UGC and Company Responses

From Larry M.:

This reminds me of a corporate-sponsored site (Dell Ideastorm) that is designed to solicit customer feedback.

On this site, Dell solicits ideas from customers and allows other customers to promote or demote them to show Dell which ones matter most to the entire community.

http://www.ideastorm.com/

From Dan M.:

Dear Adobe is a simple site that allows you to upload a complaint (or compliment) that you have regarding an Adobe Product.

The site was not created by Adobe, but they appear to have taken an interest in the feedback posted on the site, and set up a blog with responses to users’ gripes.

This isn’t quite as sneaky as sending a Tweet back to a user, but it’s a good example of how corporations are responding to user-generated content that is directed at their products.

Dear Adobe
http://www.dearadobe.com/

Responses from Adobe
http://blog.dearadobe.com/2008/12/05/adobe-responds-to-photoshop-gripes/#id-224

And here is the counter point to the social media article

In order to remain fair and balanced, you should see the counter point to the social media article I just posted...this one is titled "The real reason why Pharma hates social marketing"

http://pharmamkting.blogspot.com/2009/01/real-reason-why-pharma-hates-social.html

Seems to me the fear of user generated content that could highlight adverse effects that may HAVE to be reported to the FDA is the major issue. The bureaucracy infrastructure that would have to be put in place to manage this could be more costly that the marketing itself.

Can this content be modreated and managed before being published ?

Would that help with the acceptance of Social Media tools ?

Ritesh

Social Media and Pharma Marketing

This is an interesting article in Adotas published today. Granted the author is from Greater Than One, but the relevance is quite interesting.

http://www.adotas.com/2009/01/pharma-companies-and-social-media-marketing/

Of note, is his statement ; "Over 80% of Internet consumers search online for health information, trusting peer-generated social media content more than pharma company websites and what their physicians say. "

We at HealthEd need to really get to grips with this phenomena and how we can educate and advise patients using these community and social tools.

User generated content can be monitored and moderated. Community story telling, using video will become more common place in the next 2 years.

BK Facebook app

Burger King is offering a free Whopper to any Facebook users who are willing to sacrifice ten friends. (This means removing them from your friend list.) Burger King will then notify you, via Facebook, how to claim your Whopper. Deal ends January 15.

Note that after friends have been sacrificed, it's still possible to re-friend them.

http://www.whoppersacrifice.com/

Interesting..can't believe people will go through all that for one burger, but it seems as if almost 18K already have based on the numbers on the site.

Read more about it in this AdWeek article.

FYI, BK also produced the Subservient Chicken and Angry Gram apps.


NOTE: Looks like the Whopper FB app was the thing that was sacrificed.

Target Settles Suit With Blind Over Web Site

Just a reminder, especially as we practice what we preach, to consider those with various disabilities and their ability to access information, particularly on a brand.com site.

Target has agreed to pay $6 million and revamp its Web site to settle a lawsuit brought by the National Federation of the Blind.

The retail company has promised it will make its site friendlier to vision impaired people who access the Web via screenreaders. Among other changes, the site will include more alt text tags along with images. These tags are invisible to users, but screenreaders rely on them to convert the contents of a page into speech. Target also will make it easier to navigate its site using just a keyboard, rather than a mouse. The company will implement the changes by next February.

Additionally, California residents who unsuccessfully attempted to use Target's site can claim $3,500 in damages or, if there was more than one incident, $7,000 total. California has an estimated 10,000 blind people, while the country overall has around 1.3 million, according to a spokesperson for the National Federation for the Blind.

"There are well-established guidelines for making Web sites accessible to blind people," the National Federation for the Blind alleged in its complaint. "These guidelines have been in place for at least several years and have been followed successfully by other large business entities in making their Web sites available."

Compliance for Life

Compliance for Life will deliver dosing reminders anywhere in the world by phone, text or email. They remind people to fill, refill and take prescriptions and keep medical appointments.

http://www.complianceforlife.com/

Study: Consumers Embrace Social Media Ads

As marketers we often think that consumers do not respond to or react favorably to advertising on social media sites, but a new new study from Razorfish reports that "connected" consumers are more open to advertising on social media sites than we think.

According to the report:

• Four in 10 online consumers have made a purhcased based on advertising they saw on a social media site
• Almost three quarters welcome brand advertising on social networks.
  

The key is to distribute content and features that are relevant to the audience and and fit within the context of the social media site.

You can check out the full article here: Study: Consumers Embrace Social Media Ads

Cool Calculator Example

(From Venessa:) I like how the map presents different scenarios visually.

Especially, how users can make smaller decisions (like clicking on individual states and choosing who may be victor there) and see how that decision affects the race overall picture.

Very in line with how we like to serve up info.

Check it out! http://www.cnn.com/ELECTION/2008/calculator/

Flash 10 is Coming!

From Venessa:

Adobe just released flash player 10 for developers and early adopters, since we do a lot of flash work I thought I’d share what we have to look forward to once the masses adopt.

1. 3D effects – much easier to create 3D elements that would work faster since they’re created in flash and not a third party program

2. Dynamic sound generation – Rather than a sound we pick, sounds/music can change automatically depending on user’s input (mood?)

3. Oh glorious Text controls! - Typography has always been Flash’s downfall but not anymore! The new version offers font control we could have only hoped for (and would have saved a lot of headaches for our Cymbalta Fibro team). There is now kerning, automatic flowing of text in multiple boxes (incase users need bigger fonts) or around images, and tracking control. In all, I think this is the feature that will benefit us the most.

4. Many other features that have to do with performance and API

If you’d like to take a look for yourself go here (just need to download the new version):http://www.adobe.com/products/flashplayer/features/

The adoption of flash player 9 was faster than any player before it – with 95% of all PC users adopting it. If the same holds true, then I predict we can start offering applications, in this latest version, to our clients by mid next year.

Play video games while raising $$ for cancer

Faced with today's economic uncertainties, none of us can afford to take anything for granted. Yet, as difficult as life can be in these times, it's important to understand that learning to be appreciative of what we do have is a gift. At The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society (LLS), we continually learn of blood cancer patients and families who endure terrible uncertainty as a way of life and still take what life has dealt them and manage to turn the proverbial lemons into lemonade.

Along those lines, today, I'd like to share with you Taylor Carol's story.

Taylor Carol, of Dana Point, CA, was a typical 11-year-old boy, into sports and video games. But when he got hit by a pitch during a baseball game in March 2006, his world turned upside down. Follow-up testing revealed something more ominous than an injured elbow - leukemia-a particularly lethal form of the disease--one that does not respond to normal treatment.

During the long grueling months that Taylor was in the hospital fighting for his life, his father, software designer Jim Carol, CEO of Game 7 Entertainment Inc., focused his energy on finding a way to help Taylor and other children going through this ordeal. The result was Pledgeplay (www.pledgeplay.com), an innovative, customizable, online, casual games and fundraising platform.

LLS recently launched Play2Cures ( lls.play2cures.org ), which employs the Plegeplay platform and allows participants to play casual games online while donating money to help find cures for leukemia, lymphoma and myeloma. The site lets players purchase online tokens - $1 per token and a minimum of $10 - to play a variety of games, with more to come. Each token will help fund blood cancer research, provide critical information and support to patients and their families and help LLS advocate for issues impacting blood cancer patients. Tokens can also be given to friends and family, and participants are encouraged to compete against each other for top scores. Carol envisions Pledgeplay as a way for families to bond with one another while doing something positive for other families.

Carol's son Taylor played a major role in Pledgeplay's creation. "For one year Taylor worked hard helping me start this company as our video game expert while he was hospitalized," says Carol. "It was an awesome distraction and motivator. He was our VP of game evaluation."Now, Taylor is back in school. Although there is still uncertainty, he and his family are full of hope and happy that he is recovering. Meanwhile, Carol devotes himself to raising awareness about childhood cancers.This family is a great example of how good things can come from bad situations.

Impact Tool example: NationalGridFloe.com

Great example of a self-assessment tool -> leading to an impact tool ->leading to an action list.

This site helps determine your carbon impact, then shows you ways you can reduce that, and it does so using the emotional pull of showing polar bears on melting ice caps. There is also a tool to create a pet polar bear. Through Q&A, you can earn food and things to take care of your polar bear.

Health A Hot Topic On The Internet

A recent study by comScore, Inc. shows that visits to health information Websites have grown 21% during the past year, more than four times the growth rate of Internet visits overall.

While WebMD remains the #1 health information website from 2007-2008, it is interesting to see that Everyday Health (63% positive change), Revolution Health Network (182% positive change) and AOL Health (88% positive change) have had significant increases in site visits from '07-08, each attracting more than ten million visitors (see Chart below).

comScore noted that their increase in popularity may be due to the fact that these sites have become more active social communities:

"Most sites have become vibrant online communities rooted in sharing experiences and advice, rather than simply being one-way information resources for the consumer," said John Mangano, senior director at comScore, in a statement.

9/2 Ted Talk Tuesday--Jonathan Harris "The art of collecting stories"

Today’s talk was by Jonathan Harris, an artist, computer scientist, storyteller, and internet anthropologist. Harris makes online art that captures the world’s emotions. In this talk he spoke on a topic near and dear to HealthEd, the art of collecting stories. See for yourself at the link below.

Jonathan Harris: The art of collecting stories

Harris looks for stories on and offline and presents them as unique interfaces. He leverages images, words and graphics to tell stories in linear and non-linear formats.

In this talk he presented a few of his projects including the website ‘We Feel Fine’ (http://www.wefeelfine.org/index.html) which searches the internet for instances of the words ‘I feel…’ and then presents those instances in a graphical way, displaying levels of happiness or sadness around the world. Corresponding images associated with these expressions were also displayed on the site. The resulting stories were simple, compelling one line narratives and images.

‘The Whale Hunt’ (http://thewhalehunt.org/) another of Harris’ projects, displays photographs of a whale hunt taken at regular intervals. Harris created unique interfaces to display these images as a timeline or in a grid. Users can sort by character, topic, or even color. This allows the viewer to absorb the linear story in a non-linear format by skipping from place to place within the timeline, and focusing on those details which they find the most interesting.

To see more of Harris’s work check out his website: http://www.number27.org/

The group in attendance today agreed that Harris’ presentation of the stories he collects is exceptional. In each of his sites there is inspiration for presenting information in unique ways, which could accommodate a variety of adult learning styles, something that we constantly aspire to do.

Also, everyone who skipped today’s talk missed Barb regaling us with the story of her near death experience at the foot of Mt. Everest in which she was heroically rescued by a Yak in a blizzard…seriously it was a crazy story…ask her about it.

"Jonathan Harris [is] a New York artist and storyteller working primarily on the Internet. His work involves the exploration and understanding of humans, on a global scale, through the artifacts they leave behind on the Web."

Edge.org

8/26 Ted Talk Tuesday--Torsten Reil "Using biology to make better animation"

Torsten Reil "Using biology to make better animation"

Torsten Reil talks about how the study of biology can help make natural-looking animated people -- by building a human from the inside out, with bones, muscles and a nervous system. Note that this talk took place in 2003...so some of these cool, innovative techniques should now be a reality.

Reil was a neural researcher working on his Masters at Oxford, developing computer simulations of nervous systems based on genetic algorithms- programs that actually used natural selection to evolve their own means of locomotion. It didn't take long until he realized the commercial potential of these lifelike characters. In 2001 he capitalized on this lucrative adjunct to his research, and cofounded NaturalMotion. Since then the company has produced motion simulation programs like Euphoria and Morpheme, state of the art packages designed to drastically cut the time and expense of game development, and create animated worlds as real as the one outside your front door. Animation and special effects created with Endorphin (NaturalMotion's first animation toolkit) have lent explosive action to films such as Troy and Poseidon, and NaturalMotion's software is also being used by LucasArts in video games such as the hotly anticipated Indiana Jones.

But there are serious applications aside from the big screen and the XBox console: NaturalMotion has also worked under a grant from the British government to study the motion of a cerebral palsy patient, in hopes of finding therapies and surgeries that dovetail with the way her nervous system is functioning. The animation of a patient's gait was to be used by surgeons to predict what impact the surgery would have to the final gait and they could make adjustments to the plan before even getting started.

"It might be surprising to find a biologist pushing the frontiers of computer animation. But Torsten Reil is bringing cheaper, lifelike digital characters to video games and films."

Technology Review

8/26 Ted Talk Tuesday--Jill Bolte Taylor "My stroke of insight”

“Jill Bolte Taylor: My stroke of insight”

Neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor got a research opportunity few brain scientists would wish for: One morning, a blood vessel in Jill Bolte Taylor's brain exploded and she realized she was having a massive stroke. As a brain scientist, she realized she had a ringside seat to her own stroke. As it happened -- as she felt her brain functions slip away one by one, speech, movement, understanding, self-awareness -- she studied and remembered every moment. This is a powerful story of recovery and awareness -- of how our brains define us and connect us to the world and to one another. Jill started studying the brain as her brother had schizophrenia.

Amazed to find herself alive, Taylor spent eight years recovering her ability to think, walk and talk. She has become a spokesperson for stroke recovery and for the possibility of coming back from brain injury stronger than before. In her case, although the stroke damaged the left side of her brain, her recovery unleashed a torrent of creative energy from her right.

As she went through this experience, she spoke about going back and forth between the sides of her brain…”la-la land” and conscious thought that something was going wrong and she should get help. As a group, we wondered if she consciously jeopardized her health to go through this experience as she had several warning signs and never called 911. When she finally tried to get help (after exercising, showering and dressing), it took quite a while as she waited for her stream of consciousness to come back each time as it swung like a pendulum. It took her 45 minutes to find a colleagues business card on her desk and then she still had to dial the phone number. It was amazing to hear her thoughts and feelings as she went through this process and that she remembered them to be able to relate them back to us. Once she finally called her colleague, she remembered him sounding like a golden retriever…sound was not processing into words.

"How many brain scientists have been able to study the brain from the inside out? I've gotten as much out of this experience of losing my left mind as I have in my entire academic career."

Jill Bolte Taylor

8/19 Ted Talk Tuesday--Hans Rosling "New Insights on Poverty and Life Around the World"

For those of you who were unable to attend this week’s session, I highly encourage you to visit the TED web site and watch the video when you have some extra time – it truly is intriguing:

Hans Rosling Talks: New Insights on Poverty and Life Around the World
Researcher Hans Rosling uses his cool data tools to show how countries are pulling themselves out of poverty.

Most everyone in the session agreed that we have never seen information presented like this!! The software Hans has created takes data showing to another level so that it is even more engaging, easy-to-understand, to-the-point, and artistic…all characteristics our team strives to achieve in our projects in order properly educate different audience types in unique ways. So…how can we apply this to what we do here at HealthEd?

Main discussion points / follow-up ideas:

· Can we leverage similar story telling and presentation techniques when presenting our capabilities to clients?

· Is there a way we can show brand ROI in a similarly engaging fashion?

o Show patient participation in programs from sign-up through Rx redemption

o Show patient behavior change modeling (reach trends)

More information on Hans:

Even the most worldly and well-traveled among us will have their perspectives shifted by Hans Rosling. A professor of global health at Sweden’s Karolinska Institute, his current work focuses on dispelling common myths about the so-called developing world, which (he points out) is no longer worlds away from the west. In fact, most of the third world is on the same trajectory toward health and prosperity, and many countries are moving twice as fast as the west did.

What sets Rosling apart isn’t just his apt observations of broad social and economic trends, but the stunning way he presents them. Guaranteed: You’ve never seen data presented like this. By any logic, a presentation that tracks global health and poverty trends should be, in a word: boring. But in Rosling’s hands, data sings. Trends come to life. And the big picture — usually hazy at best — snaps into sharp focus.

Rosling’s presentations are grounded in solid statistics (often drawn from United Nations data), illustrated by the visualization software he developed. The animations transform development statistics into moving bubbles and flowing curves that make global trends clear, intuitive and even playful. During his legendary presentations, Rosling takes this one step farther, narrating the animations with a sportscaster’s flair.

Rosling developed the breakthrough software behind his visualizations through his nonprofit Gapminder, founded with his son and daughter-in-law. The free software — which can be loaded with any data — was purchased by Google in March 2007. (Rosling met the Google founders at TED.)

"Rosling believes that making information more accessible has the potential to change the quality of the information itself."

Business Week Online

Kluster helps you make group decisions

Kluster is a "group decision-making tool that helps you bubble-up new ideas, identify the best ones, and make better decisions."

If you need to get opinions or votes on a design or a message, for example, you can create a "Kluster" online and create categories, assign voters, and attach weightings to people or criteria. It tallies the results and allows you to manipulate the weighting of criteria or people to see variations on the results.

Casual Games

Food Fury helps kids identify healthy and not-so-healthy food choices using three categories ‘go’ ‘slow’ and ‘whoa’.

Play this game to test your food knowledge (and have fun)!

Serious Games

Life and Death in the Age of Malaria:

The School of Nursing at the University of Wisconsin-Madison teaches students to techniques to prevent Malaria and other infectious diseases before traveling for study abroad programs. This game was designed to help students apply these skills before traveling to reduce the risk for Malaria.
After the student learns the basics, the game creates a simulated scenario where students prepare and travel to different countries. The game goal is to keep the students alive and healthy. Similar to Oregon Trail, students ‘test drive’ the skills they learn, buying the right items and taking the right prescriptions. It’s isn’t easy, sometimes the simulated students run out of money, get sick, and die.

The game lets students apply the skills they learn before being in the situation themselves. This may have similar applications with other conditions that need specific skills to mange the disease, such as diabetes.

Verizon 411 via texting

From the desk of Julie...

As follow-up to Barbara’s presentation, many people seemed interested in texting for 411 information with Verizon Wireless.

It's an easy process...

• You send a text message to 46645 (googl). In the body you can type what you are looking for. It can be as general as “pizza westfield nj” or as specific as “mario’s pizza main st westfield”.
• The general will send you several texts with phone numbers and addresses of local pizzerias. The specific will return less, more focused results.
  
• With the message open, you hit “send” to choose the number you want that was embedded in the message, then “send” again, and order your pizza :)
  

It’s free as long as your plan includes text messages, and you are within your allotment of messages for the month.