“Unsure why Facebook is so confusing to get it doing what I want… I can barely make heads or tails of the various “streams”, news, profile, wall, photos … really IMO it should all be one stream.” Hmm, I agree. But then I’m a real less is more man when it comes to web 2.0. Hence also why that’s it to this post.
Quote from comment on how to get Facebook updated by Twitter.
Thought I’d share the benefit of my experience in the NHS/healthcare e-commerce & web 2.0 with the following quick & dirty guide to promoting your healthcare product using web 2.0 tools:
Say your product currently already has a product site which has tons of great information about the product. Without too much time/effort the information could be lifted for pages to sit on a new blog. Product information would included along with independent sources such as the Mayo Clinic to ensure all medical issues and good practice is covered to help establish the blog’s credibility.
The marketing aim of this customer-centric blog would be to engage customers into giving reviews of the product, a well-documented highly trusted source of product information for customers. Your existing product video on YouTube would be embedded on a blog post, with a link from the current YouTube comments section to the blog. The idea would be for the UK-centric blog to have a mixture of customer video testimonials, and expert content on the proper use of your product. The RSS feeds off this blog could then be syndicated to websites and blogs to help bring in traffic and raise page rank.
Key is the fact that customers can post questions and queries in the comments, and see them answered by a moderator. They would also be encourage to post their own testimonial videos, pending approval of course.
This blog would then include the clear opportunity to social bookmark pieces to Digg, Stumble, and Twitter from each post, which would help SMO for the site.
To track conversations use Twitter search engine and pick up the RSS feed, to keep an eye on relevant key word terms and collect these in your RSS aggregator. This would also collect Google blog/news/Technorati conversations. These would then feed blogs to target as appropriate for link swops/rss syndication/comments/forum discussion involvement. You might also establish a twitter account such as twitter.com/myproduct to also take part in discussions with customers too, and invite them to the blog and Facebook Group via this route.
More importantly there would be a clear banner link through to a Facebook Group branded as per the blog, which would also include much of the same content as the blog (you can use the api which allows blog post to be posted automatically into Facebook for example).
The Facebook Group would nicely serve as a parallel marketing arm, seeded with group members, who in turn on joining would auto-alert their friends to the group’s benefits. Initially this would involve a search for existing UK Facebook Groups currently focusing on your product, and an appeal to their members to join. The Facebook Group would also include a clear banner link back to the blog. Facebook works via linking through profiles to make network marketing success, blogs work through conversations. This neatly divides the two arms of the campaign, though obviously there is cross-over.
I would start looking to see what’s listed as links for your healthcare product on a key public site such as NHS Choices, and therefore likely to be gaining significant traffic. Clearly those sites with discussion forums are most useful.
As stated above very quickly other blog & sites would be identified for involvement in discussion.
Plus a PPC/online advertising strategy could be considered for Facebook and Google Adwords based on identified ‘hotspots’ for likely customers. To back this up there’s this remark from Headshift’s Cybersoc from the new media event in Dubai via Twitter: “The guy from Microsoft advertising seems to be recommending advertising on Facebook. Odd. Probably true though.” On the other side of the debate check this out, though it does say Facebook CPM is cheaper than Google, there’s a reason for that: essentially that Google users are on a specific search page for a search-related reason, whereas for Facebook the prime reason is visiting a friend:
“Facebook impressions run 13 to 16 cents CPM. For comparison, our clients in aggregate pay $10 eCPM on Google, and $6 eCPM on Yahoo. The fact FB can’t command higher CPMs speaks volumes to how advertisers value those impressions.” Also see Bryant Urstadt’s Tech Review piece (Social Networking Is Not a Business*) from which this insight is taken from on the challenge of turning a profit from social network sites.
In the longer term would look to contact patients support societies to ensure factual info on your product plus web links are included in their ‘patient pack’.
13 mins 57 secs into Scoble’s video interview on the new Facebook design with Facebook’s Mark Slee he asks my favourite kinda question; essentially ‘what are the small things that you guys have done, that might be unexpected, that others don’t bother to do?’ Mark looks kinda like he’s not been asked that before (15:05). Hey, ‘it’s clean and easy to use’ is the answer. But problem is that’s a generic answer, Scoble asked for something specific. So he asks again, in a different way, for what the guy is proudest of? Now a better answer. One, a better production interface which brings elements like videos and photos together for the first time in a simpler experience, and which makes it easier to share. On the consumption side the newsfeeds interface now come in different views, so they’ve taken the newsfeed interface which revolutionised the site a couple of years ago, and now allows users to interact with the feed and filter down exactly what they’re interested in. Thanks Mark. And nice to hear you use a PC.
23 July: Mark Zuckerberg’s keynote webcast ”We’ve got one guy in Greenland”. “We’re opening up the translation tool.” Mr Z gets a big ‘whoo’ from the audience for the annoucement that you no longer will have to sign up for apps as a user, you can just use them. Right on.
23 July: TechCrunch liveblogging the conference
23 July: Notes from jowyang’s twitter stream, compressed on TinyPaste so you get a feel for it, sitting in front of the front row on ground, a few feet from Zuckerberg. His blog post highlights the Facebook Connect news:
“Facebook Connect will allow corporate websites to authenticate, interact, and share with their Facebook network –all without leaving the corporate website. Boring, static corporate websites can now become social.” Launch FC partners are CNET, CBS and Disney.
“As Facebook continues to roll out the full version of its new user profiles, it’s becoming clear that their primary goal isn’t, as they said in May, to simply create a cleaner user experience and allow developers to have more meaningful engagement points with users. It’s more about highlighting new content relevant to the user and fostering conversations about that content. And the result is that the Facebook home page looks an awful lot like the exponentially smaller activity stream aggregation service called Friendfeed.
“The new site will likely launch publicly on Monday. Until then, anyone can log in at www.new.facebook.com to see the new profile. The biggest visual change people will see on the home page – the combination of status updates, wall posts and news feed items into a single content stream. On the profile page status updates and other mini-feed items are also combined, and users are shown a big text box at the top encouraging them to update their status. For more details on the updates, see Inside Facebook and All Facebook.
“This is just the beginning of the news for Facebook this week as they prepare for their second developer conference on Wednesday. The company is clearly looking to fine tune the Facebook experience to spur growth, particularly in the U.S. and other mature markets where they still trail MySpace.” (thanks once again to the great people at Techcrunch for this report)
Hmm, sounds interesting.