Janet Lee Johnson | The Art of Marketing

I’ve been fortunate lately, learning the Art of RSS Mixology from Marshall Kirkpatrick, in one of his last extended consulting contracts before he begins writing for ReadWriteWeb full time. Marshall is an RSS and “market intelligence systems” (I like that phrase) guru who’s helping me figure out how to efficiently and completely monitor the social web - including forums, social networks and the blogosphere - for the Academic Network and one of their large pharmaceutical clients.

You can’t manage what you can’t measure…

Monitoring your brand’s online reputation is becoming more critical as social media use explodes. We’ve got quite a system now - of persistent RSS feeds (via Attensa), Yahoo!Pipes (for combining and filtering feeds), Dapper (for those sites without RSS feeds built in) - watching a whole bunch of social media and delivering results right to our client’s (you name it) inbox/private website/RSS reader, in real time.

Thinking differently…

The thing that I’ve found most interesting, though, in learning from him, is the way that Marshall intuitively taps into the collective intelligence as he works.

• He keeps his own RSS feeds automatically rolling in several areas on his machine, so during times he’s forced to wait or scan, he can also scan scrolling feeds:
  • On his GMail account, the feed rolls along the top of his inbox - something might inspire him there…
  • Twitter updates roll along the side of his workspace on his Mac - he’s gotten great story scoops there…
• He has special landing pages built into shortcuts to sites that he visits often:
  • His delicious shortcut always goes to delicious/popular, so he will always see (and search) the most popular tagged sites first. You never know when a hotly tagged page will inspire or enlighten you!
  • His Google Blog Search page opens to a search of his own name, so he can always know whether there’s a new post mentioning his name. (He’s always quick to comment that way… which is inspirational.)

I have a new set of shortcuts in my toolbar now. What can you do - by thinking just a little differently - to take advantage of the collective intelligence as you go through your day?

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I got a note this morning from my friends over at Anvil Media, a Portland, OR search engine marketing (SEM) firm. Their online reputation was being bashed. I know them well, they’re above reproach in my book, so I wanted to look into it, and asked for an accounting of the situation.

A Marketing Coup Crumbles

Here’s how it rolled out:

1. A few months ago, Anvil and Attensa worked together to put information on Wikipedia about Attensa’s RSS feed server. Now, that’s a feat, because no “marketing” information is allowed on Wikipedia, it’s all about facts, according to Wikipedia’s “neutral point of view” policy.
2. They adhered to Wikipedia’s editorial guidelines, even to the degree that they neutered marketing language and listed Attensa’s competitors in fairness to the ‘encyclopedic’ nature of the site. Their content added enough value to the site to be published.
3. Leads started flowing into the Attensa site, and they were good ones. A marketer’s dream.
4. Their program was good enough to get coverage in Marketing Sherpa: “How to Use Wikipedia for Lead Gen…”
5. The shit hit the fan.
6. Someone pulled down the Attensa citations on Wikipedia, and everything else Anvil had ever written on Wikipedia - to boot. Emails were sent (some not-so-slightly threatening), memes ensued, and on and on…

I’m not one to fan a flame of reputation bashing (no matter the source), so suffice it to say, Anvil and Attensa and everyone I’ve been talking to about it have been (rightfully) alarmed by the response.

Wake Up Call for Transparency

So why am I taking the time to write about this? Because everyone in corporate America needs to know this story. I will go a little deeper here, to further illuminate the irresponsible nature of the secret sect that seems to control Wikipedia. In June I attended the Drug Information Association convention in Boston for the Academic Network. I blogged about it here, but it’s worth repeating…

One of the panelists lamented of their company’s inability to change a factual error on Wikipedia for a drug they manufactured - it was listed as being taken ‘orally’ when, in fact, it was not. They couldn’t do anything to correct it, though, for fear of being held liable for all of the constantly changing information about their drug on the site. So they opted, on the advice of their attorneys, to leave it.

That’s a pretty big deal. A drug company being unable to correct a HUGE inaccuracy about a drug, because of fear.

You see, since about August of last year, there’s been a tool that will show who’s editing what on Wikipedia, called Wikiscanner. When it came out, so did the horror stories (like these in Wired)… of companies editing (and deleting) entire paragraphs of information from Wikipedia. This is exactly what the Wikipedia Editorial guidelines are out to prevent, but now Big Brother can expose exactly who’s writing what…

And prevention is exactly what they’re getting - pharmaceutical companies are afraid to (or being banned from) righting obvious wrongs.

Meanwhile, guess what comes up as the #1 search result in most searches? Wikipedia. In fact, in the case of health and medical information, look who’s trusted most:

That scares me, just hearing one little story of an inaccuracy found, and the company being unable to change it.

People trust Wikipedia. Google trusts Wikipedia. But can we trust the people who edit Wikipedia? Not based on the backchannel I saw this morning.

Who are these people? A pretty clubby society of folks who’ve been able to figure out how to:

• Use the (fairly technical) programming language
• Participate and thrive in the backchannel conversations while doing so (see below)
• Control not only postings, but entire access to Wikipedia, and
• Block companies from editing entries

Who are these folks? To sum up with an insight as to their mindset (from Wired article Wikipedia FAQK), author Lore Sjoberg wrote:

“What should I know if I want to contribute to an argument nexus (or “article”) on Wikipedia?
It will help to familiarize yourself with some of the common terms used on Wikipedia:

• meat puppet: A person who disagrees with you.
• non-notable: A subject you’re not interested in.
• vandalism: An edit you didn’t make.
• neutral point of view: Your point of view.
• consensus: A mythical state of utopian human evolution. Many scholars of Wikipedian theology theorize that if consensus is ever reached, Wikipedia will spontaneously disappear.

Is it true that anyone can contribute?
Sure, Wikipedia is absolutely open to absolutely anyone contributing to absolutely anything! As long as you haven’t been banned, or the article you’re contributing to hasn’t been locked, or there isn’t a group of people waiting to delete anything you write, or you don’t make the same change more than three times in one day, or the subject of the article hasn’t decided to send scary lawyer letters to Wikipedia, or you haven’t pissed Jimbo Wales off real bad. It’s all about freedom.”

Freedom for those who know the secret handshake, that is. As for the rest of us, we’re probably just non-notable at best.

Count me as a meat puppet - on behalf of Anvil and Attensa, in this case…

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I’ve been witness to quite a mental mindstorm brewing in my brain over the past few days, and it’s likely to consume my blog efforts for some time to come… (fair warning, or fantastic relief to my four or five regular readers.)

I attended my first non-high tech conference in years (where I wasn’t a speaker), the Drug Information Association’s (DIA) annual convention. There to represent the Academic Network, I was fortunate to research the state of the pharmaceutical industry’s online strategies; especially as consumers are flocking online to research medical conditions and the medicines they’re being prescribed.

Back to the Basics

What I found was quite surprising - for someone who recently declared 2008 to finally be the year of the business blog… the state of technology (and technical infrastructure) in pharma was pretty surprising.

Partly because of regulations, and I’m not sure what other excuses there are… but frankly I was appalled at the lack of IT infrastructure to do even the basics - like supporting remote work teams. (At least, assuming the session speakers I heard were representative.)

Some examples of issues I heard:

• Many Medical Liaisons (remote representatives of pharma companies) have no access to a shared knowledge base with internal Medical Information team members. An example of a “case study knowledge repository” was shown, but there were no search capabilities, no collaboration capabilities, nothing beyond a database of PDFs or templates. It was as if I was looking at an online portal from 2000.
• Many software representatives (Oracle, Microsoft and others were at the show) had no real notion of allowing their vertical tools to accept web-based information via XML and RSS. When I tried to describe why one might want to poll online communities for potential Adverse Events (something pharma has to monitor and report to the FDA on a strictly regulated basis); I got blank stares.
  • Meanwhile, according to JupiterResearch, the top three reasons people congregate online are:
    • To see what other consumers say about a medication or treatment (36%)
    • To research other consumers’ knowledge and experiences (31%)
    • To learn skills or get education to manage a condition (27%)

Between Rocks and Hard Places…

The panel I was most looking forward to, (and delighted to find it at the show) was titled “Drug Information, Wikipedia and Google Scholar: Implications for Medical Information.” It was both frightening and enlightening at the same time. I Twittered my thoughts as the thing was unfolding… but to net it out:

Frightening: Hearing panelists scoff at the lack of viability of Wikipedia because it’s not scientifically reviewed, yet having them be unwilling (or unable) to correct inadequacies themselves. Even when it comes down to correcting a “simple” edit like changing an inaccurate method of drug delivery - from “oral” to some other method. If they change one heinous error, does that mean the rest of the article is correct by implication?

Enlightening: Because of the advent of WikiScanner in August, 2007, even anonymous entries can be tracked to an IP address and attributed to an organization. Examples were shown where organizations (Diebold and others) altered Wikipedia entries “anonymously” and were later outed for doing so in Wired. The last thing these public companies, tightly regulated by the FDA (ugh, those poor people and their systems… more on that later), want is to be publicly derided for anonymous changes.

Meanwhile, look where most consumers go to find information about medical conditions online:

So my new crusade is to do two things: help enlightened health care organizations safely enter the Health 2.0 space (while trying to stay patient - no pun intended), and to help those of us poor schlubs who are out there looking for information to find the most accurate, up-to-date information possible.

It’s a big job, but somebody has to do it. I welcome all the help I can get…

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I’m reflecting on the things I’ve learned here in Boston at the DIA conference, in support of the Academic Network. And because of the strict regulatory environment surrounding the pharma industry, I believe they’re going to be some of the last to really be able to embrace Health 2.0, (links to my post on subject on the brand new ANW blog).

Meanwhile, consumers are leading the way into the online world, going online FIRST to research diseases, conditions, and the share experiences with others. In a very informative article about this trend, Jane Sarasohn-Kahn of THINK-Health said:

‘Within the environment of Health 2.0, people with chronic health conditions are sharing their stories with each other, not just for emotional support, but for the clinical knowledge they gain from participating with “patients like me” in an online community. Doctors are meeting up online to share quandaries about challenging cases and solutions that work. Researchers are coming together with patients to learn about side effects in real-time to improve therapeutic regimens.’

- The Wisdom of Patients - Health Care Meets Online Social Media

In pharma, people look for “signals” and “beacons” and safety.

The signals are here.

The beacons and safe passage are also here, but it’ll be a task to get health care industry professionals to trust the new set of professionals who can negotiate the waters to take them there. I intend to be right there with those businesses who want to meet consumers in a world of Health 2.0 first.

Academic Network is one of them.

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I’m here at the Drug Information Association conference in Boston for Academic Network, who just announced their “Health 2.0″ practice yesterday. The session is called “Patient Recruitment Strategies and Sites’ Perspectives. One of the panelists is another partner of the Academic Network (ANW), John McAnulty from Fleishman-Hillard’s Clinical Trials practice.

I’m actually going to capture my thoughts on the session on my Twitter account, in order to share the “in the moment” thoughts, and (using those thoughts) should be able to pull information together at the end of the day.

Session is kicking off now… off to Twitter!

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