The Health Wisdom Blog™ (by OrganizedWisdom)

1 in 3 Americans uses social media for health

That's the conclusion of a new report from iCrossing, as summarized in Jane Sarasohn-Kahn's excellent Health Populi. Among the findings:

• 1 in 5 searchers chose Wikipedia.
• People want information they can use -- ratings, reviews, facts and figures.
• Patient advocates are in demand -- who better to tell you what it's really like to live with a condition than someone who's been living with it?

Jane then mentions OrganizedWisdom (thank you) among the sites that are forging the way in this area. I particularly like her conclusion:

There are already a cadre of influential health bloggers and social media mavens who are the Patient Opinion Leaders in their disease areas -- whether cancer, diabetes, MS, mental health, HIV, and a long list of other chronic conditions. Just as pharma companies recognize and reward Key Opinion Leaders (KOLs) for their knowledge of patients and prescriptions, the Consumer Opinion Leader (COL) will become influential for both other consumers and, increasingly, stakeholders like health plans and pharma companies.

What do you look for when you search for health information online? Is there any particular "patient opinion leader" who stands out for you?

Speaking at Health 2.0 North East and 7th Annual ePharma Summit

Connecting online is great, but if you happen to be attending one of these events, we'd love to meet you in person to speak about Health 2.0, trends in health care, and how we may be able to work together to keep improving the health care system.

We're looking forward to speaking at several upcoming conferences...we'll continue to post our schedule as it fills up:

Steven Krein will speak on a panel discussion at the upcoming Health 2.0 NorthEast networking event in Boston, on January 23.  Matthew Holt will keynote the event, and Indu Subaiya mentioned she would also be in attendance.  (I am hoping to attend as well along with our Editor, Pat Washburn).

Later this month, I'll be speaking at the 7th Annual ePharma Summit in Philadelphia, PA on January 30th.  The  panel, Social Media, Blogs and User Generated Content: What's Working Today, What Will Work Tomorrow?, will be moderated by Bob Harrell, Director, eMarketing, SHIRE PHARMACEUTICALS.

Panelists include Jack Barrette, CEO, MOVINGHEALTH; Brad Aronson, Executive Vice President, aQUANTIVE, parent company of AVENUE A|RAZORFISH; Melissa Davies, Research Director, Healthcare Practice, NIELSEN BUZZMETRICS; Daniel Palestrant, MD, CEO, SERMO; Kevin Nalty, Consumer-Generated Media Expert, Formerly with J&J and Unity Stokes, Co-Founder and President, ORGANIZED WISDOM.

If we don't see you at one of these events, feel free to follow our OrganizedWisdom Twitter feed and we will keep you updated with our posts.

White Paper Provides Strategy to Help Drug Firms Leverage Social Media Safely

Over the past year and a half, we have met with marketing executives, compliance officers, and lawyers from more than 20 of the world's top pharmaceutical companies to discuss how they could and should be using social media to join the conversation and connect better with patients.

We felt there was (and still is) a significant opportunity for them to leverage the power of social media to share information and education to try and bridge the massive divide that currently exists between Big Pharma and the people who buy their products.

But meeting after meeting, we would be met with resistance to the effect of, "We don't do social media; We don't want to lose control; We can't use blogs..." and so on.

Being the resilient entrepreneurial types that we are, we pressed on determined to convince these companies that a healthy dose of transparency and openness would go a long way in improving relations with customers. We even developed a presentation called Pharma-Friendly Social Media to try and bridge the gap between these companies and their customers. Still, it was always an uphill battle trying to get these companies to start listening and communicating to their own customers. (If they listen, they might learn about adverse events, which is a big no-no.  Then they have to file lots of paperwork and disclose issues that may impact their drugs, etc.).

One of the biggest challenges was that the FDA has yet to issue guidance on how to conduct monitoring and marketing practices in social media so pharmaceutical companies are unsure how to proceed. And as we quickly learned, no one wants to be the guinea pig with new innovations in the pharmaceutical industry. And for good reason, Big Pharma must be cautious, conservative, and follow the letter of the law.

It is unclear when or if the FDA will issue guidance on the many new issues that have come up as a result of social media, the Internet, and online marketing. Until the waters settle, we recommend each company take baby steps and get involved. Bring your marketing teams and compliance teams together to figure out how to take the first steps.

And step one should be reading this new White Paper just co-authored by Fard Johnmar from Envision Solutions.

Only An Inch Down The Road Of Organizing The World's Information

Seth Godin has a great post today about the numerous opportunities and need to better organize information today.

It's easy to be wowed by what a magical job the search engines do in finding you just the right needle in the haystack.

The fact is that search engines are very good at fairly simple searches, and very good at finding information about single products, services, people and ideas.

But they're terrible at connections, at rankings, at horizontal results. They can't help me find the 25 most important up and coming artists in the United States. They can't help me find six products that are viable alternatives to something that was just discontinued. They can't help me rank the service of four accounting firms.

People are starting to organize real estate data, entertainment content, and reviews in really interesting ways.  And a few new health companies (including OrgnaizedWisdom Health) are just getting started at organizing the world's health information. There's a seemingly endless amount of work to be done, but thanks to the power of collaboration and social media we have a feeling things are about to get a whole lot more useful in how people find the most useful health wisdom and resources.

Look for our official OrganizedWisdom announcement about how we intend to solve this problem later this week.

Why Ning And The Commoditization of Social Networking Matters

Not long ago companies like Blogger (now owned by Google), Sixapart, and Wordpress forever changed the Web by making it easy and virtually free for anyone to create their own blog and become an online publisher.  After only a few years blog search engine Technorati is tracking over 70,000,000 blogs!

Today, at least two new companies, Ning and KickApps, are evolving the Web even more by making it just as easy for anyone to quickly and inexpensively (FREE!) create their own social network on any topic.

Social networking has been around as long as blogging, but only within the last year have these new turn-key software solutions made it plug-n-play simple for anyone (or any company) to create their own networking communities.  For years, people have been creating Yahoo! Groups, and leveraging the power of MySpace and now Facebook.  But people have little control in these walled gardens and they make it difficult to customize their services.  (Yes, even with Facebook Apps).

Ning and KickApps on the other hand have leveled the playing field yet again and as a result the social network has been commoditized.  In fact, in the past few months tens of thousands of people have launched their own social networks.  Ning alone now boasts over 80,000 communities created since they opened up their platform a few months ago with more than 5,500 new social networks created in the past 10 days!

With the commoditization of social networking we are about to see a lot more niche communities launch in the coming weeks/months/years.  The question is, how will this impact all those companies who are spending a lot of money and resources to build their own proprietary/closed online networks?

Web 2.0 continues to make it easy for anyone to publish.  Now it's just as easy to create your own network, open or closed.  You don't need a budget.  You don't need servers.  And you don't need any technical ability. It truly is a flat world for social networking.

This means that the power of social networking is open to your local lyme disease foundation, or the regional network of nurse practitioners. You can create a temporary community for a friend's fund raiser, or compete with the big social networking platforms to create an environment more tailored to the needs of your group. You are now in control and can create any social network you want.

This is going to have a major impact on many companies in the Health 2.0 space as well as the Web overall.  Over the past 18 months we have seen the launch of dozens of niche social networking communities in the health sector focusing on everything from MS and ALS (PatientsLikeMe.com), to more comprehensive health communities like DailyStrength.org.  We've also seen millions of dollars be invested in companies like Eons.com focusing on the boomer market.  And over the coming months we'll see many more new companies launch to help bring new solutions to healthcare.

When OrganizedWisdom first launched we billed ourselves as the "first social network for health" with a mission of organizing all the world's best health wisdom.  We quickly realized that building a walled garden community was not the solution and over the past few months we dramatically evolved our strategy for a relaunch this fall (we're in private alpha right now). If you pay attention to OrganizedWisdom.com, you may have noticed that several months ago we stopped building new technology on the live site.  That's because we learned some valuable lessons early and quickly saw that we needed to make big changes to improve our service, stay competitive long-term, and tap into the power of a world where people are sharing such great wisdom across thousands of blogs and now social networks, just like they have in online forums for so many years.  The changes we are making are not merely technological.  They are about adding value to a world where everyone has access to great technology.

For companies like ours, and many others working hard to bring better solutions to people to help manage their health, there is still a significant need for better information, services, solutions.  The opportunity remains to continue to innovate, focus on quality, and add value in a commoditized technology world.

Is Today's Internet Killing Our Culture? Why Human Intermediaries Are Essential In A Web 2.0 World.

For anyone interested in social media, the concept of the Wisdom of Crowds, or the meaning of a flat world, we highly recommend watching this presentation by author Andrew Keen as part of the Authors@Google series.  Mr. Keen discusses his book "The Cult of the Amateur: How Today's Internet Is Killing Our Culture" and he makes a compelling argument for the value of intermediaries in a Web 2.0 world.

Over the past year as we've been building OrganizedWisdom to help guide people to safe, inspirational and credible health information, we've been thinking a lot about this issue and figuring out the best way to tap into the power of people sharing their own stories and recommendations. 

The biggest issue has been with figuring out the best way to organize all of the great wisdom being shared across the web, and determining the role our editors, guides and medical reviewers in helping curate all of this information. 

These are some of the questions we been dealing with (and continue to deal with) since the beginning: What rules need to be established to guide people to quality information? How do we protect people from spam?  What role should editors play?  What types of content should be considered user-generated? Is a doctor-video on YouTube user-generated? Should we include links to wisdom that are also promoting a specific product or service? And so on...

Mr. Keen makes some important statements in this presentation about the essential need for intermediaries in a world where everyone has essentially acquired their own "printing press". 

To paraphrase, he says in the Web 2.0 world, everyone is able to publish themselves. You don't have to have programming skills to be a blogger.  You don't need to have gone to recording school to produce a video.  Web 2.0 makes it very simple to create and distribute because it does away with the middleman.  And according to many who evangelize the value of Web 2.0, the middleman is bad, corrupt. Gatekeepers are bad.

But, Mr. Keen argues Web 2.0 is not a viable economy because we need middlemen.  We need the expert. Whether in marketing, creativity, or content creation, the middleman helps discover the best talent and polishes their work.  The intermediaries are the core players in any media system whether Web 1.0, 2.0, 3.0. If we do away with the intermediaries we are undermining media because we are undermining talent.  He warns the reality is that talent is scarce.  The core value of the ecosystem in media is finding and distributing this talent.  The ecosystem is HUMAN.  The only way of discovering and polishing the best of the best is a human function. Not an algorithm.

There is a lot we agree with in Mr. Keen's thinking.  That is not to say we are not proponents of everyone having the ability to publish, and create, and share.  We just agree that there is great value in helping organize, structure, and lend credibility to the best of what the crowds are creating.

Because this flattened media is more open to corruption and lends itself to illegitimate characters gaming the system to their advantage, we are seeing the proliferation of clutter, spam, and junk mixed in with all of the greatness, inspiration and wisdom.  How do we know what information is great/trustworthy/credible in a Web 2.0 world being infiltrated by people who are using the same virtues of open media to sell products, manipulate or satiate their ego? 

Mr. Keen makes a defense of a media with formal, official, and transparent gatekeepers because he believes "Web 2.0 is too easy to game.  To easy to play around with.  Too many sites are too easy to fix."

"The problem with this flattened world," says Mr. Keen, "is when you do away with formal gatekeepers, the problem with web 2.0 media is it is increasingly becoming one long commercial break. Increasingly hard to distinguish between paid content and free content.   The whole thing becomes one long advert.   It is becoming more difficult to distinguish between content and advertising."

We are seeing many of these issues being worked out as communities like Wikipedia institute more guidelines, editorial controls and moderation.  But there is clearly a lot more to be done in order to weed out the junk. Social media and collaboration are incredibly powerful, but as the Web expands it is becoming more clear that humans are an essential ingredient in helping monitor, organize and guide us to the very best wisdom of crowds.

New Research Shows How Social Media Is Impacting Health Search

We're looking forward to digging into this new research report just released from Envision Solutions: Diving Deeper Into Online Search. 

The research provides new information about why Americans trust health content they find online and documents how Internet health seekers are exposed to a significant amount of user-generated media (i.e., blogs, wikis and online bulletin boards) and frequent Websites developed by government, non-profits and corporations.

 

Compiled from Hitwise data taken between December 2006 and January 2007, this research was inspired by a Pew Internet & American Life Project report indicating that “three-quarters of Internet users who look online for [health] advice do not consistently check the source and date of [content] they find online.” 

Following are some of the key findings of the study: 

• Internet users’ exposure to health-related user-generated media is significant: Out of 16 queries Envision Solutions conducted on Yahoo and Google (using popular health/medical keywords), UGM appeared on the first three pages of searches 88% of the time.
  
• Online health searchers are relying on government, corporate and non-profit produced Websites for information:  For example, 32% of those who typed “diabetes” into major search engines went to the American Diabetes Association’s Website www.diabetes.org.
  
• In certain cases, wikis and blogs are receiving significant traffic:  Five percent of those searching online for information about the antidepressant Lexapro between mid-December 2006 and mid-January 2007 went to CrazyMeds.org.  This is a popular blog that provides information about the safety and efficacy of psychiatric medications.   

To download a free copy of the study report, please go to http://www.envisionsolutionsnow.com/healthsearch.html.

Physicians Are Encourgaged To Embrace Trend of Online Social Networking For Health

A new article  just out on CMP's ConsultantLive.com, a leading site for primary care physicians highlights the trend of online social networking and features OrganizedWisdom among others who are helping to develop tools and sites to foster these communities.

Online Social Networking Brings Further Change to Doctor-patient Relationships by Sara Selis, Online Associate Editor, CMPMedica USA.

A new generation of healthcare Web sites is connecting patients to each other, allowing them to share information and advice on virtually any medical condition. Despite concerns over some sites' accuracy and credibility, physicians are encouraged to accept, even embrace, the trend.

The Internet has become such a central part of modern life that most physicians are accustomed to patients coming into their offices with thick printouts of information they've found online.

Now, a new generation of healthcare Web sites, following the "social networking" model of sites like MySpace and Facebook, is taking online health content to another level.

These interactive Web sites (see Related Links) -- ranging from efforts by medical societies like the American Cancer Society and the National MS Society, to venture capital-backed startups with names like OrganizedWisdom, DailyStrength and Revolution Health -- not only provide expert medical content, but also connect patients to each other through disease-specific online communities, virtual support groups, real-time Web chats, and other features whereby patients share experiences and advice, and even rate their doctors. Many of the sites feature educational videos and health-assessment quizzes. Others offer an online "personal health record," along with tools that track patients' health goals (such as blood sugar and exercise goals) or send users e-mailed reminders to get recommended health screenings.

As these sites move into the mainstream, they're affecting how patients get health information and advice, how they manage their medical conditions, and how they interact with their doctors.

Click here to read the complete article on ConsultantLive.com.

JupiterResearch: Significant buzz exists around social marketing and consumer-created content in the healthcare industry

JupiterResearch published a new online health report yesterday on the impact of social media in healthcare.

This is an important report because it is the first study that we've seen to assess the importance of "Health Connectors."  Health Connectors, like patient advocates and physician experts, are becoming a powerful and important force in impacting people's health decisions.

The report also answers these questions:

• How many online consumers connect with one another about health issues, and to what extent does this activity threaten or benefit health stakeholders?

• How do health connectors communicate as well as create, consume, and share content, and how does this activity impact marketing strategy?

• How can publishers increase the number and engagement of health connectors?

• Percentage of Online Health Connectors and Share of Online Users Who Looked for Health Information Online

• Types of One-to-One and Social Media Online Users Leverage

• Reasons Online Health Connectors Used the Internet to Connect with Others

• Percentage of Online Users Who Create and Consume Health Content Leveraging One-to-One and Social Media

• Percentage of Online Health Connectors Who Use One-to-One and Social Media in Combination and Exclusively

• Degree of Sources' Influence on Online Users' Decisions to Take Prescription Drugs

• Characteristics of Online Health Connectors, Compared with Average Online Users

• Drivers and Inhibitors of Growth and Engagement of Online Health Connector Audience

• Example of Site Featuring Health Specialists

• Features Encouraging Interaction with Others Online

See OrganizedWisdom Speak at CBI's 6th Annual eMarketing for the Pharmaceutical Industry Conference in March

We would like to personally invite you to see Steven Krein, CEO of OrganizedWisdom, speak at The Center for Business Intelligence's 6th Annual eMarketing for the Pharmaceutical Industry Conference convening this year in Philadelphia, PA from March 7-9.

As social media and online health communities continue to evolve, it is essential that pharmaceutical companies continue to learn how to safely, responsibly and transparently join the conversation online and help bridge the divide that has been widening between patients, physicians and pharma for years.  Learning how social media can help all of these groups work together is the first step to solving these challenges.