A new manhattanResearch report suggests that physicians who touched a sales rep’s iPad were more likely to have a satisfactory experience, and more likely to say the experience influenced their clinical decisions.

However, only one-quarter of the 30 percent of physicians who saw a sales rep with an iPad actually touched the device during the meeting.

Commentary from Andrew Spong:

A new chapter in the mythologising of the arcane, totemic qualities of the iPad as an influencer of physician behaviour is written with the release of this data.

What exactly is it about the way that content is presented by iOS which leads doctors to feel as though they have been more influenced than they would have done were it presented on either another tablet, or perhaps a laptop?

Is it the tactile nature of the experience?

The ability of iOS to render graphics?

Or a conditioned response on the part of the audience that associates the tablet with other pleasurable experiences?

It is also interesting to note that reps seem unwilling to let the tablet out of their hands, and let the doctor ‘drive’ the detail. I would have thought ’1. pass the iPad to the clinician’ was the first item on the Successful Digital Detailing 101 training program.

In the text accompanying the instructions concerning the addition of organ donor status to timelines, facebook explains:

More than 114,000 people in the United States, and millions more around the globe, are waiting for the heart, kidney or liver transplant that will save their lives. Many of those people – an average of 18 people per day – will die waiting, because there simply aren’t enough organ donors to meet the need. Medical experts believe that broader awareness about organ donation could go a long way toward solving this crisis.

With the addition of “organ donor” to the Life Events section of timeline, you can state your intention to become an organ donor, and share your story about when, where or why you decided to become a donor. If you are not officially registered as an organ donor, sign up with the appropriate registry.

At a stroke, facebook made issues around organ donorship highly visible to its 900 million active users.

Would it be a Utopian boon or dystopian curse to have all the health resources we needed in one place?

What if facebook was:

• Where your electronic health record resided
• Where you searched for high quality health information
• Where your patient community convened
• Where you were able to consult with your healthcare professional in private
• Where you stored, quantified and analysed the personal health data streaming from your body

Taste maker, mould breaker and earth shaker though it may be, how culturally competent is facebook?

How do you feel about being invited to share your health history on one area of your timeline, and the location of your latest tattoo or piercing (because everyone has at least one of each, apparently ) in another?

It is the link I elect to include in many of my social media presences.

It features prominently in sites that I use to promote my services.

For me, the reason that it is worth the time investment is clear: LinkedIn is a traffic-driving monster on the Internet, with a global ranking of 12. It is the best, most visible, always-on means of advertising my professional services that is available to me – and it is free.

LinkedIn results feature prominently in Google search as a consequence of the fact that this professional network has become the digital Rolodex on everyone’s virtual desktop, and is used exhaustively by potential clients and recruiters alike.

It is worth remembering that LinkedIn’s default ‘People’ search crawls its user records for keywords as well as names, and that searches for leading global service providers or candidates in, for example, social health are only going to encounter those profiles that feature the keywords in question.

Just as in any other search-related context, you should be aiming to appear on the first page of LinkedIn results for the keywords that are important to you professionally. Not everyone can be on the first page, of course; but then not everyone is optimising their LinkedIn profile to ensure that they are aligned with the terms of reference that are important to them professionally.

Here is a simple method to test and tune the strength of the connection between your professional keywords and your LinkedIn profile:

• Take a few moments to define three to five keywords that you consider to best describe your professional interests. For example, mine include ‘health’, ‘digital’, ‘pharma’, and ‘social’
• Enter them as strings in the default ‘People‘ search bar at the top right of the LinkedIn homepage for global results or in the ‘Keywords’ field of the ‘Advanced People Search‘ which can be accessed by clicking the ‘Advanced’ link to its right. For example, the image above shows the current top results for an Advanced People Search on ‘social health’ restricted to the UK
• Identify which results produce strong (top 10/first page) results for you, and which deliver weaker outcomes.
• Assess the ranked performance of the search results on the keyword strings you enter relative to the importance of the terms to your professional practice
• Revise your LinkedIn profile to include additional references to the terms that you wish to promote up the search rankings.
• Restest your results over the coming days and weeks

The prevalence of the keywords in your profile influences the ranking of your search results, but discretion is required.

It is self-evident when users ‘game’ their LinkedIn profiles in order to manufacture results, and far better that you should find cogent, interesting ways to describe your work using the keywords that are important to you.

Cutting and pasting a keyword string 50 times in your profile may get you on the first page of results, but it would also make for rather alarming viewing and may lead observers to form an adverse opinion of your professional standing.

Get found: be creative, exercise good judgment in the way that you present yourself and deploy your keywords, and keep testing and tuning.

If the frequency with which you receive inquiries prefaced by the comment ‘I saw your profile on LinkedIn’ increases, then you’re doing the right thing.

Why?

Because the impact of a message concerning a product is no longer determined at the point of production by producers, but rather at the point of reception by consumers.

The implications of this role-reversal extend far beyond consumers co-opting the focus of a given campaign in order to critique it rather than express their support for it.

The hubristic expectation on the part of companies that believe consumers should for some unstated reason be overtaken by a compulsion to express their zealous support for their commodities offers some insight into advertisers’ lack of understanding as to the socially-created chasm that has appeared between them and their market.

This is not a divide to be on the wrong side of, nor is it an epiphany that is easily acknowledged.

If we date the dawn of the social turn in business to have been heralded by the launch of one of its key enablers, Twitter, acceding to the unavoidable truth a mere six years later that fewer and fewer people now care about, listen to, or are influenced by the opinions of companies regarding their own goods and services must shed a harsh light on, for example, the continuing relevance and utility of CRM tools and many SaaS propositions.

Social business strategies are not defined in order to reassure businesses that there are still ways of making what they did in the past appear relevant to their future as they endeavour to remain profitable in the present.

Instead, the act of iterating a social business strategy signifies a company’s choice to be proactive in mitigating the potentially deleterious impact of the social turn in business on its existing enterprise by choosing to understand and respond to it.

Define what social business means for your organisation.*

Interrogate how the social turn in business is beginning to affect your enterprise before its impact on your bottom line forces you to.

Then, integrate and execute your findings.

*Whilst this blog offers a number of perspectives on what social business is, there is no single definition, but in the interests of disambiguation let it be stated that whilst a social enterprise can be a social businesses, a social business need not be a social enterprise.

In my opinion, pretty much everything about today’s ‘Introduce Yourself to a Free Tall Latte at Starbucks UK’ is wrong. Let’s start with:

Why this video could never speak to me

1) I drink coffee, but I don’t drink lattes.

I’m not here to have a go at infantilised cow-juice addicts, though.

They’ve got enough problems.

2) The music.

My ears! My ears!

Boom chink, boom chink… a chirpy piano refrain that puts you right there… in the elevator this muzak was spawned in.

And now you have to get out.

Starbucks has suddenly become the Seventh Circle of Hell <lightning flash> for you.

To be fair, it’s always been that for me.

So no change there, really.

3) The pacing.

‘I’m going to speak s-l-o-w-l-y to you, because you are hard of thinking.’

4) The timbre of the speaker’s voice.

‘Even though you’ve never heard me before, I’m going to convey this inane message to you in a way that I, as a voice artist, working closely with the agency lead who has commissioned me, intend to convey warmth and fellowship to you. In a really authentic and engaged manner, of course.’

Did I miss any buzzwords out, there?

5) The monologue.

‘Have you noticed how everything seems a little impersonal nowadays? We’ve all become usernames, reference numbers and <introducing an emphasis of incredulous befuddlement in order to connote a lack of understanding> “IP addresses”‘.

But you still remember how to fork over your money, right? Step this way! Let’s move on to:

Why this video is unlikely to speak to anyone

Starbucks announces triumphantly that it has ‘decided to do things differently’.

That’s right.

They’re going to write your name on your cup instead of your order.

That will make you feel special.

You may not get the coffee you ordered, but hey! It’ll have your name on the side.

And that’s why you went into the coffee shop in the first place, right?

To get a paper cup with your name on, not the puerile, milky, love-surrogate you crave as the consequence of a deep-seated psychological aberration, pressed into daily service as a buttress against the miseries of your morning.

Starbucks’ vision of how to make us all feel like individuals is apparently going to be facilitated by treating us all the same, in some ghoulish, sub-Freudian parody of what human fellow-feeling actually is.

‘Introduce Yourself’ is still ‘selling to an archetype’ by any other name, and as such remains faceless and anonymous. It’s just now there’s the added disorientation of being asked for your name by Don Draper so that by some sleight-of-hand you are encouraged to feel known and loved, and forget the fact that you are a few pounds poorer, and as crushed and abandoned as that discarded paper cup with your name on it.

Let’s not get into the issues around ‘throwing yourself away’ when you’ve finished, either.

However, in my opinion this campaign’s biggest failure is that, contrary to the ‘we’re all in this together (and don’t forget to buy a coffee tomorrow)’ conviviality it tries to engender, there is no connection here.

Let’s look at what is probably actually going to happen during the promotion this morning. There is no Starbucks in my town, so I can’t test this hypothesis, but if anyone else would like to, I will publish your videos.

I envisage lines of people queueing out of the door of Starbucks, moaning about the fact that they’re not getting their free coffee fast enough.

Furthermore, Starbucks staff will take a shovel load of abuse and, ironically bearing in mind the campaign’s theme, end up feeling thoroughly alienated. It would be interesting to know whether there is a spike in the number of Starbucks staff handing in their notice today as a consequence.

So, how could Starbucks they have improved on this?

A series of videos shot from the barista’s point of view showing customers’ reactions when they asked them their names, and whether they could buy them a coffee would at least have offered some insights into how Starbucks customers react to the chain’s attempt to be more personal.

What can healthcare communications can learn

Do not universalise need.

Do not provide solutions designed to speak to everyone, and that touch no-one.

Do not test messages on audiences. Let audiences deliver messages.

Hand over the microphone.

That’s what we think.

What do you think?

Personal learning: don’t try to do something like this when Storify is down

A full list and a tweet chat calendar of meeting times can be found on Symplur.

While visiting, you may like to review Symplur‘s healthcare conference hashtags and new disease hashtags.

#hcsm Healthcare Social Media (USA) convenes on Sunday evenings. Moderator: Dana Lewis
#hcsmanz Healthcare Social Media Australia and New Zealand convenes on Sunday evenings. Moderators: Ed Butler, Ben Harris-Roxas, Robbo
#hcsmasia Healthcare Social Media Asia. A chat hashtag. Moderator: Shingo Kushioka
#hcsmat Healthcare Social Media Austria. A chat hashtag. Moderator: Michaela Endemann
#hcsmca Healthcare Social Media Canada convenes on Wednesday afternoons. Moderator: Colleen Young
#hcsmeu Healthcare Social Media Europe convenes on Friday afternoons. Moderators: Silja Chouquet, Gill Dunn, Michaela Endemann, Rob Halkes, Andrew Spong, Andy Widger
#hcsmeuES Healthcare Social Media Spain. A chat hashtag. Moderator: Paco Baldoví, Delia Carballo, Cindy Cárdenas, Elena Benito Ruiz, Laura Mª Vázquez
#hcsmeufr Healthcare Social Media France convenes in the afternoon of the first Wednesday of each month. Moderator: Tiphaine de Frémont 
#hcsmglobal Healthcare Social Media Global. A chat hashtag. Moderator: Valentina Jaramillo
#hcsmin Healthcare Social Media India. A chat hashtag. Moderator: Dinesh Chindarkar
#hcsmla Healthcare Social Media Latin America convenes on Tuesday evenings. Moderator: Valentina Jaramillo
#hcsmse Healthcare Social Media Sweden convenes on Friday afternoons. Moderators:  Par Hoglund, Ulla Rudsander
#hcsmSV Healthcare Social Media Silicon Valley. A chat hashtag. Moderators: Renee Berry, Erin Macartney
#hcsmua Healthcare Social Media Ukraine. Details pending.
#hcsmuk Healthcare Social Media UK. A chat hashtag. Moderator: Alex Butler

Please contact me using any of the methods listed in the header or right hand column if any of these details are incorrect, and I will be happy to update them.

What this exercise has taught me is that neither the ‘Bios’, nor web presences (where created), nor Symplur profiles of many of the hcsmX community chapters have been properly formed or populated.

As a community, there is work to be done here in order to realise both the value that the individual constituents can deliver, and across the movement as a whole.*

*That’s if we believe hcsm to be a movement at all, which is a moot point.

Coda, 23 February 2012: Please be sure to read the comments to this post.

ePatients are patients.

mHealth is health.

social media is media.

There are enough how-tos, Top 10s and playbooks out there.

They’re just a search term away.

We neither need to write more of them in the belief that we are in some way contributing something (other than more static), nor labour under the misapprehension that new entrants to the health conversation will be incapable of finding them for themselves.

Every act of unnecessary explanation could have been an act of much-needed (co-)creation.

Don’t squander a chance to make a difference; we all have fewer of them left than we’d like to believe.