical information and advice from the Internet. What better way for patients to learn more about their health condition than to read a blog post or a tweet from their own nurse?

Although 87% of nurses reported using the Internet for professional use, only 11% were on Twitter. How can we encourage more nurses to move beyond being online information consumers to being the online information leaders and creators that they are in the clinical setting? Nurses have the opportunity to assume a leadership role by sharing timely and accurate health information with patients through social media rather than just responding to content that patients bring to them. 

Who has the time to blog and tweet?

We all know how hard nurses work, and the last thing we want to do is add one more task to their already demanding job description. Social media needs to be viewed as an important patient teaching tool, not as one more thing to do. Phil Bauman, an early adopter of social media in healthcare, compiled a list of 140 healthcare uses for Twitter, many of which actually save nurses’ time. Saving time is especially important in the midst of healthcare reform and a nursing shortage, given that the role of nurses is being expanded to include more patient education, with a larger emphasis on prevention. Because of the immediacy of information, the wide reach, and the ease of use, social media is a necessary tool for nurses to foster a more prevention-focused health dialogue and promote a positive disease-management experience. 

A forum for sharing best practices

Aside from patient education, social media offers new and interesting ways for nurses to interact, to share experiences, and to compare and contrast lessons from their work experiences. Social media applications allow nurses to reach a wide range of colleagues from different disciplines and more quickly than previously possible. Nurses who use social media can attest to the benefits. Some have talked about having previously felt isolated within small clinics before they joined Twitter or found nursing blogs. The resulting interaction helped them to feel more connected to the greater nursing community. Being part of that community involves sharing knowledge. If more nurses took this approach, the online nurse community would be a truly great forum for learning and supporting one another.

I think the best way to sum up social media resistance is with a quote from nursing informatics educator Terri Schmidt: “Social media is like White Castle. You either love it or you hate it, but in the end, you’ll develop an appreciation for it.” I would hope that the long-term health benefits of social media are greater than those of White Castle, but after your first taste of either one, it’s very easy to get hooked.

 

Tara Rice
Manager, Health Education
HealthEd

Is your marketing direct and relevant?

According to organizers, nearly 10,000 people attended the DMA 2010 conference in San Francisco. Direct marketing (DM) titans such as Howard Draft (of Draftfcb) and Rance Crain (of Ad Age) were inducted into the DMA Hall of Fame for their pioneering work. None other than Lester Wunderman (widely regarded as the inventor of modern-day direct marketing) introduced Draft and Crain to the audience.

The conference reinforced the association’s relevance in a changing marketing paradigm. Direct marketing started at a time when mass advertising was king. To this day, most big-brand marketers continue to regard DM as a “below-the-line” marketing expense. However, it is more widely used than most people realize. Apart from e-mail and paper mail campaigns, there is a proliferation of marketing strategies that continue to employ the foundations of direct marketing. Marketers always strive to locate the coordinates of the 4-D marketing axes—audience, message, time, and place. DM definitely brings marketers closer to pinpointing those coordinates. Here are a few tactics that can be classified as DM:

Web personalization—The World Wide Web was founded on the belief that a global information system could be home based. Web personalization enables marketers to communicate with an individual on the customer’s terms. DMA 2010 attracted a few vendors working on the innovative front in this realm. I met with the founder of Optini (a provider of Web personalization marketing), who works with clients to create customized browser add-ons that can revolutionize the Web experience. Optini’s solution tailors the brand experience for customers via targeted display and search placements not just on the company.com but across every major Web property launched from that particular computer and browser.

 
Mobile marketing—While smart phones and apps have generated a lot of buzz since the mid-2000s, only 1 of 4 mobile users has a smart phone today. So, apps and mobile sites cannot be accessed by the remainder of the mobile audience. Text/SMS marketing continues to be the mobile marketer’s best friend. Peter Johnson from MMA (Mobile Marketing Association) presented a SMS marketing campaign case study by Jiffy Lube that increased new-to-brand opt-in leads by 50% and produced larger-than-previous conversion rates.

Search marketing—Keyword searches and content overload provide the direct marketer with a rich insight into the customer’s educational needs, product wants, and decision triggers. Companies such as Google and Amazon have pioneered the personalization approach and make recommendations on content and product based on usage and consumption patterns.

Social media—Unlike the digital tactics described above, social media marketing is where customers prefer to converse about the brand with other customers, and not the sellers. Approximately 160 million unique visitors in the United States spend much of their time (more than 5 hours per unique visitor) on social media, according to Nielsen. Ad Age predicts that by 2013, social media marketing allocation will grow over 4-fold, to about $5 billion. Many marketers in the pharma/healthcare spaces are still unsure of how to use this medium to converse with patients and physicians. At the very least, the social media happen to be the ideal place to listen to what your customers think about you.

The proliferation in new marketing techniques has multiplied advertisers’ choices, and advertisers will have to make tough decisions because of increased marketing accountability. From DM’s earliest days, measurement has been the driver of its methodology, and success or failure could easily be demonstrated with the correct accountability plan. With digital being a highly measurable medium, media buying decisions can now be made on an engagement basis (cost per click/conversion/download), as opposed to the classic reach-and-frequency model. It’s no surprise, then, that digital marketing would be direct.

As an advertiser once said, “I know half my advertising dollars are wasted; I just don’t know which half.” Which half will your marketing activity be part of when that tough decision is made? 

Abel Rajan, MS
Director of Strategy and Analytics, Strategic Services
HealthEd

 

What social media can tell us about the patient journey

Those of you who attended our presentation this morning at EXL Digital Pharma West can view our slides courtesy of SlideShare:

ExL Digital Pharma West Presentation June 2010

If you weren't able to attend, here are some key takeaways:

• Quantitative measures of pharma buzz can be misleading
• Using qualitative analysis can provide a robust alternative, particularly when findings are put into the context of the patient journey
• The patient journey has far-reaching usefulness for brands: It can provide the building blocks for all phases of a consumer marketing program
• Key intervention points we found along the rheumatoid arthritis journey included Diagnosis, Transition to Engagement, Treatment Initiation, and Moving Forward Through Setbacks
• Pharma brands can use social media conversations to create their own journeys and identify key intervention points, educational needs, and marketing implications along the way

Jeff Greene
Director of Strategic Services
HealthEd

A New Era of Media Content Sponsored by Pharma?

TLC.com recently launched “A Conception Story”, a Web-only reality series that follows the lives of six “dynamic” young (or young-ish) women in their attempts to conceive. And “the idea came not from producers at the network but rather from First Response, a brand by Church and Dwight that makes pregnancy, ovulation, and fertility kits,” according to an article in the New York Times.

Pharma initiating and sponsoring content creation! I decided to take a closer look, to see how the model held up, whether it benefited its audience and sponsor, and whether the same model could be used by other pharmaceutical marketers. Here’s what I found.

 

A good mix of patient-friendly content, but some sponsorship awkwardness

Videos about its 6 heroines form the core of the series, accompanied by the usual online toolbox: blogs that invite comments, discussion boards, educational resources, expert opinions, and partnerships with credible organizations such as the March of Dimes. Though none of it seems remarkably innovative, the package as a whole is harmonious and convincing, especially because the backdrop of the women’s stories infuses the whole site with empathy and relevance.

Much less successful is the repetition of the same, lengthy sponsorship message that appears before the viewer sees any of the women’s stories. This actually dissuaded me from spending more time watching valuable videos. The series needs to test and refine its balance of content and promotion, or risk losing its audience.

 

A sensible format

Television-based reality series often sensationalize the banal or the grotesque and encourage their subjects to expose themselves to the point of ridicule. Though blogs and vlogs created by “everyday people” may be more sincerely motivated, they can also be distressingly mediocre. The format of “A Conception Story” takes the best of both worlds. The women record their own stories, but professionals do the final editing, presenting the women in their best light. The narrative of the clips is tight; the emotions are sincere.

 

The right medium for the right topic

Infertility, and I speak from experience, is tied in with sexuality, social norms, uncontrollable emotions, hormonal fluctuations, and a frightening awareness of the passage of time. It can impact your behavior toward loved ones and your performance at work (especially when you have to skip out to yet another unexplainable doctor’s appointment). Being able to explore videos and resources from the relative privacy of a computer suits the intimacy of the topic, framing it as a meaningful conversation rather than as a voyeuristic take on another person’s life. Moreover, that empathetic, real-world tone may also encourage women to join the series’ online community.

 

Viral potential and extended shelf life

I predict “A Conception Story” will make the rounds quickly enough, especially since it will benefit from the already established audience of TLC.com (as opposed to a more obscure brand.com destination). It may even garner repeated visits over a longer time, because it covers a relatively broad range of situations, from conception through prolonged infertility. A woman could come back to the site time and again because she has identified with one of the series’ heroines or because she has moved along in her journey and is looking for different content and different forms of support.

 

Potential pitfalls

The makers of the show will have to navigate the tensions between sponsorship and authenticity. Too much pushing of product and they can lose credibility—and their audience.

Conversely, giving consumers so open a platform presents its own risks, especially with a topic as controversial as reproduction. In her blog, one of the women links to a music video that references abortion. What if she were to take a virulent stance on reproductive rights? What kind of pressure would that create on Church and Dwight?

Finally, committing to a series with real people without knowing where their journey can take them isn’t exactly for the faint of heart. What if one of the women were to remain infertile over a very long haul? Would First Response marketers still want to document her story even if she chose to adopt—and stopped using their products? Or what if the story took an even worse turn? I’ve known marriages that have come undone over the stresses of infertility. Is that also something that the brand would choose to follow? And if not, how would that affect the audience?

Any marketing situation in which consumers are allowed to express themselves directly holds a very real potential for PR disasters as well as victories. It’s best to be prepared…

 

A model for other pharmaceutical marketers?

Overall, I think “A Conception Story” will benefit both its audience and the makers of First Response products (as long as the company fine-tunes its balance of content and sponsorship). But First Response products are OTC. Would the approach be effective for the marketing and education about prescribed products, which require laborious documentation of frightening side effects and necessitate adverse event reporting? Tough to say.

And would content like this even stand a chance of making it through regulatory if it weren't about an OTC product? The recent warning letter issued to Novartis from the FDA indicates it's less likely to than it was two weeks ago when "A Conception Story" was introduced online.

In any case, pharmaceutical marketers will have to be careful if they want to emulate this sponsorship model. They will need to make the decision on a case-by-case basis only, and never lose sight of the interests of their primary constituents. Patients.

 

Megan Beardsley

Digital Creative Director

HealthEd

Our Effort in Haiti - A Journey of Transformation

On February 19, 2010, we, Jeanne Sica and Kate Barry, embarked on a trip that will forever change our lives and our views on humanity. We traveled to Port-au-Prince, Haiti, with the R.E.L.I.E.F. Foundation, a branch of the nonprofit organization Clean the World. For the next 5 days, we would concentrate all our energy on providing humanitarian relief for the Haitian people suffering because of the earthquake that had rocked the already impoverished country.

We arrived at the New Life Children’s Home in the early hours of Saturday and proceeded to set up our campsite and unload the 20,000 lb of supplies we had brought with us in the underbelly of our chartered Boeing 737. Not much sleep was had to prepare us for the next days of labor in the summerlike heat. We spent our daytime hours removing rubble, organizing and distributing supplies, building latrines and shower facilities, playing with the orphaned and sick children, and building temporary housing. At night, we crowded around the giant mango tree that served as the focal point of the compound, singing songs and getting to know the loving and captivating children.

To see the devastation in person was a life-altering experience. Driving through the ravaged streets of Port-au-Prince, we couldn’t help but shield our faces from the garbage-ridden city filled with feces and human decay. We were forced to wear filtered face masks and sunglasses to protect ourselves from the thick black smoke that rose from mountains of burning garbage and permeated the city’s air supply.

Somewhat of a daily routine seemed to have resumed among the Haitian people, but without much normalcy. Children will not be able to return to school for up to 3 years.  There are no jobs to be had for anyone, save for those few souls working to rebuild their homes.  The living conditions in Haiti are deplorable, due only in part as a result of the quake.  It is exemplified by poorly paved roads, lack of sewers, little electricity, limited running water, and few toilet facilities. There is no infrastructure and no active government to speak of.  The capitol building and national palace lie in rubble, as do the lives of the people around them.

We met children who had lost limbs saving loved ones, only to learn that other family members had suffered a worse fate. We met reverends, priests, and pastors whose churches were the only structures that still stood among the debris of the schools and orphanages they had spent years of their lives building. We met Miriam, the compassionate, selfless, and jovial woman responsible for founding the New Life Children’s Home and for providing our group of 120 volunteers with a safe haven closed off from the destruction of the city. She made us want to push ourselves harder—mentally, physically, and emotionally—to open our ears to children’s stories and see the heartbreak in their eyes and to make life a little easier for the people suffering so deeply.  She said both solemnly and assertively, “My biggest fear is what’s going to happen when people forget or move on. When the media leaves and we’re no longer in the news.  Haiti still needs help. And will need help for a long time.”

Monday, the last scheduled day of the trip, was time well spent with the children at the orphanage. We played basketball, pushed the children on swings, made arts and crafts, and played tag. More than anything the children just wanted to be held, hugged, and talked to. Hearts were broken as we packed up our supplies (most of which were donated to the orphanage) and left these wonderful children behind with our hearts aching and the sense that our lives would never be the same.

Because of 2 aftershocks that occurred our last day in Haiti, there was an electrical power outage on the runway at the airport, and no planes were allowed to land. The terminal had been condemned after the earthquake, so we were confined to the tarmac outside the building. This is where we spent the next 18 hours with limited sanitation facilities, no cover, and no accurate information on the possibility of our charter plane’s landing clearance. We thank our guardian angels, the United States Air Force, for watching over us and providing us with water, MREs (meals ready to eat), and cots. We arose to the sound of the captain’s voice at 5:30 AM as the sun rose, and finally, at 11 AM, as the temperature reached 90°F, our salvation arrived and we were able to return to our wonderful country.

What we want the civilized world to know, in the words of the mayor of Coral Gables in Miami, Florida (who accompanied us on this trip), is that “Haiti has not given up in the face of such odds. They wake up every day and face their challenges with the conviction that God will provide and that times will get better. I pray that I can exhibit that same positive attitude when something beyond my control goes wrong or a challenge is thrown in my path. We are back from the mission, but the impressions of Haiti and its people will remain a part of my life forever.” We share his sentiment 100%.

We would like to thank all who made this trip possible and those who we know will continue to keep Haiti and its people in their hearts and minds. We must remember that relief does not end with this one journey. This is only the beginning of what may be a 30-year struggle to rebuild their city.

To help those affected by the earthquake, please visit:

• The New Life Children’s Home
• The R.E.L.I.E.F Foundation
• Clean the World

Thank you,

Jeanne Sica & Kate Barry

Can Google Caffeine lead to improved patient Web usability?

In anticipation of Bing’s launch in late May 2009, Google began to revamp its search algorithm to positively impact the following:

 

Speed

The speed of search results matters to search engine users. If results take too long to download, users will go elsewhere. Why should this matter? Search marketers spend money where they know quality traffic resides. A high abandonment rate of the search engine could lead marketers to believe that quality traffic resides elsewhere. This would motivate marketers to move spend in favor of a quicker alternative.

 
  

Relevance and Accuracy

In my view, these attributes are the most important elements of a search engine’s usefulness.

 

Accuracy: An intelligent search engine should provide in its top results a list that closely matches what was entered into the search bar.

 

Relevance: In late 2009, Google launched a real-time search feature to report breaking news. This is possible because of the creation of newer search technologies and ventures with multiple players, such as Facebook and Twitter.

 

Below are a couple of search engine examples that highlight these attributes:

 

Google Example:

 
  

Bing Example:

 

 

In the example “healthed group” was typed into both Google and Bing; you’ll notice the search engines ranked equally on accuracy with the first listing being the official company website. However, Bing fared better on relevancy, its second listing was HealthEd’s Twitter feed.

 

 

Indexed Volume

Google is expected to increase the volume of indexed Web pages as a result of its recent revamp. This could increase availability of Web pages in the search engine results pages (SERPs).

 

 

 With many of these changes either under way or expected to happen within Google (which owns more than two-thirds of the search engine market share), here are the key areas that Web marketers should focus on in developing a digital strategy for patients (from a search engine perspective):

 

• Web site content—Content that is relevant to the site’s core message is essential. Choice and emphasis of keywords within body and title of pages also are important
• Meta title and description tags—Good ones increase site relevancy and improve standings in SERPs
• Site/page download time—Currently Google places little importance on download time. Caffeine is expected to give more weight to download time. The best digital assets will be those that achieve a compromise between faster download times and better creative delivery
• Fresh and updated text—In the new version of Google, recently updated Web sites will rank higher in the SERPs than those Web sites that haven't been updated for a while. Therefore brand marketers should start thinking about getting additional Web content pre-approved through med/legal, embargoing it, and posting it throughout the year
• Quality links—Web sites that are similar to own-product sites will receive greater weighting, irrespective of Google Page Rank. Example: news article linked to pharmabrand.com in PR Newswire will receive a lower ranking than those linked to pharmabrand.com in, say, Quality Health
• Social media—Thanks to partnerships, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and blogs are being mined by search engines to provide real-time search results. The powers of blogs, search engines, and social media Web sites are finally converging

About.com conducted a study in June 2009 in which patients were surveyed online about their behavior postdiagnosis. Almost 65% of survey participants stated that they would research the disease state, treatment options, and specific pharma brands either via search or specific health Web sites, such as WebMD, Quality Health, and Real Age.

 

An increasing number of pharma brand marketers are now focused on patients and their Web usage. As marketers, let us help our patients be more engaged participants in their treatment process and provide them with up-to-date, relevant information in a medium that is a popular choice for many.

 

Abel Rajan

Director of Strategic Services, Analytics

HealthEd Group

Want to reach African-Americans? Use Twitter

I needed to add a quick post after reviewing some eye-opening data. I'm putting together a strategic deck for a client that markets medications for a disease affecting African-Americans.

I've been combing through Pew data, and found this demographic group lags in certain measures of technology, notably broadband access. Then the data took a different direction.

Did you know that 26% of African-Americans Tweet? Only 19% of Caucasians do, according to Pew Research Center. This is new data, from a study conducted in August-September 2009.

I already knew minorities are more likely to use mobile for non-voice applications than the Caucasian population. Pew confirms this with some nice behavioral details. Of note: 37% of blacks with a cell phone or PDA have ever used wireless Internet, vs. 21% of whites. And in a typical day, 21% of blacks vs. 12% of whites (with a cell phone or PDA) use wireless Internet.

Some older Pew data show that bloggers are less likely to be white than the overall online population. While 9% of Internet users are black, 11% of bloggers are black.

Given concerns by many in the African-American community about that population's lagging health indicators, Web 2.0 and mobile technologies appear to offer a growing solution. These tools should be championed by organizations and public-health officials whose aim is to improve the health of minority populations.

According to Pew, the data justify it.

Jeff Greene
Director of Strategic Services
HealthEd Group

Twitter vs. Facebook vs. Twitter vs. ...

It's a good week for conferences, if you're searching for the future of Health 2.0.  I had a chance to meet in person yesterday with some of healthcare's leading digital luminaries at an evening Tweetup after Day 1 of the Digital Pharma Conference in Bridgewater, NJ.  On the West Coast, the popular Web 2.0 Summit is drawing large crowds including the CEOs of Federated Media, Paypal and Twitter.

Evan Williams, Twitter's chief, was questioned about his young platform’s growth, plans for revenue, and not surprisingly, how he sees Facebook.  According to Mashable: "Evan discussed the increasing role of Facebook as a competitor to Twitter, but summed it up with this: 'The world is big enough for Facebook and Twitter.'"

Or is it?  Back in Bridgewater, the chatter I heard among pharma marketers was clearly bent toward Twitter, and conference speakers seemed to share their passion.  In fact if you searched all the tweets attendees have posted to date about Digital Pharma speakers and topics, you’d find that “Facebook” appears in only 32 tweets.  “Twitter” appears in 90. (updated 10.22)

Of course the argument is moot without taking e-patients into account.  These are the very consumers that Digital Pharma attendees are hoping to study, analyze and understand.  You could argue that one measure of Facebook or Twitter engagement is the number of fans or followers collected by an individual or organization.  Looking at a select few advocacy groups – the best-known associations of patients with given diseases – a story begins to emerge:

Advocacy	Facebook Fans	Twitter Followers
American Diabetes Assoc.	12,708	1,933
American Cancer Assoc.	166,657	14,099
Natl. Multiple Sclerosis Society	17,999	1,670
Susan G. Komen for the Cure	113,532	9,975
Natl. Kidney Foundation	6,066	832

 

Hold on … let’s put this into perspective before crowning Facebook the leader.  After all, Facebook is older and larger than Twitter, so advocacy fan pages have had more time and eyeballs to work with.  According to comScore, Facebook averaged 92 million unique visitors during the month of August 2009, compared with just under 21 million for Twitter … which means we ought to weight our comparison before drawing a conclusion.  What would the advocacies look like then, if their Twitter feeds had 4 times as many potential followers?            

 

Advocacy	Facebook Fans	Twitter Followers*
American Diabetes Assoc.	12,708	8,563
American Cancer Assoc.	166,657	62,458
Natl. Multiple Sclerosis Society	17,999	7,398
Susan G. Komen for the Cure	113,532	44,189
Natl. Kidney Foundation	6,066	3,685

*weighted

 

When one (tiny) measure of social media influence is controlled for in one (exceedingly simple) way, the gap between Facebook and Twitter appears to close – particularly for those advocacies that arrived recently to the social networking scene.

On the other hand, to truly gauge Facebook vs. Twitter, you need to understand the influence and impact of thousands of grassroots fan pages and feeds, created and passionately updated by e-patients themselves.  Only within that complex and fascinating ecosystem will true healthcare insights from both social platforms eventually come to light.

-Jeff