OrganizedWisdom Health Blog

Complete Transcripts from Don Kemper Podcast

We had the pleasure of interviewing Don Kemper, the CEO and founder of Healthwise the week before last.  You can click here to listen to the MP3 of the discussion which is about 40 minutes long or as promised here are the complete transcripts:

Steven Krein: Good afternoon. I want to welcome Don Kemper, who is the chairman and CEO of Healthwise, to a very unique conversation that we're going to have today. Unity Stoakes, the co-founder of OrganizedWisdom is here with me and we've got what a lot of people call the information therapy guru himself, Don Kemper on the call.

Don Kemper: Ohh!  That's nice Steven, to be here.

Steven: So anyway, we at OrganizedWisdom decided to integrate expert health content into our platform last year, and we went in search of what we consider to be the best health information online, both as a benchmark standard as well as the best tools for consumers to use. It was not even a question that Healthwise was the clear leader. So we actually decided to partner with Healthwise and include all of its content on OrganizedWisdom as a foundation of expert content to really supplement the really user generated content that we have available to consumers.

So Don, I want to welcome you, and perhaps you can give a little bit of an overview, you have been doing this a long long time, and most of the innovation in the health information space has really come from you and your team, but I'd love to hear in your own words a little bit about your background and how Healthwise came to be.

The Golden Rule To Creating Wisdom And The 9 Tips We're Learning From Our Members

It's truly amazing what can happen when a community comes together to
help each other.  At OrganizedWisdom.com, people like you have been
sharing their best health advice, ideas and recommendations by publishing
WisdomCards on everything from Preventing Back Pain and Healthy Diets
to Alzheimer's Disease and Arthritis -- and the knowledge being shared
is already helping thousands of people who are searching for this
information.

Since a lot of our members have been asking us recently about what makes
a really great WisdomCard, we thought we would share some tips we've
learned from the best wisdom already being shared on OrganizedWisdom.com.

I hope you will use these tips to create more great WisdomCards!

Tip #1: The Golden Rule to WisdomCards
Have you ever needed to find an answer to an important health question and
not been able to quickly locate a straight answer? The most important
thing you can do when creating a WisdomCard is to think about what you
would want to know if you were the person needing help.

Tip #2: Everyone Has Wisdom to Share
I can't tell you how many people have emailed me saying: I really want to
create a WisdomCard but I don't have anything important to say. Well, the
truth is, everyone has important health wisdom to share. In fact, people
share health tips and stories with friends and family all the time. Now
let's get all this great collective wisdom written down and make it easy
for others to find!

Tip #3: Pick A Topic You Know About
Start by thinking what health experiences you or a loved one have
experienced. Have you ever been sick? Or to a hospital, dentist, therapist,
or treatment center? Have you ever used a medication? What worked? Did you
wish you did something differently? Whether you have experience with a very
serious condition, or something seemingly simple, share what you know.

Tip #4: Be Honest
This goes without saying, but the best wisdom is honest and sincere.
Remember, you can remain anonymous if you want so don't be afraid to open up.

Tip #5: Be Specific - The More Details the Better
The more detailed you are the better. Share specific tips, advice, and
lessons learned. Your details will help others.

Tip #6: Offer Practical Advice
Try to share actionable information. Much of the health information
available online leaves people wondering what questions they should ask
their doctor or what they should do next. You now have the chance to publish
tips people can use.

Tip #7: Recommendations Are Invaluable
Tell people what books, websites, medications, doctors, treatment centers,
etc. helped you most. If they helped you, they could help others too.

Tip #8: Hope Helps
Your stories can inspire and provide hope. And this can often help more than
anything.

Tip #9: Create More Than One
We hope you will publish several WisdomCards on as many topics as you have
experience with. Remember, you can create more detailed WisdomCards on
specific products, medications, treatment centers or anything you want.

We hope you find these ideas useful when creating your next WisdomCard...

Don Kemper, CEO of Healthwise, Speaks About Social Media, Information Therapy and Key Trends

We had the pleasure of interviewing Don Kemper, the CEO and founder of Healthwise last week.  You can click here to listen to the MP3 of the discussion which is about 40 minutes long.  We'll also be posting a complete transcript and our Podcast feed of the interview within the next week or so.

OrganizedWisdom decided to partner with Healthwise, and license their comprehensive evidence-based health library, for several reasons.  First because of the quality and credibility for the content Healthwise has assembled and continues to update.  Another big factor, was the reputation and vision Don Kemper has put forth over the past thirty plus years -- his efforts have truly helped transform the information available to consumers and patients. And as a result millions of people now have access to better doctor reviewed health information.

My partner Steven Krein and I conducted a 40 minute phone discussion last week with Don Kemper.  Here are the issues we covered:

1) History and background of Healthwise
2) Information Therapy
3) The biggest trends that will help people get even better access to health information
4) How the web and new Internet platforms play into the future of better health information access
5) Social media and patient participation as the missing link until now
6) How evidence-based health information, patient contributed content, and industry content can compliment each other to help consumer patients
7) The key to getting more people participating and sharing their health wisdom
8) Rating the quality of health information
9) The effect of information windows closing in the health care space and the impact on physicians
10) Solving the challenges of people finding the health information they need when they need it
11) Future trends

If you want to subscribe to our podcast series, go into iTunes and hit "Advanced -- Subscribe to Podcast" add this feed: http://wisdom.blogs.com/health/rss.xml

Social Media Grows More Useful for Marketers, Users

Social media tools such as RSS, blogs and podcasts are becoming more popular than ever with users - and marketers - according to new research from Bluestreak.

The study is titled "Emerging Digital Channels: Consumer Adoption, Attitudes & Behavior" and surveyed consumer behavior and attitudes toward emerging technologies, eMarketer reports.

All respondents to the Bluestreak study said they use email, and 88 percent use text messaging; other forms of online communication were also popular. Some 71 percent of respondents said they use message boards, 63 percent read blogs, 38 percent listen to podcasts and 28 percent use RSS.

"Emerging technologies are offering marketers and consumers an increasing number of channels through which to communicate, although marketers are allocating budgets for multi-channel communication without a clear understanding of the effectiveness and desirability of each channel," Doug Anderson, president of Bluestreak, is quoted as saying.

Other highlights:

Text messaging was the only form of communication that most users did not want to see sponsored advertising on: 88 percent of respondents had a negative opinion of companies that sponsored advertising on text messages. Next were RSS feeds at 21 percent, message boards at 16 percent, podcasts at 14 percent and blogs at 12 percent.

Health 2.0: A Podcast Interview with Sermo.com, OrganizedWisdom.com and The Health Care Blog

Matthew Holt from The Health Care Blog just posted his recent podcast focused on two new Health 2.0 communities: Sermo.com and us (Organizedwisdom.com). 

The transcript will be available in a few days, but you can listen to Matthew's interview with Daniel Palestrant, founder and CEO of Sermo.com and Unity Stoakes, from OrganizedWisdom.com.  We really enjoyed the discussion and participating alongside Sermo.com, which is a social network helping physicians collaborate.  In fact, we plan to do a few more podcasts with Sermo and other health 2.0 companies in the near future so we can keep sharing ideas, help one another innovate, and ultimately develop better health information solutions for consumers, patients, health care professionals, and industry organizations.

Download the podcast here on The HealthCare Blog.

How to Create a Platform That Will Keep Customers Involved and Interested

We just got back from two enlightening days at the eyeforpharma eCommunications and Online Marketing conference held in Philadelphia.  We were thrilled to be invited to speak at the conference this year and introduce OrganizedWisdom to so many leaders in the Pharma community. We thought we'd share our presentation with you as well...we welcome your feedback!

Click here to download our presentation titled, Health Focused Social Networking: How to Create A Platform That Will Keep Customers Involved and Interested.

New Improvements To OrganizedWisdom

Our amazing technology and design team is hard at work building a number of new features for the OrganizedWisdom community based on your great feedback.  Thank you all so much for making great suggestions.  As a result of your comments and feedback, we've just launched a number of improvements.

Here are some highlights of what's been keeping our team busy and some of the upcoming features we're working on.  As always, we love hearing for you and any suggestions you have to help us keep innovating.  We've got some big changes coming so check back often.

New Homepage - 3 Easy Options (New!)
We're continuing to evolve our homepage to make it easier to use our site. There are 3 easy ways to get started. 1) Connect with others; 2) Create a WisdomCard; 3) Find Health Information.  This page will continue to evolve as we add new features so we'd love to hear from you.

Easy Search On Every Page (New!)
We've redesigned our site header to make it easy to search for user WisdomCards or expert medical research from any page on the site.

WisdomWizard Updates (New!)
We've added audio directions to each step of the WisdomWizard.  Press the green audio button to hear directions to walk you through the process. Also, now it's even easier to select a topic using our search technology.  With thousands of health topics to choose from, we have made it easy for you to search by keywords to find your health topics.

Social Search (Completed!)
Now it's easy to find the best health wisdom, medical research, and content that other OrganizedWisdom members have saved. Every OrganizedWisdom member gets their own permalink where they can save knowledge and information.  You have the option to show others content you recommend, or you can decide to make certain content you save a private and only for you.  Use the tool to highlight and recommend great content to others in the community.  Here's a tip: saving content is one element to our ranking results too.

Improved Content Rating System (Completed!)
We've updated our rating system to make it even easier for you to see how helpful the content is. Help the community by rating content that is helpful to you, and indicating which content is not helpful.

Report This! (Completed!)
Our main concern is to help ensure people get access to practical and useful health information.  With your help, we are building a user-generated knowledgebase of health wisdom on thousands of topics. And with your help we will be able to keep the community healthy, safe and Spam Free. Use our Report This! feature to alert us to inappropriate content. 

Healthwise Doctor-Reviewed Health Library (Completed!)
We have integrated one of the world's most comprehensive and useful doctor-reviewed health libraries to provide you professionally created and credible health information on thousands of health topics, drugs, treatments, diseases, and support groups.

Google-Powered Search (Completed!)
Our search technology is powered by the world's best search engine: Google.  We have tailored our search results to make it easy for you to search the doctor-reviewed Health Library or the User WisdomCard content.

And Now Some of the New Features We're Working On:

Personalized Homepage/Dashboard
We are constantly working to improve our design, features and the user experience based on your feedback.  Our goal is to keep finding ways to make the site better, easier to use, and more helpful.  That's why we are updating the homepage to feature the best health Wisdom from the community, and tailoring the page to features you opt-in for. 

Post Your Comments To WisdomCards
Soon you'll be able to add your comments, feedback, suggestions, or important updates by appending comments to individual WisdomCards.

User Tagging
You'll be able to add your own keyword tags to your WisdomCards, and the community will be able to add keyword tags to expert health library pages.  This will make it easy to search content by additional keyword filters and tag clouds.

Internal Messaging System
You'll be able to safely and securing contact other members of the community through our internal messaging system.  This will help you share private messages, get additional wisdom from others, and stay in control of who you decide to communicate with.

Health Groups
Friends, families and health organizations will be able to create and join any health group. You decide if you want a group to be public or private.

Connect to Friends
You can already save wisdom from friends and family.  Soon you will be able to connect to friends directly and save them to your MyWisdom page.  Family can connect to help each other, friends can connect to support a loved one through a health issue, and patients can link to their physician.

Advanced Privacy Features
You are already in control of all of your personal information, and may remain anonymous on OrganizedWisdom. Our new advanced privacy features will make it easier for you to set detailed privacy controls for each individual WisdomCard you create.  Decide what information friends, family, groups or the public have access to and make changes at anytime.

Automatic Updates
Never miss updates to user wisdom by subscribing to RSS feeds on any health topic.

SponsoredWisdom
We already offer doctor reviewed health information and health wisdom from people with real-life experience, but soon we will offer SponsoredWisdom to provide credible and safe health wisdom from the health care industry.

Invite Feature
We're designing a new invite feature to make it easy for you to tell your friends, family or patients about organizedwisdom.com.

Improved WisdomCard Options
We are making it even easier to interact with WisdomCards. With our new WisdomCard options it's even easier to send, share, rate, rank, and comment on any WisdomCard.  We want to make it as easy as possible for you to participate. So please do:-)

One in 20 Web Visits Go to Social-Networking Sites

Online competitive intelligence service Hitwise on Wednesday announced that in September one in 20 U.S. Internet visits went to one of the top 20 social-networking websites - nearly double the share of visits compared with a year ago.

As you might expect, MySpace lead the pack. In September, MySpace drew 82% of visits among the top 20 social networking sites, increasing its dominance of the Web's fastest-growing category. Overall, traffic to social networking sites during the month is nearly double the proportion of traffic a year ago.

Other social networking sites with above-average growth in market share of visits were Bolt (www.bolt.com), up 271 percent; Bebo (www.bebo.com), up 95 percent; Orkut (www.orkut.com), up 63 percent; and Gaia Online (www.gaia.com), up 41 percent.

The trend we expect to really take off in the coming few years is the rise of vertical social networks.  As communities mature, many are demanding more relevant communities and focused platforms.

WOMMA Issues Blogging Guidelines For Marketers - 10 Principles for Ethical Marketing Contact

The Word Of Mouth Marketing Association has just announced a new set of guidelines.  Called the WOMMA Ethical Blogger Contract Guidelines, the 10-item checklist aims to help marketers ensure they are always appropriate and ethical when communicating with bloggers.

"It is vital that marketers understand the rules of the road when communicating with bloggers," said WOMMA CEO Andy Sernovitz. "We're committed to making it easy to be ethical."

From the press release (which you can read in full here):

When companies engage with blogs, they are more open, transparent, and accountable. As companies respond to this call to participate, they need clear guidance on the rules of the road.

Marketers who want to join blog conversation must, 1) decide if and when it's appropriate, 2) do it ethically, respectfully, and with good taste. If they choose to engage bloggers, then these guidelines will help them do it right.

Modeled on the WOMMA Ethics guidelines of honesty of relationship, opinion, and identity, this simple tool helps companies educate their entire staff on exactly which behaviors are appropriate.

"It's an easy way to teach your team and to avoid mistakes that will be harmful to your reputation," said David Binkowski, director of online outreach, Hass MS&L, who is co-chair of the project. "Prevention is a powerful protection."

WOMMA  has opened the dialog for public feedback which you can share here.

10 Principles for Ethical Contact by Marketers

• Review these guidelines before initiating any contact with bloggers.
• Share these guidelines with vendors, agencies, and staff.
• Keep disclosure and transparency top of mind.

Remember: Consumers come first, honesty isn't optional, and deception is always exposed.

1. I will always be truthful and will never knowingly relay false information. I will never ask someone else to deceive bloggers for me.
2. I will fully disclose who I am and who I work for (my identity and affiliations) from the very first encounter when communicating with bloggers or commenting on blogs.
3. I will never take action contrary to the boundaries set by bloggers. I will respect all community guidelines regarding posting messages and comments.
4. I will never ask bloggers to lie for me.
5. I will use extreme care when communicating with minors or blogs intended to be read by minors.
6. I will not manipulate advertising or affiliate programs to impact blogger income.
7. I will not use automated systems for posting comments or distributing information.
8. I understand that compensating bloggers may give the appearance of a conflict of interest, and I will therefore fully disclose any and all compensation or incentives.
9. I understand that if I send bloggers products for review, they are not obligated to comment on them. Bloggers can return products at their own discretion.
10. If bloggers write about products I send them, I will proactively ask them to disclose the products’ source.