Envisioning 2.0

In an interesting post, Forrester analyst Jeremiah Owyang recently focused on a study produced by his firm indicating that people trust their “peers or people” they know more than experts.  Over the past few years, people have used data like this to explain why online media generated by non-experts seems to carry a lot of weight.  What’s most intriguing about this new analysis is that generic “bloggers” don’t get a lot of credit, while friends, family and well-respected colleagues do.

While trusting “people like me” has certainly had a lot of benefits, it does have a dark side.  Take the debate over whether there is a link between vaccines and autism.  A growing body of parents have squared off against scientific experts who insist that vaccines do not cause autism.  Parents are not buying their arguments.

Commenting on a New York Times story about the vaccination debate, Amy Tuteur, MD discussed why she believes the anti-vaccination argument is so powerful.  She wrote:

“Vaccine rejectionism has been around for more than 200 years, almost as long as vaccines themselves. Over those two hundred years not one of the myriad claims of vaccine rejectionists have turned out to be true. . . . the cultural claims of vaccine rejectionists resonate with prevailing cultural assumptions. . . . Agreement with doctors is constructed as a negative and refusal to trust is constructed as a positive cultural attribute . . .”

Sound familiar?  We’ve seen these cultural trends played out again and again in the blogosphere, on social networks and other places where people gather online to discuss various topics, including health.  However, sometimes trusting “people like us” comes at a great cost.

Earlier this week, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) reported that there has been an unprecedented explosion of measles cases in several states this year.  Parents who have refused to vaccinate their children are a major reason measles outbreaks have jumped this year.  According to the CDC:

“Of the 64 people infected by the measles virus, only 1 had documentation of prior vaccination. Among the other 63 case-patients were 14 infants who were too young to be vaccinated. Many of the cases among US children occurred in children whose parents claimed exemption from vaccination due to religious or personal beliefs, or in children too young to be vaccinated. Disease transmission occurred in a variety of community and healthcare settings, including homes, childcare centers, schools, hospitals, emergency rooms, and doctors’ offices.”

The measles outbreak is one example of how trusting our peers can sometimes have nasty public health consequences.  Perhaps this latest news will help people better weigh the currently unproven autism risks of vaccination against the very real chance that measles can lead to significant complications for vulnerable infant/child patients.

This post also appears on my blog HealthCareVox.

Over the past year, I’ve been reading Richard Meyer’s blog, World of DTC Marketing, with great interest. Meyer serves as Senior Global eMarkeing Manager for Medtronic and worked at Eli Lilly and Company for many years. He is well-qualified to discuss direct to consumer (DTC) advertising and other drug marketing tactics. For quite a while Meyer has been encouraging his colleagues to reduce their reliance on DTC advertising. Last month, he wrote a wonderful post focusing on why many pharmaceutical marketers have been slow to embrace social media communications tactics. He said:

“DTC marketers are great at coming up with a myriad of excuses why they can’t do things because the FDA regulates the DTC industry. The truth is that there are many ways to connect with customers using Web 2.0 that will keep even the most conservative legal and regulatory people happy. We’re all paid to take risks and part of that risk taking is working with internal resources to make them understand that the battlefield has changed.

Over and over again when I recommend tactics in my consulting work I hear the phrase ‘I’ll never get this passed regulatory or legal.’ [Your] job is to protect your brand, and company, from making mistakes and getting letters from the FDA. The FDA, however, does not fully understand the Web and has not issued any in depth guidelines for DTC advertising on the Internet. I am sure that eventually they will get around to issuing guidelines for DTC advertising on the Internet but for now marketers should be leading the way into these uncharted waters.”

I couldn’t agree more with Meyer. This is why I’m pleased to announce that my firm, Envision Solutions, has partnered with the brand monitoring company TNS Media Intelligence/Cymfony and the law firm Seyfarth Shaw, LLP to help drug companies overcome the legal and regulatory obstacles associated with social media communications and monitoring. We have developed the pharmaceutical industry’s first white paper that provides strategies to help it embrace social media without violating DTC promotional regulations.

I encourage drug industry executives and others interested in conducting successful pharmaceutical social media communications to download this free white paper (registration required). We will also discuss this paper during a special Webinar scheduled to take place on September 11 at 1:00 p.m. Click here to learn more.

Today I am pleased to announce that my firm Envision Solutions, and Trusted.MD Network have launched the second edition of the “Taking the Pulse of the Healthcare Blogosphere” survey. This annual poll gathers comprehensive opinion and demographic data from the global community of healthcare bloggers.

Last year’s survey was a great success, as it has become an important resource for researchers, journalists, marketers, physicians and others seeking to learn more about why people blog about healthcare around the world.

If you devote at least 30% of posts on your blog to health-related subjects, you qualify to take this poll. To learn more about it, please click here. Thank you in advance for your help.

There’s been a rumor going around the blogosphere that BrandWeek is distancing itself from its new resident blogger, the controversial Dr. Peter Rost. John Mack, author of the Pharma Marketing Blog, said it first here:

“It seems that Nielsen Business Media, owner of Brandweek — the trusted print publication formerly associated with NRx — is busy putting some distance between Brandweek and the NRx blog. First, the name change, which is evident in the new logo although the URL still has ‘brandweek’ in it. Second, if you go to the Nielsen page that lists its publications, you won’t find BrandweekNRx blog mentioned in the ‘Brandweek’ section. Consequently, if you are a new reader of NRx, you are not going to know the association, if any, between the blog and Brandweek! There’s no ‘About’ section or anything else that will tell you who’s responsible for the blog unless you scroll to the bottom of the page and click on the copyright notice. And who besides me is going to do that?”

The rumor continued to spread in the latest edition of the MedAdNews e-newsletter, Pharma Blogs: Week in Review:

“Last week, Dr. Peter Rost at NRx (formerly known as BrandWeek NRx) and Ed Silverman at Pharmalot reported the departure of three managers from the HIV marketing team at Pfizer.”

Is it true that BrandWeek is distancing itself from Dr. Rost? Last week I conducted an interview with Jim Edwards, BrandWeekNRx’s former author, for a new WebTv show I am producing in partnership with Scribe Media, The Digital Health Revolution. He told me there is no evidence that BrandWeek is putting a firewall between itself and Rost. Specifically Edwards said:

o The BrandWeekNRx logo has not changed. It’s the same as has always been since the blog was launched

o All of BrandWeek’s blogs are listed on the front page of the magazine’s Website. If you scroll down, you’ll see that the company refers to Rost’s blog as BrandWeekNRx and still prominently displays its posts (see screen shot below; click it to enlarge)

o BrandWeekNRx’s traffic has shot up since Rost took the helm, which is something the publication is very happy about.

In addition to discussing Rost’s addition to the BrandWeek blogger roster, Edwards and I had a very interesting and wide ranging conversation. Stay tuned to this blog for more info about The Digital Health Revolution, which will launch later this summer.

I came across this interesting interview in TIME magazine today with the founder of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, that has great relevance for how we talk about social media and marketing.  Here’s what he had to say:

TIME: Why do you describe Facebook as a “social utility” rather than a “social network?”

Zuckerberg: I think there’s confusion around what the point of social networks is. A lot of different companies characterized as social networks have different goals — some serve the function of business networking, some are media portals. What we’re trying to do is just make it really efficient for people to communicate, get information and share information. We always try to emphasize the utility component.

TIME: Beyond Facebook’s exclusive advertising deal with Microsoft, which gives the software giant the right to sell ads on the site, what are some of your ideas about monetizing your 30 million users?

Zuckerberg: Advertising works most effectively when it’s in line with what people are already trying to do. And people are trying to communicate in a certain way on Facebook — they share information with their friends, they learn about what their friends are doing —so there’s really a whole new opportunity for a new type of advertising model within that. And I think we’ll see more in the next couple months or years on that.

Great stuff to think about on a Wednesday morning.

The Society for New Communications Research has published the Spring/Summer edition of its journal, New Communications Research.  An article featuring new data from the Envision Solutions/The Medical Blog Network (now Trusted.MD) survey of healthcare bloggers is in it.

You can purchase this article and additional social media-focused research for $60 at Lulu, a Website featuring self-published material.

Today I moderated a panel at the Healthcare Blogging Summit, which is being held in Las Vegas. John Mack, author of the Pharma Marketing Blog, released the details of a new survey he conducted focusing on pharmaceutical-related blogs. Respondents to his poll believe that blogs that are critical of the industry are more credible.

During his presentation, Mack speculated that his data may be influenced by the composition of his survey sample. Specifically, most respondents to the survey may be industry critics.  It will be interesting to see how the statistics change when he fields the survey in the future. To learn more about the study, please click here.

I’m at HealthCareVox writing about new research from my firm Envision Solutions and JupiterKagan that indicates social media really matters in healthcare.  Click here to read the post.

Over the past year, we have witnessed significant changes in the healthcare social media landscape – especially in the blogosphere. Healthcare providers are beginning to embrace blogs as a means of sharing information and their experiences with colleagues, patients and the general public. Major healthcare organizations, including the Centers for Disease Control and the publishers of the journal Health Affairs have launched Weblogs to facilitate dialogue about important subjects. These developments are cause for celebration.

However, fully embracing social media means much more than simply starting a blog or launching a podcast. It requires making a commitment to engaging in open and honest dialogue with stakeholders. Transparency and honesty are highly valued in the social media arena. However, this requirement has led many players in the healthcare system to fear it. Another reason is that many do not understand why social media is important or think those developing user generated content will have much impact on the healthcare system.
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