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ePatient conference: Ten big ideas (Day 2)

Seth Quillin (the EVP of innovation in GSW's digital lab) and I were in Philadephia this week for ePatient 2010 - a conference that brings together lots of people like us who are dedicated to reaching, engaging and educating epatients and caregivers. Who are they? Patients and caregivers who’ve become empowered and engaged advocates for their own care through the social web and connected communities.

We were both live blogging from the conference floor on WhatsYourDigitaliQ.com, but of all the great talks we heard, these are the essential ideas -

Ten big ideas from Day 2:

1. Medicine is moving online (fast). Kaiser Permanente has over 3 million people enrolled in its online health management system. In the second quarter, those people sent over 2.6 million emails to their physicians. 


2. Pharma's selling cycle hurts digital investments: Product launches inspire big investments, but they're often quickly abandonned once a list is built or a product matures. Patients don't trust that pharma-sponsored destinations will be/stay there.


3. Big trend in wellness = powerful sensors. Products like Zeo let engaged patients be active participants in their own health. More engaged patients need better tools.


4. Medicine will only change by example. Docs have four years of medical school. That sounds like a long time until you think – the amount of medical information doubles every 3-5 years. Docs have a lot to learn and keep learning. New skills (like writing, video conferencing, sharing) can't be taught that way (what would be left out to teach them?)  We need to get to a critical mass of doctors who think this way and practice this way to teach by example.


5. We're ready for quick response: Kurt Mueller at Roska Digital said that 45% of US is QR ready; 95%, Japan; 75%, Europe


6. Your competition online isn't other products. It's everything else on the internet. People are watching the Family Guy on Hulu, not camping out on your competitor's new blog.


7. Medical journalism is "sideways." Twenty years ago, medical journalists tended to open their advance copies of JAMA and New England Journal of Medicine to write stories. The medical news was top down. Now personal stories reflect bigger challenges in navigating the healthcare system.


8. Nonspecific guidance IS coming. Barabara Chong from DDMAC reported that the agency will release multiple rounds of online and social guidance - the first of which should come out this year. But, the guidance will be general, not targeted to specific destinations, like Facebook


9. We need to think about ePatients when we design clinical trials. The big opportunities are making them more participatory (enroll from anywhere) and more patient centric (share clinical data back with enrolled patients to allow them to increase their own health and wellness or decrease their medical costs)


10. Storytelling breaks through. Novartis reported that 78% of docs were motivated to change their behavior after seeing a film about life with cystic fibrosis. The difference? Real storytelling that followed the three-act format of compelling entertainment (The three acts)

Also see: Ten big ideas (Day 1)

ePatient conference: Ten big ideas (Day 1)

Seth Quillin (the EVP of innovation in GSW's digital lab) and I are in Philadephia for ePatient 2010 - a conference that brings together lots of people like us who are dedicated to reaching, engaging and educating epatients and caregivers. Who are they? Patients and caregivers who’ve become empowered and engaged advocates for their own care through the social web and connected communities.

We both did a slew of live blogging from the conference floor (you can read those detailed posts at WhatsYourDigitaliQ.com). I guess this would be called slightly delayed blogging - the kind you reflect on in the hotel bar.

Ten big ideas from Day 1:

1. The new ROI for pharma is sustained behavioral change. Every speaker I heard today talked about it.


2. We have new opportunities today to reach people where they really are. Ben Sawyer, Digital Mill mentioned a really compelling example: New York state is looking at how to put the emergency broadcast system into Xbox Live because that’s what people are interacting with in real time


3. When it comes to games (for health or entertainment) perceived competence is a big barrier and also a big myth. Two presenters showed how quickly most people pick up games - once they stop saying "I can't."


4. Healthcare is increasingly focused on innvoation outside the research lab. We met Joe Shields - the new innovation chief at Pfizer. The announcement of his new global innovation role mirrors similar recent hires at J&J, Lilly and elsewhere along the cooridor.


5. Challenge for innovators is designing information into the things around us; changing daily behavior with packaging. In a case study about GlowCaps, David Rose showed how something as simple as a night light can bump adherence from 71% to 98%


6. The age of ubiqutous peer influence is over. Susannah Fox, Pew Internet & American Life Project, and others talked about how much more balanced the value we put on inputs is today - 9:10 people say healthcare professional are the most valuable source for getting an accurate diagnosi; 5:10 say HCPs for daily tips and advice (same number as friends, family, other expert patients); vast majority choose friends, family, other patients for emotional support


7. Making stories and messages more personal really has an impact. Victor Strecher with HealthMedia showed case studies from campaigns that connected people's personal core values to desired changes in behavior. He not only showed head-to-head compare stats, but also MRI scans. The more tailored the message, the more likely to activate the medial prefrontal cortex – the decision making part of the brain – and the precuneus – where ideas are attached to long term memory. Real science? Totally cool.


8. We need to pass on valuable communities. 4,000 people are diagnosed with cancer every day. Tools like CaringBridge can make that terrible diagnosis easier for almost everyone. The weight on the shoulders of people with cancer isn't just fear, it's figuring out how to tell and support their loved ones.


9. Big trend for 2011 is providing value to patients beyond pills. Brian O’Donnel from Klick talked about the big market pressures on pharma (the elephant: end of the blockbuster drugs) and figuring out how to support brands in this new climate


10. Love this one >> Myth: patient communities are all about sharing and emotional suppor; Fact: they see themselves as being about science, about making people better. Not about hugs. Here here. (Susannah Fox, Pew Internet & American Life Project)

7 ways we use social now: #1 Ask and Answer

Did you ever try ChaCha on a roadtrip? Get googled deep into the unreliable wild wild west of Yahoo Answers? Actually Ask Jeeves? Then you know the first generation of Q&A services was a little slow off the blocks.

That's starting the change. A number of hot new tools and big name investment is redefining search as a kind of social information discovery.

The leader in the field at the moment seems to be Quora, the brainchild of a former Facebook CTO. They launched in private beta early this year to the delight of the early adopter crowd. The site itself features an intuitive interface, Facebook Connect ease of use, and of course - a growing database of Qs&As created, edited, and organized by everyone who uses it. Quora has been such a hit with the technorati that web celebrities have even been spied answering questions about themselves. The Facebook founders, for example, talked about the Facebook movie there.

Is a buzzy little startup enough to start a trend? Twitter would probably say so, but Ask and Answer is more than just one service.

Facebook Questions entered the space last month. The interface and functionality is amazingly similar, but Facebook does have the advantage of a captive audience while Quora is working to build its reputation beyond the early adopters.

The really interesting alternative out there is Aadvark. Instead of crowdsourcing answers, it mines them through friends of friends - looking for people in your social network who have talked about similar topics or queries. That adds a level of social relevance that's incredibly compelling if you have a network big enough to support it.

Go mobile: Five signs mobile optimization should be a top priority for your brand

The latest data from Pew (a notoriously conservative research house) finds that over 1/3 of us (38%) use our cell phones to access the internet. That's up 52% from last year. If the trend continues, over half of Americans will be using their cell phones to access the web a year from now.

That's a surge of change. The next big move in how we connect and communicate.

Here's the question: Are you still designing for the big screen?

Those websites that offer amazing experiences at 17 inches are downright painful to view and navigate on the little screen. That's led many consumer brands to optimize their sites for mobile - either as a m-site (that detects that the user is accessing the site from a mobile device and automatically directs them to the mobile-friendly version) or as an app. Earlier this summer, Google evened the playing field between those two choices by showing both sites and apps in its mobile search results.

Not mobile friendly? If you answer yes to any of the five questions below, it's absolutely time to start thinking about that little screen-

Is your brand WOM worthy? Here's what happens at happy hours, dinner parties, offsite lunches and other causual encounters today:

Person1: Have you seen [this cool thing]?

Person2: No, I haven't heard of that

Person1: Let me show you (pulls out iPhone, iPad, blackberry, etc., and dials up a site or an app to share)

Today, WOM is technology enabled. We expect to be able to instantly share not only ideas, but experiences. If you think your customers are talking about you, it's time to make it easier for them to show you off.

Is your audience uber mobile? Some audiences are more mobile than others. Teenagers, sure. But also doctors (72% of them use smartphones) and IT professionals. What do you know about how your audience uses the computers in their pockets?

Are you advertising in public places or on outdoor boards? If you're seen by people on the go, you want them to be able to access you on the go. Make it clear that there's an easy mobile experience and give them a memorable URL. Who knows - they could be headed to the bank or Starbucks where they'll be waiting in line with plenty of time to visit your site. Great example is the Best Buy minonator app. It was advertised largely onscreen and in theater displays. Call to action was to download an app that would decode the squeeky little credits at the end of the Despicable Me movie. Something fun to download and play with while you're waiting for your popcorn (or for all those turn of your cellphone PSAs to play through :).

Do you have a salesforce? If you have people out in the field or on the salesfloor, chances are they're going to want to share some aspect of your site with a customer. How can you make it easier (faster to load, easier to read, more relevant)? Go mobile. The initial interaction is better and the customer knows they can access that same content on their own any time from any device.

Would you like to make more immediate calls to action? A lot of brands are experimenting with fast calls to action. It could be putting a QR tag on a print piece or a bit.ly URL on a TV spot or even a single click from a Facebook status update. People who use those immediate technologies? Mobile people. If you're on a social network, the chances are about even that someone is accessing your updates via mobile device. And, if you're using a QR tag, it's more like 90%.

Next post: 5 tips for optimizing the experience (not just the content) for the little screen

Rise of the Great White Forty-Somethings

It turns out I'm dating one of the most influential people in the social world right now.

A 40-something on Facebook.

He looks kind of unassuming, doesn't he? Not like a force behind the next big shift in social media. But, he and other 40-somethings with young kids and disposable income are taking over the social web.

I don't know when it happened. It used to be the 30-somethings with their big ideas and the 20-somethings with their play-by-play who ruled the social web. Glibly trading observations on modern life; swapping favorite Daily Show quips; and spotting all the best new music, destinations and eats.

No more, friends. We've been sidelined.

The piracy sites that used to be home to the newest Radiohead album are now packed with episodes of iCarly and Thomas the Train. The fastest rising video on the viral charts is about a mini van - nay, a swagger wagon:

3 million people think that's hysterical.

And, if that's not confusing enough, there's the whole Betty White phemonomon. That's right, the 40-somethings are organized. They used Facebook and other social media to propel a Golden Girl onto SNL. I don't even want to tell you what they're doing for politics - passing petitions and POVs and counter-media ideas en masse.

Think through your own Facebook friends. Who are the most frequent posters (once you "hide" the farm and mobwars people, of course). Chances are they're 40-something moms with workout updates, social goings on, and lots of pictures. 

How will we connect with this newly socially-empowered group? Products are already hitting the market that are designed to be part of the next wave of social adaption - not the full-scale asks for digital natives, but easy moves for the complex age bracket that's both pirating iCarly and promoting Betty White. Check out Zoove for one example.

Creative brief: Owners wanted for break-through clinical innovation.

What will happen to advertising when business fundamentally changes from rewarding problem solving to rewarding solution finding? When knowledge is too big and problems too discreet for any one business to own the answer or even the process to find the answer?

Just tagged a fascinating article on that those business changes by some of the solution-seekers at InnoCentive, Eli Lilly and Hive Pharma.

Their basic premise boils down to two things: 

1. Getting new drugs to market is increasingly expensive and uncertain (for lots of reasons)


2. Drugs are getting increasingly personal (meaning we needs more types of drugs for increasingly smaller segments of humans)

The combined effect challenges the traditional large, fully integrated pharmaceutical company model. If they can’t guarantee blockbusters (think Viagra and Prozac), how do they continue to thrive?

The authors make a number of short-range recommendations to bridge the gap, but their long-term view is to an entirely new model. The winners, they say, will establish orchestrated drug-development networks. This is beyond individual company strategies to acquire and license pipeline innovations. It’s an industry-wide knowledge base centered around agreed-upon standards for digitally representing drug assets.

That probably got a little confusing, right? Inside any pharma company there’s a mass amount of research going on. Some of it leads to new drugs. Some of it to new questions. Some of it just sits there as an underdeveloped asset. Today, the way those companies store that data is idiosyncratic at best (lots of different systems) so there’s no easy way for them to compare or sell it to one another. Which means there’s a lot of duplication out there and a lot of unused ideas (or hints of ideas) sitting on the shelf.

The emergence of a fluid drug development network (where knowledge could be monetized and shared across players) has broad-ranging impact. Not only could smaller players broadcast their intellectual property, but importantly, “foundations or even patient groups could have drugs developed that targeted markets too small for the big players.” Yeah, the people who needed it could fish it out and pay for its development instead of waiting to become someone else’s priority.

How monumental would that be? Crowdsourcing groups of owners who through pooled funding could change – or even save – their own lives. This is the promise of the next era. Not more tweeting about what we had for dinner but more, higher-value sharing and tailored collaboration. 

How will trends like this change advertising? What if we’d no longer be selling a product, but bringing together the people who will create it? Will agencies with category expertise have significant advantage? Or will a new industry crop up altogether? Exciting times.

Top 5 Ideas

I'm a big fan of the New York Times Magazine annual Year in Ideas issue. It uncovers both magical oddities and major shifts in consumer wants and needs (aka: trends). Here are my five favorites from their A>Z index of how our world is changing.

1. Good Enough Is the New Great. An idea I've been looking for words for - basically, "Companies that had focused mainly on improving the technical quality of their products have started to notice that, for many consumers, 'ease of use, continuous availability and low price" are more important'." Think Flickr, YouTube, iPods (vs. photo books, high def and stereos.) Today, it's often more about what's easy than what's the very best. That's a game changer.


2. An Advertisement that Watches You. Maybe an oddity for now or maybe where our world is going. Using a camera and face-tracking software, a poster in a Berlin bus shelter changed its content this year based on whether or not people were paying attention to it. Look away and the graphics change in your peripheral. The technology is improving all the time. Now it can even identify the sex of a passerby and dynamically change the graphics to match.
   


3. Random Promotions. You've heard, of course, of The Peter Principle - people are promoted to their level of incompetence. If you're good at doing, you get promoted to managing; good at managing, you get promoted to leading. Despite the fact that those three functions require entirely different skills. And, then you're stuck in that role until you use up all the equity that got you there. A new study found that promoting people entirely random improves the overall efficiency of a firm. So much for merit.
   


4. Printable Batteries. You probably remember Entertainment Weekly running the first video ad in a print publication this year. The technology to print those video ads is surprising accessible. The challenge has been how to power them. The solution is to print batteries too. This year, a research team at the Fraunhofer Research Institution for Electronic Nano Systems revealed a 0.6-millimeter-thick battery.
   


5. Subscription Artists. I love it when social gets all practical. You've probably heard of productive crowdsourced business models, like Edison Nation, iStock and Innocentive and do-good ones like Kiva and Microplace. A relatively new player in the field offers the best of both - it's Kickstarter. It offers artists a chance to put together business plans and engage subscribers or funders to pay for it. For perhaps the first time, an artist can quickly answer a nagging question: Does anyone actually want my art badly enough to pay for it?

Personal convergence: What really goes on in the living room

Convergence was the flying cars promise of our generation. One box that ruled our entertainment lives - feeding games, music, browsing, movies, telephone and more in one complex stream of multitasking magic in every living room in America.

Here, in reality - where the cars still drive on the road - convergence is much more personal and mobile.

Nielsen calls us a Three-Screen Nation. 

We watch: 141 hours of television a month.

• That's almost 5 hours a day. (A stat Pew echoed in earlier research)
• Surprisingly, that represents an all-time high. The time we spend consuming entertainment on other devices adds on to our overall media experience, it doesn't take away from television

But: 57% of us go online at the same time

• Our online experience at home is in front of the television almost a third of the time.
• Sometimes we browse to complement what we're seeing on television, but more often it's entirely disconnected from it

And: We're increasingly device neutral.

• The number of people watching mobile video increased 70% from last year
• Those who watch video online increased their viewing by 46% compared to a year ago

Oh, and, by the way, we're starting to watch ads again.

• Adweek recently reported that a greater percentage of time shifters (fancy media-buyer talk for DVR users) watched network TV ads during the first week of the season versus a year ago.
• Perhaps because advertisers are starting to get what it takes to be part of our entertainment instead of mere sponsors of it. They're telling better stories, making us laugh and, occasionally, even thinking the same thing we are. My favorite of the moment.

NonProfits and Social Media: Two ideas that will change your strategy

I heard NPR's story about Lotsa Helping Hands in the car on the way home and couldn't get to my laptop fast enough.

If you know me in the offline world, you've probably heard me talk about Carepages - an ingenious little social system that helps hospital patients manage communications with loved ones. It's a lot like a super simple blog that lets patients say how they're doing, what the prognosis is, etc., in one dedicated spot (vs. sharing that same information on phone call after phone call when they really should be getting a little of that doctor-prescribed rest.)

I say it's ingenious because it uses technology to meet real human needs. Needs like compassion and access and impatience and sleep.

Lotsa Helping Hands does it one better. It's a private, web-based community that organizes family, friends, and neighbors during times of need. They can easily coordinate activities and manage volunteers through a group calendar + get updates, pictures, etc. Need a week of meals prepared?  Open seven slots and get seven volunteers.

I love this for what it is - a way to give people something meaningful and useful to do in a crisis. And, for two of the fundamental changes shaping nonprofit digital strategy that is illustrates:

1. People want to help. They'll give, sure, but you own them once they act. There is no single trend that will change the development office of nonprofits more than this in the coming years. Emerging generations of donors want to do more than write a check. A donation is a one-time thing; not the demonstration of an ongoing commitment to a cause. They want to be where the action is. Asked to help - not just pay - in meaningful ways, at various levels of commitment. They want their association with that nonprofit to be part of their identity, not just part of their tax deduction. Colored ribbons were just the beginning.
   
   Think about that Lotsa Helping Hands program with a charity at its center - a local foodbank able to send out calls for packers or canned goods; a hospice able to better mobilize volunteers or letter writers against peaks in need; even Meals on Wheels getting extra drivers during flu season.


2. Online is quickly becoming the most personal thing we do. There's a great moment in this NPR story when Melissa Block asks if it's less personal to give online. And, Omar Gallaga says he finds just the opposite is true - instead, he feels more connected giving online. Gallaga cites a specific example of giving money to DonorsChoose.org, a company that connects students and teachers to people who would like to donate. Gallaga said he got an e-mail from a teacher thanking him and telling him that the money was being used to buy AV equipment at a low-income school in Wisconsin. He was able to see the real people helped.
   
   Interesting twist on "impact." No more is it the volumes of people helped, but the real lives changed. It's connecting givers to receivers in incredibly personal ways.

Want to do something little or big? Check out Bethlehem on Broad - a multi-church holiday effort  that feeds 1200 families in my city and includes a big Christmas-day feast and a free call home for anyone who needs it. They need money, food, time and pass along. Do whatever feels right.

A quote worthy of its own post

From a great Wall Street Journal article about job swaps between Google and P&G and the digital struggles of a consumer product company:

"The worst answer you can hear from an agency is, 'Don't worry, we have a group to handle interactive,' said David Bell, a Google consultant, during a session with some P&G job-swappers at Google's New York office. 'Interactive isn't a group, it's everybody's job,' said Mr. Bell, who himself formerly headed Interpublic Group, a major advertising-business holding company."

The article is subscribers only (but well-worth finding a friend with a login to download):
A New Odd Couple: Google, P&G Swap Workers to Spur Innovation