20 November 2008
It’s a fact of life: no organisation, not even governments, likes to spend money on something unless they can see that it will make or save money. Well, here’s some evidence about the money-saving aspects of personal health records (PHRs) that should make governments, even in Australia, sit up and take notice. The AusHealthIT blog has uncovered a story about a US study that claims the implementation of PHRs across the American healthcare system will save more than US$21 billion a year, through things such as more efficient monitoring and sharing medication lists.
As AusHealthIT blogger David More writes, “If PHRs can deliver even half of these benefits I will take two, thanks!”
One important caveat – the study was funded by ‘unrestricted grants’ from companies including Microsoft and Google, which of course have a vested interest in the success of electronic PHRs…
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14 November 2008
Like a Molotov cocktail hurled into a crowd, Publishing 2.0 blogger Scott Karp has ignited the already heated debate about the future of journalism and publishing with his most recent post, entitled “The market and the internet don’t care if you make money”.
He’s pinched the title from Seth Godin, the marketing pundit who is peddling his latest book Tribes, but Karp takes the idea and runs with it in a long screed about how the Internet has broken the newspaper industry’s business model, a topic about which plenty of people including myself have written about ad nauseum. But Karp offers a detailed and particularly articulate discussion of this issue, writing that “Nobody has the right to a business model – Ask not what the market can do for you, but what you can do for the market.”
As usual with this sort of thing, the comments are as entertaining and thought-provoking as the blog post, and as a former journalist I can relate to the responses from people in the traditional media. The words of Thomas Jefferson, author of the American Declaration of Independence, still echo in my ears as one of the main reasons I got into the media business: “Given a choice between a government without newspapers and newspapers without government, I would not hesitate to choose the latter.” The media have an important role in informing society and keeping governments honest. But while Jefferson specifically mentioned newspapers, if he was here today I think he would understand and approve of the Internet and blogging. It is the same principle he was talking about back in the 18th century - free speech. Whether it’s Rupert Murdoch or Ariana Huffington or Joe Bloggs exercising that right doesn’t matter.
At the end of the day, say what we will, the market doesn’t care about ‘quality’ journalism and comprehensive local news coverage. We collectively need to find a model that works in this new and changing environment. I agree with Karp that a future business model lies in the power of networks, not the power of monopolies.
[Reproduced from Zazoo blog]
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5 November 2008
The number of consumers in the US using Web 2.0 technologies in relation to health matters (dubbed ‘Health 2.0′) has doubled in the past year to 60 million people, according to a study just released by Manhattan Research.
Manhattan defines Health 2.0 consumers as people who have:
- read health-related blogs, message boards or participated in health-related chatrooms;
- contributed or posted health content online such as: writing or commenting on a health-related blog, adding or responding to a topic in a forum or group, or creating health related web pages, videos or audio content; or
- used online patient support groups, message boards, chatrooms, or blogs.
The report says, “Pharmaceutical marketers are catching on to the trends, but there’s a long way to go before brand media closes the gap between where consumers are and where budgets are going – only a small fraction of overall pharmaceutical advertising spend is currently allocated to online campaigns. But as we’re seeing with our clients, consumer trends are prompting marketers to put more weight behind digital strategies.”
“…. Social media is a powerful force impacting the pharmaceutical industry – whether or not brands choose to participate. Taking too conservative of an approach to a channel which thrives on two-way dialogue and open communication will undoubtedly distance brands from consumers – especially for those looking to reach the groups most engaged in Health 2.0. And even if brands aren’t yet ready participate in conversations, some sites sell aggregated data to pharmaceutical companies looking to understand the experiences and challenges that patients face.”
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8 October 2008
A study of chief marketing officers (CMOs) in the US by marketing and direct services firm Epsilon shows that while traditional marketing and advertising spend is down, partly due to the current economic crisis, digital marketing spend is still strongly on the increase this year.
The results, based on a survey of 175 CMOs, indicated that more than 60% of companies are increasing their spend on digital marketing and advertising this year, while nearly 60% are reducing their overall spend on marketing and advertising.
Other interesting results include:
- Social computing (including word of mouth, social networking sites, viral advertising, etc.) was the most popular emerging channel with 42% of marketing executives expressing interest in adding it to their marketing mix.
- Blogs were the second most popular emerging channel: 35% of marketing executives want to pursue blogs and 19% already use blogs
- Almost one-third of CMOs mentioned Podcasting as an area of interest: 31% are interested in adding Podcasting to their marketing mix and 18% already have.
- Mobile devices also elicited interest: 29% are interested in Mobile Devices (Phones/PDAs) and 22% have added them to their marketing mix.
One thing to note is that the survey was conducted in August, before the US$700 billion Wall Street bailout and all the attendant stock market fall-out occurred. It will be interesting to see what the results would be if the survey was conducted this month.
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5 October 2008
It doesn’t seem all that long ago that WebMD was the Internet health behemoth that grew and merged and acquried its way to a billion-dollar company, then deflated after the tech stock crash to a shadow of its former self – all the time reigning as the biggest player in a not-so-lucrative market.
In yet another sign that we could be heading for a tech stock bubble, WebMD’s two biggest competitors, Revolution Health and Waterfront Media, which runs the EverydayHealth websites, are merging to form a new online health behemoth (it’s such an evocative word, I’m going to use it twice in two paragraphs) that is claimed to be bigger than WebMD. The deal is reportedly worth US$300 million.
Meanwhile, in the small and fragmented Australian market, players such as MSN Health and Virtual Medical Centre scramble for a pool of consumer advertising that may or may not be worth $1 million a year. You would think there was an opportunity there for someone who can attack this in a sensible way?
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27 September 2008
It turns out the current financial crisis in the US is creating one boom market – online business social networks. Sign-ups and usage of LinkedIn (or as I explain it to people, “Facebook for business people”) is soaring as people who are afraid they will lose their jobs enrol and update their CVs. Apparently LinkedIn is up to nearly 30 million members, mainly in the US, while German-based network Xing has hit 6.5 million members.
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18 September 2008
We now pause again for an advertisement. I have started up an Internet content business with HotHouse Interactive MD Simon van Wyk, called Zazoo. The website has just gone live at www.zazoo.com.au. My blog postings here at Welling Digital may become less frequent as I will be posting content-specific items there, though I will still be writing about health care technology and Internet marketing here. Zazoo offers a network of content experts that will help companies fill all their online content needs, on a small, medium or large scale. Let me know if you’d like more information.
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12 September 2008
A report published on the Computerworld website this week hints that the era of Web 2.0 and social media may already be on its way out. The Demo Fall 2008 conference in San Diego, which gave 72 start-ups six minutes each to display their wares, included plenty of social networking tools, but also saw an increasing number of business-related collaborative tools, perhaps suggesting a shift from the emphasis on social aspects back to business aspects of the web.
The report said, “Demo executive producer Chris Shipley and AllThingsD.com co-executive editor Kara Swisher… both suggested that the ‘hanging out’ type of Web 2.0 environments like Facebook and MySpace wouldn’t stay relevant much longer. In their place, Shipley predicted the rise of “collaboration for a purpose” sites and services that would come with lucrative business cases. Sites like Facebook certainly were critical for showing that the Web was about more than informational pages and transactions, but they wouldn’t have the same financial effects as either of the previous Web generations, she said. The purposeful sites she saw emerging would have that impact, Shipley proposed.
“….there were some indications of a change toward purposeful collaboration, Shipley predicted. Compared to two other project-collaboration services at the Demo Fall show, Qtask’s project service seemed to be viable, covering not just shared documents and messaging but actual project management tools to track schedules, approvals, and assignments. Given how much time people spend in e-mail anyhow, it’s unclear whether they can be convinced to use such a service and not fall back to sending out mass e-mails to project participants instead.
“Another example was Cinergix’s Creately, an online business process modeling tool that, in Microsoft Visio fashion, lets you diagram processes such as network design or mortgage approval workflows, with embedded rules that let you validate the process as you diagram it. Such tools have long existed, but not in a collaborative Web environment in which users can propose their own business logic.”
With the amount of time people are spending on the Internet at work, it had to be only a matter of time before more work-related options were created to stop people from spending so much time updating their Facebook pages on company time!
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8 September 2008
From today’s edition of 6 minutes:
“A pharmacy-driven electronic prescribing project announced with much fanfare earlier this year has hit a setback with one partner, prescribing software company Medical Director, going cold on the project.
“In March the Pharmacy Guild announced a ScriptX project to start in October which would allow GPs to create electronic prescriptions on a central encrypted hub that any participating pharmacy could access and dispense.
“But the project’s creators, pharmacy software company Fred Health, now says it is looking to work with new partners such as Microsoft to develop a similar system, known as eRx Script Exchange, to start next year.
A spokesman for the company, Mr Paul Naismith, told 6minutes that their original partners HCN, the vendors of Medical Director, had decided not to go ahead with the SciptX project as planned.”
Is this the precursor to Microsoft launching its HealthVault product in Australia? Meanwhile, no great surprises that HCN/Medical Director have backed out on the project; if a teacher was to give a report card on HCN, it would no doubt include the comment, “Does not play well with other children”…
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8 September 2008
Gerry McGovern has produced another practical piece on the evolution of the Web for business. He writes, “Web 2.0 and social media mean that for teachers a declining part of their job involves telling. An increasing part is listening to the class and facilitating them in having conversations. Teachers should help moderate these conversations and draw new learnings from them. They need to say less of: ‘let’s open up a book.’ and more of: ‘let’s open up a conversation.’.
“The traditional manager is taught to command and control. Web 2.0 challenges that model…. Companies are not democracies, of course. And social media will deliver little value if it becomes some giant water cooler conversation because not all the best ideas are discovered at the water cooler. Huge quantities of absolute rubbish are talked there too. So, social media and Web 2.0 are not a replacement for management decision making, but rather a support to make better, more-informed decisions.
“The naïve tool-centric view of Web 2.0 still exists. ‘Just give them the blog and the wiki software and get out of the way’ has very limited logic. But it is classic IT-thinking. As if the tool was the be all and end all, and the only purpose of life was to discover the right one. As if it was the type of quill that Shakespeare chose that made him the writer that he was.”
“So Web 2.0 and social media still need management…. But the managers are not the only clever people in the room anymore. The room is much bigger and it is speckled with cleverness. To manage in the Web 2.0 world is to converse, to listen, to be honest and upfront, to collaborate, to moderate, and constantly watch out for the trends and patterns that always emerge when many minds mingle and mix in the network.”
The message needs to sink in that companies need to start giving up some control over the conversation with their customers. I know this is very hard to hear, and even harder to do, but it is happening whether comanies like it or not. Those that continue to keep a stranglehold on the conversation will eventually find that no one is listening…
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