Insight Categories: Marketing

In partnership with the Prostate Cancer Foundation (PCF), Johns Hopkins Medical Center and the Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, Grafik is developing a patient portal to support the National Proactive Surveillance Network’s (NPSN) long-term study of the efficacy of nonintervention for certain types of prostate cancers and patients.

Participants in the NPSN program must visit their doctor for initial consultation and for ongoing monitoring if they are eligible and accepted into the program. The portal will allow prospective patients to learn more about the program, and allow in-program patients to fill out various intake forms and surveys, manage their medical data, and ultimately, communicate and collaborate with doctors and other patients.

In addition to Johns Hopkins and Cedars-Sinai, additional institutions will join the NPSN after the portal’s launch in early 2011. By growing the study population, consolidating the study data, and exposing that data to the research community, the program and the web portal will help shed new light on disease progression and will ultimately provide better screening and evaluation tools that will prevent the overtreatment of prostate cancer.

PCF experts calculate that an estimated $3 billion in annual treatment costs might have been saved between 1986–2005 if the ability to distinguish between lethal and nonlethal cases of prostate cancer were available to healthcare professionals.

“Part of Grafik’s mission, as a company, is to collaborate with partners who do important work,” said Grafik Principal and Managing Director, Lance Wain. “We are thrilled to be part of this project and look forward to the contributions this tool will make towards science and disease management.”

For more information call Teddi Alyce Segal at Grafik 703-299-4507.

As some of you already know, last Wednesday Google released an update to their search product, called Google Instant, which displays the potential search results page as you type. So, essentially, this new enhancement takes the predictive search interface (where Google took what you were typing and suggested potential search queries for you) one step further by adding the results to those predictive searches.

For example, prior to the release of Google Instant, if I were searching on the term “Redskins Win,” Google would begin to suggest search queries that start with “R-E-D” as seen in the screenshot below.

Now, as I begin to type “R-E-D” Google displays what the search results would be for the first search query in their predictive search suggestions as shown below.

The goal of Google Instant is that it’s supposed to save all of us seconds with each search by guiding us towards the search we really want and save us the trouble of clicking on search or hitting return. Personally, I find it a little annoying as I know what I want to search on and don’t like being interrupted as I’m typing – which is what it is basically doing. So, I will turn it off, (like I did with their personalized search results feature) and you can too if you don’t like it, by clicking on the link next to the search box.

So how does displaying the search results page as you type impact SEO if you are a business depending on SEO for customers? Well, some have gone as far as declaring that this move has “killed SEO.” But claims like this piss me off as much as some of the recent East Coast hurricane forecasts have (another touchy subject with me) since they are ignorant and sensationalistic. However, wild claims like this, while really stirring up the hornets nest, also force people to really think through what Google has done here, and how it impacts SEO marketing strategy.

Because seriously, as some of the more savvier search marketers and even Google’s product manager are pointing out, Google Instant doesn’t kill anything, instead, it forces us as marketers to evolve as the technology evolves. Which is a good thing people! (Unless, quite honestly, you’re lazy). Now, with Google Instant, we’re able to gain insight into tangential keywords that we may have missed before.

For example, say I was a beer aficionado and wanted to optimize my site around “craft brew” keywords. If I start typing “Craft brew” into the Google search field, I now see that “craft brewers alliance” is a top suggested keyword which I might not have known that before. And if this term is relevant to my audience, I may want to have a page on my site devoted to this “alliance” to capture any of my potential audience that might get sidetracked by clicking on this term.

This approach is just one of many new opportunities that have been created for SEOs by this release. I think this Faster Times article actually does a good job explaining a few others and also explains pretty clearly how the fundamentals of SEO have not changed. At the end of the day, it’s all about providing relevant content to a general target audience, and not unique individuals. And while Google Instant may change search behavior, by sending a potential customer down a different relevant pathway than they may have gone down prior to Instant’s release, Google is giving marketers the same opportunity to KNOW what that pathway is and allows us (and you) to provide that same content to our customers.

Having said all of this, in reality, it’s still too early to tell what the broader impact of Google Instant is going to be… and I WISH more people would admit that they don’t know, rather than making grand proclamations that hurt more than they help. But I guess this could be said about many headlines in general, and without these proclamations, we sometimes don’t have much to complain about. And on a Monday morning after a Redskins win over Dallas, I really don’t have much to complain about!

How do you get prospects to sit up and take notice? If you’re Software AG, you send an iPod Touch loaded with special video content in a custom box. As you might expect, response has been pretty phenomenal. In a report delivered last week, our client cited a response rate of 23% — but that number is still growing. And all this means that dollars signs will soon follow.

Of course, you’re probably thinking this extraordinary effort had an extraordinary price tag. And you’d be wrong. The cost was absolutely appropriate for the task, which was to get meetings with a select group of hard-to-reach C-level decision-makers — executives surrounded by gatekeepers. Software AG was successful because they understand customers’ lifetime value. They know the cost of an iPod is nothing compared to the overall worth of a new client. And with that knowledge, they asked us to develop a campaign delivering a pointed message that clearly articulated how Software AG could change the way prospects do business.

Thanks, Software AG for being a great client. And a great marketer.

On Tuesday night, a few colleagues and I attended a Sweets and Tweets event put on by social media consultant, Debbie Weil, where the featured guest was Gov 2.0 “guru” Mark Drapeau (aka @cheeky_geeky). The discussion was centered around how social networking is being used within the government both effectively and otherwise with a few other solid nuggets thrown in for good measure. I admit that I was somewhat surprised at how many different forms of social networking tools are currently being used by the various government agencies, ranging from wikis to Twitter-like apps. Even the National Weather Service is actively using social networking to support their mission of protecting life and property [which I admit I got a little geeked up about being a meteorologist myself].

It was also nice to hear Mark reiterate the basic fundamentals of social marketing, fundamentals that many of us forget on a daily basis, but are no different when developing any type of marketing campaign:

What is your overarching mission (objective)?

What specific goal are you trying to achieve that supports the mission with this campaign?

What specific tactics are you using to accomplish this goal?

Addressing these three questions before jumping into the social media waters would comprise developing a social media strategy. My officemate and I talk about this all the time. How often do you run into someone who has launched a Facebook page and can’t tell you exactly what purpose their Facebook page serves? Is it to build awareness? Generate leads? Connect with your customers? Is it just one cog in a very large campaign?

It’s basic marketing, right? So why do we so often forget?

Thanks for the reminder Mark.

Every once in awhile, a brand will take you by surprise, but rarely will you be surprised by three, all in one day, using social media. Believe it or not, that actually happened to me yesterday.

Over the weekend, my wife’s car was broken into while parked in a Red Roof Inn parking lot outside of Baltimore, Maryland—the thief made off with a GPS unit. Consequently, yesterday morning we needed to find someone to repair the window that was broken. We called two national autoglass chains, Safelite and Glass Doctor, for quotes and appointment times.

First up, Safelite. The woman on the phone was very sympathetic and quickly gave her a quote and a number of potential appointment times. When my wife mentioned that she was going to get a few other quotes, the woman was very understanding, wished her luck and told her that she could call her should she have any trouble or other questions.

My wife then called Glass Doctor where the woman she spoke with continually confused which window needed repairing, quoted her three different prices, and sounded as if she had been out late the night before. Not a good experience.

In the end, despite being $100 more expensive, quality customer service won out, we chose Safelite.

Being the social media geek that I am, I immediately tweeted that customer service is king—using the real world experience as an example. Within 10 minutes, I received replies from both @Safelite and @Glassdoctor1. @Safelite thanked me for the kind words while @Glassdoctor1 apologized and traded a few messages with me to get to the bottom of the issue, promising to follow up with the local sales office to address the problem. Both very good experiences for me and definitely impacted how I perceived their brands.

Finally, wouldn’t you know that my day ended with me receiving an email from the casting company for Hasbro’s Cranium, inquiring if I would like to submit a video that could potentially be used in a Cranium commercial. So, how did they know my friends and I play Cranium? (OK, played Cranium – all my Cranium activity was pre-baby). Well, they found photos I had posted on Flickr over two years ago and sent me an email through Flickr with the invite. Again, I was very surprised, but excited to see a brand I already like reinforce that positive image by engaging me where I spend time on a daily basis.

I mention these three examples because you constantly read how more prominent brands like Coke or Comcast use Twitter and Facebook to connect with their customers. But, you would never expect an autoglass company or a cult game to use social media the same way. However, they do what I talk with our clients about all the time—they use social media to listen and affect the customer experience. They use social media to engage their customers in a conversation and shape their brand perception. These three brands prove that regardless of size or industry every brand should be listening to what people are saying about them, because people ARE talking. And when your customers DO talk, you should be there to talk back.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, my buddy and I have to demonstrate two people playing frisbee without talking. Oh, and if you happen to stumble across a three year old GPS unit with outdated maps, sigh, send it my way.

On June 1, the internet was abuzz about a study published by the Harvard Business School. The general gist of the study was that men primarily follow other men on Twitter, and that on average, the growing user base of Twitter hardly tweets. Of course, this was big news in the “Twitterverse,” which has been the case with any article that speaks to the usefulness or lack thereof of this latest craze. After reading the study, I felt motivated to respond to the following “findings”:

Although men and women follow a similar number of Twitter users, men have 15% more followers than women
Are we really surprised by these figures? First of all, given that Twitter is a service that was first adopted by all the techheads (which tend to skew male), it’s not surprising that these folks have figured out how to provide useful information on Twitter. As a general point of social media, anyone who produces useful information will attract followers/readers.

The top 10% of prolific Twitter users accounted for over 90% of tweets
Again, as everyone slowly figures out whether or not Twitter is right for them, they will begin to generate more information. Plus, I tend to think that this figure is being skewed by the large number of spam accounts that have been created, which artificially increases the number of Twitter users. That said, I would hope that in a sample size as large as 300,000 that the end statistics would not be affected by the spam phenomena, but I am a skeptic at heart, and I can’t help but wonder what percentage of Twitter’s registrations are real humans.

Among Twitter users, the median number of lifetime tweets per user is one.
I think with a lot of web technologies, particularly those that receive a lot of hype like Twitter has, there is a natural sense of curiosity. So one might create an account to see what Twitter is like, but honestly, Twitter is something that takes a bit of time and understanding to determine what its relevance is for you. If you do not have the patience to figure this out, you may never come back again or tweet. So, am I surprised by this number? No.

An average man is almost twice more likely to follow another man than a woman—which was juxtaposed to the fact that on a typical online social network, most of the activity is focused around women—men follow content produced by women they do and do not know, and women follow content produced by women they know.
Um… do I even need to respond to this? Twitter is text information, which means there are no pictures. We’ve all know the “men are cavemen” mentality and should immediately know that men like to look at pictures of women. But on Twitter, the lack of pictures means a man is basing his decision to follow or friend another member strictly on rational criteria.

That said, after reading through the study, a part of me wondered how familiar the researchers were with the service prior to conducting the study, and whether or not they use Twitter. If so, how do they use it? Also, of the 300,000 profiles that they studied, how many of those were brands, and how did that influence the gender statistics? And what was the point of the study other than to rile up all of the social media pundits?

It feels like every media source has gone on record telling us why we should or should not use Twitter. What amuses me the most though are the comments from people vehemently bashing Twitter. “Twitter is stupid, it’s a waste of time, it doesn’t make sense, etc.” But as David Pogue from the NY Times wrote back in February, and what I emphasize to my colleagues, family, and friends, Twitter is what you make of it. Twitter is not going to be right for everyone, just as some people prefer MySpace to Facebook. And unless you take the time to get to know how it works, the different means to access it, who uses it, and how they use it, you won’t know how it fits into your life.

My point to all of this rambling is that we all need to take these studies and articles with a grain of salt. Do your due diligence and understand what the capabilities are of a given technology yourself and make your own judgement about its value. Personally, I love Twitter, and like everyone else, I’ll be happy to share how I use it in a future post. And like everyone else, I’ll be waiting for all of the bashers to tell me why they don’t like it. [wink]