Sometimes marketers get good ideas from parodies of their marketing. An article in satirical publication The Onion by one "Fred Hammond, director of digital video and social media integration, Tide Detergent," is all about a putative viral video for Tide that has apparently led to Tide making the real thing on its YouTube channel. The article makes Tide the target of a general lampoon of marketers' baldfaced efforts to generate buzz. "And it's so easy to see why this Tide detergent video has the entire Internet abuzz," writes the fictive Hammond. "It's just so funny! But not just funny -- cool, too. If you like things that are funny and cool, you should definitely watch this clip from Tide. I guarantee it's right up your alley!" he writes. "In fact, the video is so cool I had to go check out more at @Tide's Twitter feed!" In the story, he writes: "Hey, wouldn't it be incredible if Tide's unbelievable new viral video and app were just the start of a really awesome online campaign? Just imagine how sick a video would be for Tide Totalcare or the Tide to Go Instant Stain Remover pen." Tide's response was this video. Digitas handles Tide's online efforts. At the link, tthe packaged goods maker said, "The Onion had fun with Tide this week. Now it's our turn. Watch the cool new viral Tide detergent video with cute, funny talking animals, an indie rock song, and an 80's-inspired rock star. The video launched June 1 and has gotten 2,335 views. That is not Bret Michaels in the video, obviously. "Are we trending yet?" asks one of the animals at the end of the video, as a stuffed bird goes "Tweet!"
In an important test of a new interactive storytelling experience, MTV this week launched a new series called “Teen Wolf.” That’s right -- new. While the second season of the MTV series by that name debuted Sunday night following its telecast of the 2012 MTV Movie Awards, a new, parallel, interactive version of the series debuted Monday on, well, a variety of screens -- just not television ones. The main platforms for the interactive “Teen Wolf” series are fans’ own personal screens -- whether they are PC, tablet or handheld -- and the primary distribution engine for it is Facebook, where the series has already amassed 1.5 million fans, making it one of the most-liked MTV programs of any kind. The number of Facebook fans is up about 50% from when the series’ 2011 season ended, and the growth on the social network, says Kristin Frank, is testament to the fact that “Fans don’t stop being fans just because seasons end, and episodes end.” Frank, who is senior vice president-general manager of MTV and VH1 Digital, calls the concept “storytelling without borders,” which is her way of describing what others in the business have been using buzzwords like “transmedia” or cross-platform storytelling to define. The idea is probably as old as storytelling itself, but the media industry began exploring it in earnest in the early 1990s when digital interactive media –- at first, kiosks, then CD-roms, and ultimately networked computing -- but to date has been largely experimental and has not generated much fruit in terms of scaling audiences for programmers and advertisers. But MTV’s Frank says both the media environment and the expectations of fans have changed markedly in the past couple of years, and the time is right for a new form of storytelling that runs “parallel” to a regular TV series like MTV’s “Teen Wolf.” The benefits, she says, are for the TV program (heightened buzz and promotion), the advertiser (oodles of brand integration opportunities), but mostly for the fans themselves, because unlike any series before, the digital version of the “Teen Wolf” series will enable users to be immersed in a way that allows them to experience the stories unlike anyone else, and on their own time, and in their own level of engagement. “You can have a very different experience than your friends can,” she says, explaining the logic behind the interactive fiction, which utilizes elements of social media, game mechanics, and multiplatform narratives that weave in and out, and go off on their own from the mainstay TV series. The effort is possible, Frank says, because the show’s creators and writers are also working on the interactive components and see it as a genuine extension of the TV series’ primary story arc, but on a more personalized level. Facebook users who are fans of the series will receive direct feeds on their walls, in their message boxes, as well as SMS text messages to their mobile phones that invite them to follow secondary narratives along. Most of the content is experienced in text narratives, although sometimes they link to videos or other multimedia content that users can determine how much time to spend with -- whether they go deeper or to other levels, and of course, whether they share them with other friends. Each week, digital fans of the series will receive cues to experience between three and upwards of seven “scenes” of related content, according to MTV Executive Producer Tom Akel, who is overseeing the digital version of the series. Akel says viewers must experience at least three “critical scenes” that are integral to following the narrative, but that they have the flexibility of experiencing them superficially (about five minutes each) or more deeply (upwards of a half hour). It’s all based on their own self-interest and motivation, he says, making it a truly interactive fiction. Frank says the goal is first and foremost to service fans who feel a “radical intimacy” with TV shows and their characters, and want ancillary ways of experiencing them, but the payoff could be for the show’s producers and advertisers by adding to an already fervent fan base. If the digital series is successful, Frank says MTV will try it with similar long-form content in the future. “We’ve done a good job with our tentpole events,” she says, referring to the interactive storytelling enhancements MTV has developed around big events such as last weekend’s MTV Movie Awards. “This takes it to the next level. At the end of the day, good storytelling is good storytelling. This will only enhance it.”
Boost Mobile is moving from being an amplifier of consumers’ complaints about their wireless providers to showing how it can solve those problems in a new marketing campaign for its prepaid wireless programs. The effort, which breaks June 4, introduces the character of the “4Genie,” a being (portrayed by actor and comedian Faizon Love) that hears consumer complaints about their phones and wireless service and then grants the solution via Boost’s unlimited plan with “shrinking payments” (through which monthly payments decrease over a period of time). “Everybody pretty much touts their 4G speed or their 4G coverage,” Peiti Feng, Boost’s director of brand strategy and marketing communications, tells Marketing Daily. “We want to differentiate from the competition.” In the first of three national television commercials, two women sit at a diner for lunch. One complains that her antiquated phone is too slow, but that 4G service is too expensive. In response, the 4Genie shows up and replaces her phone (via a command sounding like, “crack-a-lack-a-shing!”) with a new Android smartphone. “That’s how I do it,” he says. “People don’t really know what 4G stands for,” Feng says. “We decided we don’t need to educate them. We need to make sure they have more fun with the character and drive them to our Web site.” The company’s tagline, “Be Heard,” remains. The tagline was introduced in a campaign last year that highlighted consumers’ frustrations with their wireless networks. The campaign gave voice to complaints found on various social networking sites. “Boost has always been an ally in the wireless world. They like to listen to people and give them what they’re asking for,” says Matthew Elhardt, creative direct at Boost’s agency, 180 LA. “When Boost heard people were looking for a 4G plan that was more reasonable, they offered it.” In addition to the television campaign, Boost and its agency have developed a “Wish Fulfillment Center” Facebook App. The app, which will launch next week on Boost Mobile’s Faceobook page, lets consumers enter complaints about their own wireless service. The 4Genie responds to the complaints via one of several relevant video responses (many of which tout Android smartphones and the shrinking payments program). The television campaign will air on broadcast and cable networks. The campaign will also include out-of-home elements illustrating how Boost is making people’s 4G wishes come true.
So many billions and billions of social mobile page views, so little monetization. This didn’t start with Facebook and its notoriously underdeveloped device strategy. Massive inventory and low ad response has been the lament of social mobile media for a number of years. One of the earliest white-label online community providers to the carriers in the pre-smartphone era, airG, encountered this problem and turned more toward virtual currency models for monetization. “We started getting into the mobile advertising space when it was too early,” says VP Corporate Development, Dejan Mirkovic. “But now we have gotten back into it. We can see that brands can benefit from the targeting data and if we make sure we deliver targeted ads.” Even more to the point is the format itself. “What we have learned is that banners don’t work,” he says. “In social media the only thing that works is a targeted ad that is relevant and a disruption method like an interstitial.” They learned and implemented that lesson in a recent Red Bull Canada mobile campaign aimed at driving users to register for the annual Red Bull Crashed Iced World Championship event. Within 48 hours of starting the campaign with a standard banner, they pivoted to a full-screen interstitial. The effort employed a new set of 14 more precise targeting parameters that airG is rolling out. In this case aiming for extreme sports enthusiasts, the ads were targeting males 18 to 34 with interests in skating, hockey and related activities with other layers for gender, age and location. According to Omar Kaywan, director, mobile advertising, airG, one of the biggest learnings from working with Red Bull and its agency on the campaign was the importance of discrete mobile executions. ”Look at what is really effective [on mobile] rather than just taking what was on the Web and optimizing it for mobile. We had a smaller banner that wasn’t as successful. So we ran it through as a 300x200 interstitial that had frames and was more visual.” The resulting 8 million mobile impressions helped drive enough traffic so that 10% of event registrants came from mobile. For Mirkovic it is clear that a combination of targeting and getting in the user’s face, even for a moment, is critical. “If you are going to show a banner, you will get bad performance without targeting. If you show an interstitial with targeting you will get better click-through.” For airG, which is a virtual space where people discover new people and engage in online activities like mobile games, the nature of the experience is different from the more utilitarian Facebook. While Facebook is a network of existing friends communicating a wide range of personal messages, “[airG] is more entertainment-oriented,” he says. The company has over 6.5 million active users generating billions of impressions a month. “This is a service where people can accept disruptions because of the value proposition,” he adds. In a recent survey of 30,000 of its users, airG found that 26% have already engaged with a rich media or video ad unit. More than 70% of those who viewed a video ad spent up to 30 seconds with it. “To get good click-through rates you have to look at interstitials and disrupt the service slightly,” says Mirkovic. “It may make some customers angry, but you need a model that works.”
Sometimes marketers get good ideas from parodies of their marketing. An article in satirical publication The Onion by one "Fred Hammond, director of digital video and social media integration, Tide Detergent," is all about a putative viral video for Tide that has apparently led to Tide making the real thing on its YouTube channel. The article makes Tide the target of a general lampoon of marketers' baldfaced efforts to generate buzz. "And it's so easy to see why this Tide detergent video has the entire Internet abuzz," writes the fictive Hammond. "It's just so funny! But not just funny -- cool, too. If you like things that are funny and cool, you should definitely watch this clip from Tide. I guarantee it's right up your alley!" he writes. "In fact, the video is so cool I had to go check out more at @Tide's Twitter feed!" In the story, he writes: "Hey, wouldn't it be incredible if Tide's unbelievable new viral video and app were just the start of a really awesome online campaign? Just imagine how sick a video would be for Tide Totalcare or the Tide to Go Instant Stain Remover pen." Tide's response was this video. Digitas handles Tide's online efforts. At the link, tthe packaged goods maker said, "The Onion had fun with Tide this week. Now it's our turn. Watch the cool new viral Tide detergent video with cute, funny talking animals, an indie rock song, and an 80's-inspired rock star. The video launched June 1 and has gotten 2,335 views. That is not Bret Michaels in the video, obviously. "Are we trending yet?" asks one of the animals at the end of the video, as a stuffed bird goes "Tweet!"
In an important test of a new interactive storytelling experience, MTV this week launched a new series called “Teen Wolf.” That’s right -- new. While the second season of the MTV series by that name debuted Sunday night following its telecast of the 2012 MTV Movie Awards, a new, parallel, interactive version of the series debuted Monday on, well, a variety of screens -- just not television ones. The main platforms for the interactive “Teen Wolf” series are fans’ own personal screens -- whether they are PC, tablet or handheld -- and the primary distribution engine for it is Facebook, where the series has already amassed 1.5 million fans, making it one of the most-liked MTV programs of any kind. The number of Facebook fans is up about 50% from when the series’ 2011 season ended, and the growth on the social network, says Kristin Frank, is testament to the fact that “Fans don’t stop being fans just because seasons end, and episodes end.” Frank, who is senior vice president-general manager of MTV and VH1 Digital, calls the concept “storytelling without borders,” which is her way of describing what others in the business have been using buzzwords like “transmedia” or cross-platform storytelling to define. The idea is probably as old as storytelling itself, but the media industry began exploring it in earnest in the early 1990s when digital interactive media –- at first, kiosks, then CD-roms, and ultimately networked computing -- but to date has been largely experimental and has not generated much fruit in terms of scaling audiences for programmers and advertisers. But MTV’s Frank says both the media environment and the expectations of fans have changed markedly in the past couple of years, and the time is right for a new form of storytelling that runs “parallel” to a regular TV series like MTV’s “Teen Wolf.” The benefits, she says, are for the TV program (heightened buzz and promotion), the advertiser (oodles of brand integration opportunities), but mostly for the fans themselves, because unlike any series before, the digital version of the “Teen Wolf” series will enable users to be immersed in a way that allows them to experience the stories unlike anyone else, and on their own time, and in their own level of engagement. “You can have a very different experience than your friends can,” she says, explaining the logic behind the interactive fiction, which utilizes elements of social media, game mechanics, and multiplatform narratives that weave in and out, and go off on their own from the mainstay TV series. The effort is possible, Frank says, because the show’s creators and writers are also working on the interactive components and see it as a genuine extension of the TV series’ primary story arc, but on a more personalized level. Facebook users who are fans of the series will receive direct feeds on their walls, in their message boxes, as well as SMS text messages to their mobile phones that invite them to follow secondary narratives along. Most of the content is experienced in text narratives, although sometimes they link to videos or other multimedia content that users can determine how much time to spend with -- whether they go deeper or to other levels, and of course, whether they share them with other friends. Each week, digital fans of the series will receive cues to experience between three and upwards of seven “scenes” of related content, according to MTV Executive Producer Tom Akel, who is overseeing the digital version of the series. Akel says viewers must experience at least three “critical scenes” that are integral to following the narrative, but that they have the flexibility of experiencing them superficially (about five minutes each) or more deeply (upwards of a half hour). It’s all based on their own self-interest and motivation, he says, making it a truly interactive fiction. Frank says the goal is first and foremost to service fans who feel a “radical intimacy” with TV shows and their characters, and want ancillary ways of experiencing them, but the payoff could be for the show’s producers and advertisers by adding to an already fervent fan base. If the digital series is successful, Frank says MTV will try it with similar long-form content in the future. “We’ve done a good job with our tentpole events,” she says, referring to the interactive storytelling enhancements MTV has developed around big events such as last weekend’s MTV Movie Awards. “This takes it to the next level. At the end of the day, good storytelling is good storytelling. This will only enhance it.”
Boost Mobile is moving from being an amplifier of consumers’ complaints about their wireless providers to showing how it can solve those problems in a new marketing campaign for its prepaid wireless programs. The effort, which breaks June 4, introduces the character of the “4Genie,” a being (portrayed by actor and comedian Faizon Love) that hears consumer complaints about their phones and wireless service and then grants the solution via Boost’s unlimited plan with “shrinking payments” (through which monthly payments decrease over a period of time). “Everybody pretty much touts their 4G speed or their 4G coverage,” Peiti Feng, Boost’s director of brand strategy and marketing communications, tells Marketing Daily. “We want to differentiate from the competition.” In the first of three national television commercials, two women sit at a diner for lunch. One complains that her antiquated phone is too slow, but that 4G service is too expensive. In response, the 4Genie shows up and replaces her phone (via a command sounding like, “crack-a-lack-a-shing!”) with a new Android smartphone. “That’s how I do it,” he says. “People don’t really know what 4G stands for,” Feng says. “We decided we don’t need to educate them. We need to make sure they have more fun with the character and drive them to our Web site.” The company’s tagline, “Be Heard,” remains. The tagline was introduced in a campaign last year that highlighted consumers’ frustrations with their wireless networks. The campaign gave voice to complaints found on various social networking sites. “Boost has always been an ally in the wireless world. They like to listen to people and give them what they’re asking for,” says Matthew Elhardt, creative direct at Boost’s agency, 180 LA. “When Boost heard people were looking for a 4G plan that was more reasonable, they offered it.” In addition to the television campaign, Boost and its agency have developed a “Wish Fulfillment Center” Facebook App. The app, which will launch next week on Boost Mobile’s Faceobook page, lets consumers enter complaints about their own wireless service. The 4Genie responds to the complaints via one of several relevant video responses (many of which tout Android smartphones and the shrinking payments program). The television campaign will air on broadcast and cable networks. The campaign will also include out-of-home elements illustrating how Boost is making people’s 4G wishes come true.
So many billions and billions of social mobile page views, so little monetization. This didn’t start with Facebook and its notoriously underdeveloped device strategy. Massive inventory and low ad response has been the lament of social mobile media for a number of years. One of the earliest white-label online community providers to the carriers in the pre-smartphone era, airG, encountered this problem and turned more toward virtual currency models for monetization. “We started getting into the mobile advertising space when it was too early,” says VP Corporate Development, Dejan Mirkovic. “But now we have gotten back into it. We can see that brands can benefit from the targeting data and if we make sure we deliver targeted ads.” Even more to the point is the format itself. “What we have learned is that banners don’t work,” he says. “In social media the only thing that works is a targeted ad that is relevant and a disruption method like an interstitial.” They learned and implemented that lesson in a recent Red Bull Canada mobile campaign aimed at driving users to register for the annual Red Bull Crashed Iced World Championship event. Within 48 hours of starting the campaign with a standard banner, they pivoted to a full-screen interstitial. The effort employed a new set of 14 more precise targeting parameters that airG is rolling out. In this case aiming for extreme sports enthusiasts, the ads were targeting males 18 to 34 with interests in skating, hockey and related activities with other layers for gender, age and location. According to Omar Kaywan, director, mobile advertising, airG, one of the biggest learnings from working with Red Bull and its agency on the campaign was the importance of discrete mobile executions. ”Look at what is really effective [on mobile] rather than just taking what was on the Web and optimizing it for mobile. We had a smaller banner that wasn’t as successful. So we ran it through as a 300x200 interstitial that had frames and was more visual.” The resulting 8 million mobile impressions helped drive enough traffic so that 10% of event registrants came from mobile. For Mirkovic it is clear that a combination of targeting and getting in the user’s face, even for a moment, is critical. “If you are going to show a banner, you will get bad performance without targeting. If you show an interstitial with targeting you will get better click-through.” For airG, which is a virtual space where people discover new people and engage in online activities like mobile games, the nature of the experience is different from the more utilitarian Facebook. While Facebook is a network of existing friends communicating a wide range of personal messages, “[airG] is more entertainment-oriented,” he says. The company has over 6.5 million active users generating billions of impressions a month. “This is a service where people can accept disruptions because of the value proposition,” he adds. In a recent survey of 30,000 of its users, airG found that 26% have already engaged with a rich media or video ad unit. More than 70% of those who viewed a video ad spent up to 30 seconds with it. “To get good click-through rates you have to look at interstitials and disrupt the service slightly,” says Mirkovic. “It may make some customers angry, but you need a model that works.”
Media companies know a thing or two about economics forcing change. In Sunday's Orange County Register, syndicated columnist Mark Steyn muses on world economics and how the working years of Western civilization continue to shrink. Take a line or two of what he writes out of context, and the sentiment applies to the shifts in online advertising, marketing and journalism. He believes "too many citizens of advanced Western democracies live a life they have not earned, and are not willing to earn." These universal concepts point to the central metaphor of change. During the weekend in an email, MediaPost President Jeff Loechner pointed to a thought-provoking post written by Gigaom's Mathew Ingram, who refers to commentary from Tim McGuire, former newspaper editor, Pulitzer judge and now journalism professor at Arizona State University. In the commentary, Ingram writes: "To survive, become a guide and a helper." I believe both can build trust. He explains how McGuire views the future of traditional media players: "traditional newspapers are profoundly troubled, but not necessarily doomed." McGuire believes that by no means will paywalls or mobile apps allow media companies to return to "the glory days." They simply must adapt to declining print revenue by changing to survive. Aside from traditional newspapers, all businesses must reinvent themselves and become open to change. Last week, Google took heat from media and search marketers for changing the free Google Product Search into the paid Google Shopping service. At the Sugarland concert at the Verizon Wireless Amphitheater Saturday night, attendees had the opportunity to vote on the lineup of songs by texting requests to a specific number. Consumers always had a voice, even before the Internet. They spoke by either opening or closing their wallets at brick-and-mortar stores. Now they also speak through comments on Web sites and recommendation engines that get sourced and served up across the Internet where 2.3 billion global Internet users searched, shopped and surfed for information in 2011, according to 2012 Internet trend data from Mary Meeker at Kleiner Perkins Caufield Byers. For the three-month period ending April 30, 36% of mobile subscribers, up 0.3 percentage points, accessed social networks or blogs, according to comScore. The data firm reported that 234 million Americans age 13 and older used mobile devices during the same time frame. The rise in mobile use reflects one change forced by economics, not only advancements in technology. It required executives at media, search and marketing companies to change their thinking on respective business strategies and how they would earn the respect of consumers online, as they did in stores. Early on, search engines, brands, and media companies earned the respect of people searching and consuming, as well as following or advocating products and services. Economics forced the hand of change, requiring companies to reinvent themselves to keep pace with growth and maturity. It may also mean that some need to re-earn the respect and relearn how to gain it. Trust has become part of the basic life cycle of economic change.
The latest example of how social discovery features can grow a video site or service comes from MeFeedia. The company aggregates videos from about 35,000 sources, and after switching from a video search platform to one that integrates social into the user experience, MeFeedia said it has grown its traffic 20 times in six months from 350,000 uniques to 7 million uniques per month in the United States, according to data from comScore. The company also learned that social referrals resulted in a 55% increase in engagement over search and other ways of discovering videos. Social video users watched videos for longer and shared more videos if they had been referred by a friend. By contrast, users who found videos through search watched more videos but for less time. The engagement boost is particularly noteworthy because it underscores that consumers increasingly are turning to their online friends and fans for recommendations on what to watch when it comes to both online video and TV. Viacom also said in a recent study that TV viewers engage in seven different types of social TV activities each week, which could include watching TV with others, as well as viewing TV clips on social networks -- and they do so to communicate, consume content and check comments, Viacom sid.
How healthy is your Twitter account? Do you tweet informative, smart and useful tidbits -- or are you apt to inform your followers that you ate a brownie for breakfast, sans guilt? Or, you might be a combination of both. I enjoy tweeting my columns, but sometimes I come across a food truck that the whole world, or my 12 Twitter followers, must know about. Stinkdigital decided to conduct an in-house project to determine the health of the company’s Twitter account. Using a Nike+ FuelBand, which athletes typically wear to measure the amount of their physical activity over the course of a day, the folks at Stinkdigital created an Arduino bot and connected it to the Nike+ FuelBand. Once that was complete, the only thing left was to create an account, and Tweetfuel was born. “The idea for TweetFuel just came from an idle conversation about using the Nike+ FuelBand as the basis for a fun hack; the rest came from there,” said Mark Pytlik, Founder, Stinkdigital. “Once we had the idea it took relatively little time to build and execute. We managed to finish everything in just under 10 days. “We have in no way tampered with the Nike+ FuelBand, we’ve just slightly altered its purpose,” added Cameron Temple, Creative Director, Stinkdigital. Whenever a person follows, retweets or even mentions Stinkdigital, the bot connected to the Nike+ FuelBand spins the band around. The more followers the person mentioning Stinkdigital has, the more times the band spins. The company picked up 200 new followers since TweetFuel launched on May 24. As of writing this column, Stinkdigital had a total of 6,600 followers. As our own health can vary by day, so does TweetFuel’s. Stinkdigital is working on ways to keep their Twitter health up, once buzz from the TweetFuel project lessens. “TweetFuel really does reflect what happens on Twitter, so as a result we’re generally a lot less healthy on the weekends,” concluded Temple. “This is pretty much true for our bodies as well.”
The effect social media has had on society and world culture is undeniable. We have witnessed social networks help lead to the downfall of dictatorial regimes in the Middle East. They have been facilitating like-minded audiences across the world to collaborate for good. And, of course, it has dramatically changed how we communicate with our friends and family, as well as businesses and organizations. The healthcare industry is no stranger to social as many organizations have already leveraged it in many successful ways. See below five examples of how social is helping the healthcare industry. 1. Social for Good: Charitable Health Programs Social is an incredible platform to facilitate good. Take, for example, a company called Two Degrees that makes healthy snack bars with the mission of feeding the world’s children. For every bar purchased, it will donate a meal to a hungry child. Two Degrees leverages the power of social sharing to spur additional purchases and donations. The company’s website states, “Our mission is to empower you, the consumer, to help feed 200 million hungry children through just Two Degrees of separation. After all, in today’s world, none of us are that far away.” That is so true. We believe in the power of using social for good, which is why last year we purchased a social, charitable gaming product. One of our CPG clients is currently using the product for its public affairs campaign to promote healthy, clean drinking water. In a branded, memory-style game, players match products and learn eco-friendly facts about those products while making donations towards the Children’s Safe Drinking Water program. These are just two of many noteworthy examples. 2. Organ Donation Process: Facebook Adds Scale, Encourages Organ Donation Facebook itself recently announced it is partnering with Donate for Life to enable users to share organ donor status and link to databases where people can register to become donors. This has the potential to transform the organ donation process, facilitating and connecting millions to save lives. Experts say that the vast majority of people understand organ donation is a good thing and want to donate but for various reasons have never officially registered. A representative for the New York Organ Donor Network was quoted in USA Today about the program: “This is absolutely critical at this time when online communication and social media are really the way people are communicating.” Facebook’s efforts will help millions worldwide in what might prove to be the most successful idea ever for organ donation. 3. Consumer Focus Groups: Mining Today’s Social Web for Health Data It has been said that consumer focus groups are no longer needed; today’s social web provides the largest consumer test market available. Health and medical information is some of the most shared content across the social web. The healthcare industry is benefiting by listening, monitoring and mining everything from Twitter feeds to Facebook to message boards to gather valuable medical information and insights. Wool Labs, a business intelligence company, has been doing this successfully for numerous clients. One executive commented recently in the Wall Street Journal: “The public clamor to share health information and experiences isn’t going away—everybody should figure out how to harness it, rather than hide from it. You have more to lose by not looking.” Of course, researchers and organizations have been mining the Internet since its start for valuable data. But the emergence of social networks like Facebook and Twitter took it to an entirely new and beneficial level, opening up a treasure trove of data from a most engaged and vocal audience approaching more than 1 billion worldwide. 4. Niche Platforms Arise: Sharing Personal Health Information The rise of Facebook has led to other “niche” socially enabled platforms that facilitate communications within like-minded groups and individuals. Mountain View, Calif.-based Genomera is one such company that helps people share genomic information by providing a scalable platform that connects these people and groups. Melanie Swan, owner of DIYGenomics.org, and a partner with Genomera, said that “to really scale we needed an automated platform where it is easy to share information.” Swan refers to Genomera as the “Facebook of genomics.” These niche social platforms allow consumers, doctors and patients to create their own groups and networks to enable better access to open information. WebMD does this as well as other startups like DoctorsElite, CareZone and HealthTap, to name a few. 5. Healthcare Consumers: Social Helping to Empower Today’s Consumer Today’s new technologies are empowering consumers to take a direct and engaged approach to their healthcare and wellness. No more playing the waiting game, consumers are actively reaching out and engaging with health and medical professions. And those professionals are engaging back. PwC’s recent survey found that 32% use social media outlets to connect with health organizations or people with similar health-care interests. And that number is rising daily. Consumers overwhelmingly prefer to interact with their own doctors and providers online, with 73% of U.S. adults indicating that they “would use an online, secure tool to make it easier to communicate with their doctor and office staff” (Intuit Health Survey) and 60% are even comfortable sharing data (PwC Survey). As consumers increasingly turn to digital and social channels, healthcare marketers have a tremendous opportunity to reach, engage and interact with today’s consumer like never before. And that is great for all parties involved.
My favorite focus group on all matters digital is my 20-year-old daughter. For those of you who have followed her and my exploits over the years in my Mobile Insider columns, you already know that she has been both my muse and my loyal antagonist as both our generations come at the mobile revolution quite differently. For her -- and I believe many of her peers -- mobility has always been most about person-to-person and group communication, while for me it has been mostly about mobile’s role as a media platform. In fact, even after three years of campaigning when she finally got her hands on the iPhone, her use of apps was small and narrow. But she has glommed onto the media-discovery and creation apps, especially StumbleUpon and Instagram as well as Pinterest. I was inquiring about her use of the apps the other day. “You don’t ‘inquire’ -- you grill me, Dad,” she usually reminds me. Okay, it can’t be easy being the daughter of a digital media critic who regularly pesters his kid about her media habits in cool professorial ways. “Really, Dad, lighten up. You sound like a Census taker sometimes.” Point taken. In fact, some of her best insights about digital media really come spontaneously. Last night she volunteered that she has embraced Pinterest and Instagram because they are less stressful breaks from the rough and tumble of Facebook. “Facebook brings out the worst in people,” she says. This was interesting coming from a girl who in recent years appears to live on Zuckerberg’s social network and sometimes uses it in place of email SMS and most other forms of peer-to-peer communication. “People seem to look for drama and conflict,” she now says, safely two years out of high school. Her thesis, clarified by the visual nature of these other social apps, is that Facebook’s reliance on text and language without spoken nuance leads to more misunderstandings and hurt feelings than friendships. “I have seen more feuds and breakups happen among the people I know here than happen in face-to-face meetings,” she tells me. The broadcast nature of it all -- the ways in which people in different circles of acquaintance are listening in, misinterpreting, sharing, making trouble -- gets tiresome. “I don’t post anything personal or meaningful anymore,” she says. It just asks for trouble. “I only post about my animals and work.” Her posts are fewer, and the emotional investment behind them weaker. For her, Pinterest and Instagram are welcome respites from social networking as faux friendship. It makes sense. These social networks are not only visual, but they play off of different impulses. I imagine it is possible to make a snarky Instagram picture and caption, but it doesn’t seem to me the natural path for most. It is an app that -- like Pinterest -- expresses through creation, inspiration, sharing positive moments. Obviously Facebook allows multimedia posts too, but its roots as an always-on, text-heavy, desktop console for constant communication is different from a mobile-centric platofrm that is opportunistic, of the moment, and intrinsically visual. Now I have to say that among my age group, in my newsfeed, Facebook is more a platform for sharing positive moments. For my daughter’s age group, I can imagine how things would be different. They use Facebook as an extension of their relationships in a deeper way than many of us who are older. In my Facebook circle the people are physically more distant from one another and are posting in order to keep in touch and share separate experiences. For her, most of her Facebook circle are real-world friends nearby for whom Facebook is just another venue for an ongoing and very personal conversation. But I am more interested in the implications of her insight for Instagram, Pinterest and other media-sharing apps that leverage not only visual communication, but mobility and life moments. I wonder if social networks, especially as they mobilize, start to have different characters and tones. Yes -- Instagram is a simple idea of photo sharing mobilized. But it is also inspiration-sharing, beauty sharing, sentiment sharing. Instagram and Pinterest apps are much more likely to make me smile. I often open Facebook with a mild sense of dread. Now what? I sometimes think. Which is another way to say that mobility may do to social networking what it has begun to do to other media –- change it in kind, not just in shape and size. We have the opportunity to reimagine what we want our social communications to be and even to create new spaces with a variety of moods, modes and tones.