Notes from the Healthcare Blogging Summit: Marketing Panel
This panel's full title is "Using New Media to Market (or Motivate?) Behavioral Change -- Practical Lessons from High-Profile Cases." Participants include:
- Fabio Gratton, Ignite Health
- Adam Pellegrini, American Cancer Society
- Debbie Donovan, Conceptus
- Moderator: Nedra Weinreich, Weinreich Communications
Fabio discussed how his company has leveraged blogs. He has built a series of blog networks in specific disease states. www.HepB.tv is a pharmaceutical company sponsored patient video blog that Fabio created. Fabio has some interesting ideas and has done some creative things online. I hope to interview him soon in an upcoming Pharma Marketing Talk podcast. Stay tuned for that!
Fabio learned that self-esteem and ego were powerful drivers that motivate bloggers, more so than accumulating points that can be redeemed for music downloads.
Debbie Donovan blogs in the medical device space -- "Diary of a Decision: The Essure Procedure." Her company created a persona, "Judy", so that visitors can "Ask Judy" questions. This simple device dramatically increased the number of questions submitted daily. Patient stories on her site are there to help women see what other woman who have undergone the procedure are saying and feeling.
Adam Pellegrini talked about ACS's "Relay for Life" website, which hosts 8,000 bloggers. "Your really don't know what your users want, unless you know who your users are," said Adam. Metrics are important. Go ask Jim Edwards -- BrandweekNRX continues to poll its users. ACS will never replace its editorial content, which is well-trusted, with user-generated content. But it is working on integrating the two sources of content.
3 comments:
I find it interesting that no academics were included. The issues you discuss are representative of marketing theories that are rather OLD school.. like myself. I am waiting for the statistical tests and poll sample representativeness figures myself :)
Love and Peace,
Dr. BK
Hi John,
Thanks for the great summary of our panel! I wasn't able to take notes, so I'm glad you did. It was great to meet you.
Dr. BK,
This panel was intended to be comprised of people who are actually using social media in their work. But you're right that it would be interesting to explore new theories that are emerging about how people use these tools. Perhaps in the next conference.
Best,
Nedra
Oh yes, thank you John for your coverage of the conference, and for the postings as of late. For some reason, you seem more compassionate by the month.. maybe it IS the little blue pill :)
Give your wife, thanks from your audience for all the hours of YOU she gives up for our benefit :)
Cheers!
Post a Comment