Health Camp Minnesota

Health Camp Minnesota: “Health care – Technology – social Media. A conference created by and for health care delivery providers, and payers, and medical device producers in Minnesota.”  Video reviews.

Most interesting insights (from my perspective):

Keynote:

Lee Aase (Manager of Syndications and Social media for the Mayo Clinic). 
Social Media University, Global

Lee mentioned that he was “navigating hierarchy and impacting innovation” at Mayo. He also made an interesting point: “you can be so strategic that you can not actually do anything, but it is still important to see the larger picture.”

• Social media is the defining trend in communications in the 21^st century
• Social media will dramatically affect every industry
• Health care organizations should engage with social media. Health care is not unique…

One curious point that I saw during Lee’s presentation was social media search for unique material that can be used online, rather than “planning and producing campaigns.”  In many cases, the company found an advocate and used the story or video rather than trying to “create” something. One satisfied patient found through social media was used later in print campaign.

Charming example: an old couple playing piano in the atrium of Mayo clinic. More than 4 million views on YouTube…

Blogging… difficult to get physicians to write. Easier: interviewing physicians on video. Video is used to pitch to journalists also. Important; getting flip cameras and training staff how to use them. How is legal reacting?  Mayo legal counsel is on Twitter…

How to deal with negativity: not that many negative comments – people on Facebook in particular rarely post something negative – they are using their own name and will not criticize without a good reason.

Mayo uses WordPress!

Sharing Mayo Clinic (blog for patients to share stories)  

Mayo clinic employees social media policies are easy to find.  

Mayo clinic presentation can be found at SMUG site.   

Panel I 

David Moen, MD, medical director of care model innovation, Fairview; Colleen McGuire, vice president-communications, IHC Health Solutions

Clinicians are less nervous about social media than PR, Marketing, and Legal… but physicians may not like the situation when a patient comes with a folder of collected information… However, this is a culture issue, not technology issue.

Health care challenge is to recognize the opportunity. Health care is a business… how would we pay physicians who use social media for their time? 

Who will pay for the online communities where patients can communicate?  But… if we can demonstrate lower costs and improved outcomes, maybe an interested party can be found…

Problem with public perception of health insurance companies. Only 7% of people “like” health insurance companies.

E-mail test:

• Wellness e-mail sent from insurance company – little response
• The same e-mail sent without identification that it was an insurance company – much higher response

(I heard about similar results from research done in the past by other insurance companies.) 

Interesting: Health Camp conferences discuss cost in US and access in Canada… and nobody is happy with their system….

Pannel II

John Reid, chief executive officer, AbbeyMoor Medical, Mary Halet, Regional Director  for the National Marrow Donor Program; Pat Kullmann, moderator, CEO, CG3 Consulting.

Prostatic stent promotion through a humorous YouTube video became an unexpected success for a small b-to-b company.

The video also lead to an article in Star Tribune. 

John Reid his earlier fears to become a joke of the industry, but the success of the video definitely worth the risk.

The original idea of the video was that young people would watch and forward to their uncles, etc. However, YouTube audience could be 45-55 years old (based on Mayo research).

Interesting: the company provides online training sessions (could not afford sales force) and physicians do sign up… even older physicians participate.

National Marrow Donor program employs 2 FTEs to listen and use social media; it is a ”deliberate” use of the channel.

iMobile Health  provides access to patient-physician community via iPhone. The service is subscription based, but has a free trial.

 Panel III

Tamara Young, Ph. D.  – Health Scoop, Chris Boyer - Health Grades,  and Chris Bevolo  – moderator.

The question about negative reviews… Health Scoop receives 4:1 positive reviews.

Interesting note: a class of students joined the session. Students were not shy to ask questions, and one of the questions was built on applying Netflex functionality to some of the health care rating sites. The new generation (when they start using health care information online) seems to expect features and usability with which they are already familiar through consumer sites. 

     

There are many sites grading physicians… the most important factor, however, is which content shows up on Google searches…

Very good event!  When is the next one? 

Unsummit – Interactive Marketing Un-conference

My first unsummit was very insightful. Though extensive audience participation is not typical, this type of events poses more questions than answers. The topic is perfect – nobody is an expert – we are all learning in real time and trying to catch up with interactive marketing universe. 

Interesting points:

Social media: it is important to have a strategy. What are you trying to communicate? Facebook is a tool, not a strategy. The decision “we should be involved into Facebook” can not be considered strategic.

The army experiment (not so good): One group decided to set up a Facebook page. However, the page did not have a following of fans (was not sufficiently promoted to fans) and attracted people who did not support the army. The Facebook page was used as an online “protest;” soon after the Facebook page went live the protest was organized outside of the unit’s building. The protesters most likely used the Facebook page to find each other and organize.  

Another army experiment (good): prospective recruits could ask questions through the website, and soldiers from different parts of the world answered these questions on the video. The video was posted on the site unedited. This approach increased the credibility of the organization.

Internal communication:

Companies are using private Facebook pages and Yammer. Medtronic encourages all new hires to sign up on Yammer during the orientation. Price Waterhouse discovered that Yammer helped people who work in different locations to communicate better and extended the practice to the whole company.

The “intranet” becomes more collaborative… the move is inevitable.

New tools

Drop Box  – a tool that allows saving large files on the cloud to be accessible from different computers.

  Setster – a free tool for adding appointment setting functionality to web sites and blogs. The consultant that recommended the tool noted that his clients are using the tool quite willingly.

  Todoist  – a free tool for creating… to do lists in a quite sophisticated form.

  XMind – a free team brainstorming and mind-mapping tool.

Social media reality check session tried to return the unsummit attendees back “to the real world,” where average person may not be as comfortable with the new tools and ideas as everybody in the room…

We should not try to set trends; we should utilize trends that already exist.

 The most popular tools of the future will be most likely “low friction” tools – the applications that are simple and easy to use.

One of the presenters was working on the real estate iPhone app that allows the person to enter his preferences for a house. When the person would be half a mile from any matching house on sale, the phone would ring and inform about the house on sale.

Personal information right now: the user goes to places (sites) that have his personal information. In the future, the personal information might be stored in the browser, and the sites would “react” to this personal information.

Minnov8  - a podcast done by a local group highlighting innovations of local companies in the interactive space.

The minnov8 group brought up an interesting point: in the past the definition of “genius” was an exceptionally gifted scientist making discoveries by himself. In the future, the definition of “genius” will change to the person who is able to synthesize ideas of many gifted scientists…

 “In the future, it is not what you know, it is what you share.”

Recommendation to review publications of Danah Boyd - Social Media Researcher at Microsoft Research New England and a Fellow at Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society.

Mobile

Development trends: attempts to transpose to mobile what already exist online. This approach does not make sense and can be compared to early paining of children in adult clothes (during the time when children were perceived just small adults).

Mobile is different – “it is not your website squished down.”

But, the question is: How can I get all that content to the mobile?  This question is similar to a more prosaic task: How do I feed a toddler nutritious food if he is not going to sit through a meal?  The answer: Snacks!!   

We need to “snakefy” mobile information for the user. Typical user is not viewing mobile content longer than 5 minutes.

Good example or mobile applications is Ralph Lauren

Mobile resource: Fierce wireless.  The site has a free newsletter subscription and can be searched for verticals topic (health care, etc.) specifically. 

• Prediction: Android devices are expected to outstrip the rest.
• Most people do not read “long form” on a mobile devise; they bookmark something interesting to read later.
• Completion of tasks on mobile devices now is less than 50% (usability issues across devices).
• New term: m-commerce -  mobile commerce. 

Important: to fail fast and cheaply and learn from it (last session).

Unsuccessful examples:

A beer brand created a contest for schools which offered students to send a picture where they were “interacting with the brand.” The brand had a ranking of “party schools” and offered an ultimate prize – a trip to Cancun for a spring break. The problem: colleges and parents did not like it and the campaign had to be stopped.

  Slerpee  created its own branded social network for enthusiasts. The probability that the people would join one more social network is less comparing to adding a possibility of interaction with the brand to the social networks that already exist. Definitely an expensive effort. Better approach would be a Facebook app or a simple Ning site. “Go where the people are…”

 More successful example:

 Kreg tool company created a simple Ning community for people who use their tools. The community is active and can help its members to solve problems in the area of tools (what is important for the brand). This is definitely successful (and inexpensive) effort.

I612 – The Silent Click: Building Brands Online

The i-612 event was centered around the dilemma of interactive marketing – if everything can be measured as a direct response, would it be the best (or the only?) measurement of the campaign success?

 

Highlights from the presentation:

The possibility of measurement “the click” is increasing: in UK online ad spending already surpassed TV ad spending.

However, CTR for rich media ads are low (based on DoubleClick benchmarks). I had an opportunity to see Dart reporting for some campaigns and the numbers are definitely not surprising.

Industry CTR:
 - Wellness – 0.1%
 - Financial Services – 0.06%

Another concern: only 16% of the online audience - “natural born clickers”  – are responsible for 80% of clicks. The “natural born clickers” tend to be young (24 – 44), and lower income ( <40K, online average income ~60K ).

Consumers spend time online differently comparing to the last 5 years.

The interesting point is that social networks took time away from “communication” rather than “content.”

The study, conducted by comScore, assessed 80 of the biggest branding campaigns across 200 of the most trafficked sites over a month’s time analyzing consumer behaviors of those Internet users who were exposed to display advertising. “The Silent Click” measured three consumer actions: 1) searches conducted related to the advertisers’ brands; 2) site visitation, the traffic driven to the advertisers’ site and 3) consumer spending, the e-commerce transactions related to the advertisers’ brands.

Aggregate results:

After being exposed to the online advertisement, consumers are more likely to search for advertised brands and visit advertiser’s web site. When thy visit advertiser’s site, these consumers spend more time on the site and view more pages. Consumers exposed to the advertisement also spend 7% more money on e-commerce sites. The consumers who visit sites after being exposed to the ads are more affluent comparing to the average.

The presentation gives excellent data by verticals and advertising categories.

However, the number of exposures to the ads was not considered in the research.  Targeting was also not measured.

Panel discussion after the presentation emphasized that measurement of the marketing efforts must be consistent with the campaign objective.

Twitter Spam Lesson Live on Marketing Experiments

I love Marketing Experiments!  This is one of the most insightful interactive marketing informational resources   I found and often recommended to coworkers and clients. Today’s webinar happened to be even better than expected; it demonstrated a couple of lessons live, and the attendees were active participants. This marketing experiment (though unplanned) introduced me to Twitter Spam and highlighted the “real time” nature of the channel.

The presentation itself was very thoughtful. It showed good and bad examples of business use of Twitter and was based on fundamentals. Well-known Forrester’s POST approach (People, Objective, Strategy, Technology) was modified into ROST (Research, Objectives, Strategy, Technology). Even if I think that POST still applies, any mention of Objectives before Technology makes me happy!

The recommendation of Twazzup - Twitter monitoring tool  was also interesting – I have not used the tool before.

The most interesting however, was the real and absolutely unexpected series of “marketing experiments” in twitter use and Twitter Spam that I never noticed before…

Twitter Spam Lesson Live on Marketing Experiments:

1. Too many people were joining the webinar – congratulation to Marketing Experiments!  The topic was enticing and the quality of Marketing Experiments events is well-known. Topic contained Twitter, so specific hash tag #webclinic was announced.
2. Unfortunately, the number of people overwhelmed GoToMeeting service and Webinar “closed” after a couple of minutes.
3. After determining that my Internet connection was still functioning… I went to Twitter to see what was happening… So did many of over 800 webinar participants….
4. Webinar was restarted, and then it crushed again…
5. I was back on Twitter, together with the rest of the determined webinar attendees… discussing the situation.
6. Webinar was restarted again, and did not disappoint the audience.
7. At that point the conversation on Twitter became one of the 10 top trending topics…
8. Twitter Spam immediately became noticed: unrelated messages with the same hash tag #webclinic appeared in the search results.

Marketing Experiments captured the situation spectacularly in one of the Twits, that was re-twitted multiple times:

Everything happened very quickly, and soon after the webinar ended, the #webclinic disappeared from trending topics. 

Interesting… It was my first introduction to Twitter Spam, which has been well-described already   but the problem of Twitter Spam  happened to be more widespread than I thought before… even after religiously blocking all inappropriate followers from my own account.

The experience was very enlightening… First the frustration that my favorite webinar was not available, then camaraderie of fellow attendees trying to understand the situation, and then the communication with Marketing Experiments that everybody could observe… with the interruptions of Twitter Spammers.

Comments about the event noted that even if the webinar was excellent, the audience expected more traditional “structure” including measurements. Hopefully, we will see it in the future…

My attempts on Twitter experiment were rather anecdotal.   No hard data, but I noticed:

• more followers (serious) after tweets sent around lunch time
• more spam followers around weekend
• more retweets of concise useful data in the message
• more interest to topic including Twitter itself (what would not be surprising)

How will microblogging evolve?  Only time will tell – what an interesting interactive marketing world!

 Follow Marketing Experiments on Twitter  I do!

Cloud Computing Opportunities for Business – Rocking the Cloud – Reside

Excellent event on cloud computing!  Reside was successful in blending the concept of cloud computing for marketers and IT professionals into one event where each group was able to see their aspect of cloud computing advantages.  
Even more information related to online communities and cloud computing can be downloaded from the event’s page.

What I found interesting – marketer’s perspective:

  Implications of cloud computing:

• Empower access to technology to those with need, not knowhow
• Greater ability to innovate—the freedom to make mistakes
• Increased ability to focus precious capital on other needs

The layers of the cloud
 

Very insightful overview of online communities (an invaluable 34 slides presentation with benchmark data!)   presented by Eric Scheel.

Particularly enlightening – objectives of the communities and which part of the organization needs to be involved. This is the best “answer” to the question of “who owns social media in the organization”

Examples of existing online communities:

Idea Storm (Dell)

• 10,000+ ideas generated
• 615,000 promotions of ideas
• 81,000 comments
• 200+ ideas Implemented by Dell
• Average 10,000 unique visitors/day

Dell’s Breakdown of ideas:

• 4% innovative
• 80% improvements
• 12% unusable

Citizens’ Briefing Book

• In one weeks’ time…
• 125,000 participants
• 44,000 ideas
• 1.4 Million votes
• Briefing Book for President

FICO – Decision Management Community

• Several thousand members; largest in industry
• Continual customer contact vs. 2x per year
• Customers helping each other
• Sense of “ownership” builds loyalty
• Integration to CRM -> Lead Capture -> Increased Sales

 My Starbucks Idea

• 40,000 ideas in first 3 months
• Media reports from large newswires, including the New York Times, digg.com and Yahoo! News
• Implementing ideas (Gluten Free Options, and free coffee on Election day.)

A successful community requires a significant philosophical commitment from many levels of the company.

Reside provided excellent explanation of project roles and responsibilities for the community management, the process how ideas should be handled,  and a very practical list of Keys to Success.

 

 The Cloud computing event  also set a record for the best breakfast event I have attended so far from the perspective of location, venue, and food. Yes, snack is important, and breakfast provided at the Metropolitan Ballroom  was absolutely spectacular!

Online Marketing Summit – Minneapolis

Minneapolis part of Online Marketing Summit   was very educational, and I hope this event will come to the Twin Cities area next year too.

The most interesting ideas from the event (in my understanding):

Excellent SEO opportunitiy: video (the competition is not that significant yet). Optimize video (put on YouTube, add to you site, image files, text around, links to the video).

Vimeo – video posting site, which allows customizing anchor tags text links from anybody who embeds your video.

Add your items to Google Base

Check for duplicate content (tool – copyscape.com http://www.copyscape.com/ )

Do not forget REL=”Canonical”

Dealing with IT is a sensitive topic… IT can feel that SEO is technical responsibility at which they fail. It is good to start the conversation with a statement that SEO is something most companies are not doing and that SEO is an additional opportunity to help the company to make money.

SEO blog to read http://www.businessol.com/seo-blog/ 

How to track AJAX and Flash Actions with Google Analytics Event Tracking

301 other domains to your www; 301 passes link ranking.

Absolute links are better for SEO… Ideally, a CMS would use relative on stage and publish absolute links live.

Description is not affecting ranking on Google (but still in Yahoo); careful with pure call to action without relevant keywords…

Tip: if the site has too many pages and optimization of each page title is not possible, insert reversed breadcrumb into title.

More pages on your site, the better page rank you have

Web 2.0 allows to “extend the message to people who has highest propensity to link to us.”

Applying traditional marketing metrics to social media is similar to applying advertising metrics to PR.

Who “owns” social media in the organization?  It depends on the goal…PR? Marketing? Customer service? However, C-level executives needed to be champions.

How to deal with more than one Web analytics packages: decide in advance which package should be used for which data and follow this rule.

Web analytics should be considered as:
strategy > infrastructure > value creation.
Currently 37% of companies don’t have formal strategy for extracting value from data…

Optimization is the reason why you collect data.

Very good example of YouTube channel – ikea 
Successful videos provide valuable content (job search tips – successful; explanation of how to use job search web site – not successful).

How to find relevant niche community: find niche bloggers – check blog roll.

View what is said in comments…YackTrack.com

Virtual Conference – Digital Marketing World – MarketingProfs

Today I had a luxury of attending most of a virtual conference first time. MarketingProfs’   Virtual Conference – Digital Marketing World.  Last year I would log in for a few minutes, or just review something in recording… “walk” through an empty lounge… or download a white paper or two from an unattended booth… (the booth’s owner follow up would still find me…)

Virtual conference is more useful and engaging while it is live. Particularly interesting:

• Communicating with the other attendees before the conference, while everybody is trying to find their local or specialty counterparts.
• Twitter name exchange… interesting – people are eager to post their twitter name everywhere (it is not as guarded as an e-mail address)… but I think I gained a follower too
• Ability to follow not only chats on the conference web site, but also reviews of the conference on Twitter.  Though sometimes overwhelming… it is quite exciting to see in real time what points of the presentation the rest of the audience found important…  And not as rude as during the live event.
• Ability to see opinions of the attendees of the parallel track about the presentation that I missed…  Based on these comments, I quickly made the decision if I needed to review the recording
• Oh!  I just realized!  I forgot my briefcase at the conference… Oops… I will need to go back and pick it up…  it is not too far – just a couple of clicks

I think we, the attendees, were quite confused about some of the virtual trade show rules, that one entrepreneurial and helpful marketer quickly posted “user advice” for a virtual trade show attendees on her blog – thank you!!  Of course, I retwitted it during the event :-)

Virtual conferences are just starting to become a part of the business environment… and I see a few advantages and a couple of changes that will probably come in the future…

Advantages:

• Everybody has a profile and no company would need to manually “enter” business cards left in the booth into the database.  Marketer’s dreams come true!
• The “evaluations” of the conference sessions are not necessary – if may be impolite to leave the auditorium during a live presentation of a disappointing speaker, but clicking “lounge” button after a few boring minutes of online presentation is quite OK
• All the materials are in the “briefcase,” that can be picked up any time… or forgotten at the event…

Future changes:

• I think virtual conferences are at the period of the development where web sites were about 10 years ago (I still remember infamous “guest books” :-)  ). At that period of time, true potential of interactive marketing was not discovered yet, and the sites resembled print brochures. But in a few years everything changed. Something similar will probably happen with virtual convergences. Right now too much effort (graphics, space, etc.) is expanded to “recreate” the atmosphere of the real live conference. It might be necessary for the “transition” period, but the use of the space will change. Soon.
  • The picture of the realistically looking booth with a city background would probably morph into the company’s logo, pictures of the company’s representatives, and… useful facts and materials for the “booth’s visitor.”  The intricate booth design (thought quite interesting for the first time) does not contribute to the satisfaction of the need of the conference attendee – it is not necessary.
  • Lounge will probably “learn” to devote more space to the images of currently talking people… Maybe – just maybe – Twitter-type threads?  Maybe some “official” method of finding attendees from the same locations or marketing verticals? Thread categories? At the current virtual conference, generic images of the lounge dominated the prime real estate, and the people (who I came to meet :-)  ) were hidden on the bottom.  Ha!  The arrangement worked quite effectively anyway – seeing images of others I hurried up to place my picture into my profile :-)  
  • Would it be interesting to see fellow attendees during the sessions?  Bottom of the screen would be quite nice…  Maybe…  it depends on privacy and other goals, but we will see…  Virtual conferences are here to stay, and it is absolutely wonderful!
• I believe the categories of the virtual conferences will also change soon to a user-centric navigation…  It won’t be “auditorium, show floor, lounge” but something closer to “presentations, vendors (or prizes? :-)  ), networking.” Right now they reflect the “building,” but they will soon reflect “the benefit” that this type of building used to provide for the conference attendee. 

Great event!  Yes, I had to “bring my own snack” but it was a wonderful opportunity to expand my knowledge in the field of interactive marketing that I love and connect with other enthusiasts.  All from my own home computer…. Free. Thank you, MarketingProfs,  and, just like everybody else who filled out the survey, I was happy to propose the new tagline for your organization :-)

Social Media Marketing – Minneapolis Workshop

Workshop – November 5, 2008: Get Your Biz On > Marketing + Social Media was quite well-attended by local companies, agencies and non-profits. 

Some of the interesting Social Media Marketing ideas from the event:

• Rank-and-file employees now considered more credible than CEOs (Edelman Trust Barometer). Marketing implication: a blog written by an employee-enthusiast might be more effective than a CEO’s efforts
•  Web 2.0 (an era of “co-creation”) should concentrate on integrating of “cool staff” around business bjectives. Marketing implication: social media marketing is less “social media” and more “marketing”  – achieving business objectives through new opportunities. The “staff” has to work for the objectives
• Interesting explanation of the “long tail” as smaller pieces of diverse content that can be more important over time.
• Definition: White Label Community solutions – a community that can be branded easily by a company or an organization
• Interactive marketing mantra: “don’t let your technology show – let your strategy show.” The solution should not be based on certain “technical features” – the features (only necessary) should be masked by design to allow the solution to serve its business objective.
• Is it easy to find an employee who would be willing to devote additional time to creating content for the internal community/blog/etc?  In some competitive cultures, an employee can receive a unique exposure and benefit from it. Finding an employee who would like to participate in this situation is easy.
• Company’s promotion via social media marketing: VVPN – Very Vertical Passionate Narrative

Value evolution
Then                                    now
Tell                                      Ask
Top down expert                 co-Creation
Looking Good                     Transparency
Finished Products               Perpetual beta
Us vs. Them                        Zero distance + Community
Blockbuster                        Long Tail
“How to”                             Follow the Energy

Interesting example of social media use for internal communication (ING):
Problem: the company’s processes are cumbersome… it is not easy to accomplish some little tasks
Solution: an internal site with employee-generated tips how to accomplish tasks easier, fun webisods about success stories of simplifying tasks within ING, and an employee-written blog sharing “grass-root” viewpoints.

What worked well:

• employee-generated conversations builds instant trust and credibility
• people are social: mix professional and personal topics
• make it easy for people to participate (link from the home page, etc.).

Another interesting example: a community with cost-saving suggestions (as part of introducing new CIO).

What worked well:

• Perpetual beta: start with clear and limited scope, and keep going…
• Know your audience (even if it is every marketer’s dream :-) )
• Tie to bottom line results makes sponsorship easy
• Make it easy for sponsors and champions do their job: provide data, sound bytes, cheat sheets, job aids and performance metrics
• You are not done when you are “done” – the post-implementation stage
• Measurement planning takes time

Zanby – “groups of groups” approach – unique in the industry.

Social networks… why buy rather than build?  Zanby was created over about 4 years, and at some points about 40 developers worked on the software. Do you have these resources in house?

How Website Optimization Can Determine the Most Compelling Combination of Content and Design for Your Website (by Interwoven).

The event was very interesting and inspiring – thank you, Interwoven!  Even if I thought I studied everything available about marketing testing (what was easy to find and free of charge :-)  ), evaluated multivariate and post-click marketing with segmentation, I found very useful insights in the presentations.

Sitting at the same table with the presenters (a lucky occurrence) , I was excited to see that other marketers are engaged in tactics about which most of us in the audience can only dream…  From another side, the obstacles that advanced marketers faced brought the world of testing to reality. 

The presentation suggested the audience to guess on the most successful variations of one of the tests. Usual parameters: testing an image, a call to action, a form field layout. The audience of experienced marketers guessed…  and only 3 people guessed correctly 2 out of 5 elements…  Very humbling experience… We can not – and should not – guess… we must test.

North West Airlines presented a wonderful case study of significant improvement through multivariate testing. Even if the company is not quite moved to the adventure of testing of the home page, they started small and received very good results. Bravo!

Interesting points from the presentation:

• One of the problem that marketers face is the lack of easy technical capabilities to provide targeted content to targeted audiences.
• Interesting concept of “speculative” web design as the result of the “hippo” decision making (highest paid person in the organization decided what should be done). Speculative web design can be eliminated with testing
• Interwoven has an interesting product allowing determining personas based on testing and enabling persona targeting (adaptive targeting). The method allows discovering personas and the content to which they are responsive. I would love to learn more about it…
• Testing can include time of day parameter (particularly useful for b-to-b). And I currently use daytime targeting in PPC based on nothing else but “my best judgment…” 
• How NWA started to pay attention to testing?  The company discovered that competitors were doing multivariate testing. This was sufficiently convincing. The company also had a great success in e-mail marketing testing what made it e-mail marketing leader in its category. Excellent PPC targeting lead also to special recognition from Google.  
• Why NWA selected Optimost: availability of service and proven technology. The service element allows each client of Optimost to have an optimization team of 3 people (account person, technology person, and analyst who designs the tests and provides reports).
• NWA started from less important part of the site to learn more about the testing and evaluate its effectiveness.
• One of the tests showed that reducing marketing copy (that marketing thought was invaluable) lead to more conversions. Marketing became excited with less copy and more conversions.
• One of the tests challenged the branding rule of not using people in images. The image with the person produced more results than images without people. Image that is not quite “on brand” stayed… because it increased conversions by almost 6%…
• Current tests of NWA include flash/no flash landing pages

Hm… Interesting development in the industry: while Omniture acquired Offermatica and tries to position itself not as an analytics company, but as an optimization player, Interwoven acquired Optimost and ties to connect the optimization with content management. Time will tell what could be the winning combination… Ha! This is an existing time in marketing!

Great event!  Delicious food!

Think Different

Think Different - half day conference with a fabulous lunch was offered by Silverlink in several cities. The conference was very interesting; however, as a marketer, I did not find anything new… Silverlink president mentioned that a couple of reactions to the event were:

• Marketing in healthcare? Can it exist?
• You are not doing it yet?

The conclusion for me was simple: if I love and understand marketing, my clients may “think different.” I need to take this fact into consideration when I am trying to suggest approaches which have been successful in other industries. And, I should not get frustrated…. I am not alone

Interesting point from the conference:

• While 25 years ago megatrends were important; we live in the time of explosion of choice and need to pay attention on microtrends
• Microtrends can contradict each other (obesity and low-calorie diet)
• To understand microtrends we need to be comfortable with two contradictory ideas in our heads and respect human complexity
• Example of a microtrend: young women treat doctors “as consultants at best” and want to make their own medical decisions
• Example of a microtrend: working retirees (ads targeted to retires usually show people in leisure activities, what may not be the right approach)
• Segment targeting is more successful than general targeting (what seems to be obvious); microtrending should lead to microtargetting
• In health care identity group changes quickly (after a diagnoses the person may immediately change identity group)
• Public health environment is shifting: before – “quick fix or die;” now – chronic conditions.

 

Economist: Evolutions
The situation will get worse before it can get better

• Consumers are looking at social networks for information and support (particularly younger consumers)
• Social computing is used particularly by people with certain diseases (especially socially stigmatized conditions)
• PHR – 75% of consumers never heard or don’t know what it is
• For many consumers, wellness involves trading something concretely good for something abstractly good
• Incentives are needed for people to achieve wellness results (the additional reward is needed)
• Interesting: a parallel in financial industry – consumers use credit cards with rewards much more than traditional credit cards, even if the basic benefit is the same. People who want credit cards for rewards spend more and less delinquent
• Wellness reward program should be tailored to the person
• Health care web sites are considered less usable than web sites of other industries and less enjoyable
• Pick one segmentation and stick with it… changing segmentation often is not helpful…
• Health care is not differentiated product, except for the communications… the communications can be the differentiator