The answer: Warning Letter (but I’ll admit “not approved” is also at the top of the list!)

For those unfamiliar, the FDA, and in this case the Office of Prescription Drug Promotion (OPDP) issues warning letters when a company or organization insufficiently or inaccurately communicates a medical product or device’s benefits and risks. This includes not fully describing the side effects associated with a product or using language or visuals that imply a product treats a certain condition which the FDA has not approved. A warning letter is what it sounds like; a cautionary notice – “Strike 1” to use a baseball analogy – from the FDA that a company should consider revising its communications to avoid enforcement action.

Of course, Warning Letters can be viewed through different lenses, with the chance for confusion. It’s like the batter who thinks he’s received ball four when the umpire calls strike 3. Different interpretations and views of the information, and the warning letters themselves, in healthcare communications can seriously impact future marketing efforts much like disagreements over the strike zone can affect a game’s outcome.

Luckily, the FDA does not issue warning letters without explanation or allowing for questions. Today at 11:30 a.m. ET, the OPDP will host an Enforcement Webinar that lets viewers directly communicate questions on Warning Letters and Untitled Letters November 2012 through March 2013.

During this time, the FDA issued six Untitled Letters for misleading claims about the efficacy or risks associated with products treating a variety of diseases and conditions.

Here are the three questions that I’d like the OPDP to answer today:

• Looking forward, do you have a sense of particular areas of concern when it comes to trends you’ve seen with drug promotion? For example, are you seeing more violations in terms of overstating efficacy claims or understanding potential risks?
• There was only one online letter dealing with a company’s web site and podcast. What are your primary concerns regarding potential violations on digital platforms? Where do you see the biggest risk for sponsors?
• How do you plan to include the information you’ve used for these Untitled Letters in whatever policy FDA eventually issues regarding social media promotion?

I’ll be live-tweeting tomorrow’s meeting using the hashtag #FDAletters. Please follow along and look for another update on this blog later this week. And if you have additional questions for the FDA, please leave them in the comments section. I’d love to see them.

It seems like the whole world is trying to figure out the future of healthcare communications and marketing. What exactly are the opportunities in the expanding trend of consolidated marketing and communication assignments? Yes, the whole last sentence is an oxymoron.

There is no doubt that Healthcare is important on a national and local level. It is complex. But we are an industry of pretty smart people that have regular dialogue with scientists and clinicians and do okay.

Some would say Healthcare is fragile; an industry that was insular not so long ago but today is under siege, has lost its swagger and maybe even its edge. Again, there are a lot of good agencies out there vigorously trying to reinvent themselves to cement the cracks in the highways to “healthy healthcare marketing” and communications.

So why are all these smart, good people and agencies struggling so hard?

The problem around simply cementing the cracks is that eventually environmental pressures force the cracks wide open. One can see this on display in those cases where agencies (typically under a holding company model) continue to specialize in their verticals and piece together “team approaches” to healthcare stakeholder marketing and communications. The PR agency does their thing, the ad agency theirs, managed care theirs, and so on. Under the guise of integration the agencies form a unified team where the best communicators come together to ideate and create the programs and platforms that underpin successful brand education and promotion.

Beyond the obvious pressures of agency infighting over program control or revenue, this approach is artificial in that it cobbles approaches and people together rather than being designed or engineered around data as the communication strategy or tactic that is wanted or needed or the must have tool at a precise moment in time for someone to self-mange their health in a new healthcare system.

In the second scenario, you can’t really put a label on what the communication genre is. It’s not PR. It’s not Advertising. It’s not Med Ed. And frankly it’s irrelevant. Except of course to the individual groups that practice some of these crafts individually or exclusively.

In a world where nothing matters more than information and truth, the industry has to evolve to be less about contrived conversation starters or bombardments of brand messages to increase share of noise or voice.  It all comes down to scientific and medical intelligence.

In a data-deep world gone social, gathering intelligence, engaging intelligently, and activating intelligent, co-engineered communications has never been more crucial. And you cannot get this by cobbling together a bunch of disparate entities with a hope and prayer that what needs to break through or be delivered to make thoughtful healthcare choices, decisions or even loyalties will in fact get delivered.

You get it when the borders go away. And the analytic workbench enables the mapping of social and contextual insights that translate variables into disruptive commerce models, digital platforms and trusted engagement (secondary but prized outcome = highly engaging/successful brand.)

W2o Group is excited to be able to invest our time and resources to reshape current products and innovate new ones designed to deliver healthcare resources like:

• The World’s First Clinical Investigator Index
• The World’s First Advocacy Index for clinical Trials
• Dashboards for clinical trials showing all integrated information
• Real insight and understanding of patients, disease states and investigators and the elements that will improve clinical trial enrollment
• Improved connectedness through dialogue and engagement with all
• Improved relationships as a result of value brought forward (for example, improved clinical trial enrollment that helps investigators build their practice and thought leader position)
• Improved practices in how content is consistently shared for improved patient and advocacy relationships since the right patients will be in the right trials at the right time

W2o also recognizes that innovation is real time and never static.  What is an innovation today can quickly become yesterday’s news.

And this is why we often describe ourselves as partners in communication design and engineering. Essentially this means that we partner with our clients as “optimizers of data that shape communications that spur a call to action.”  In the case of healthcare, it means being a provider of precisely what is needed in the area of information or education or answers to enable self management and care in an era choc full of system of care challenges and complexities.

I admit that we still have plenty of challenges and imperfections in health, especially in the United States. The elephants in the room – access, cost, reduced research funding – have all gotten bigger, and they may soon sit on the gains made on behalf of patients everywhere. But for now, I’m optimistic that patients won’t allow these challenges to stop them.

Here are four reasons why patients should be hopeful, and why physicians, health companies and regulatory agencies are adapting and growing to meet their needs:

1. The FDA has a patient web site: Haven’t heard of it? It’s called simply the Patient Network. Launched last week, it offers patients and caregivers a simple, navigable tool to have their voices heard and questions answered. In the past, the only patient outreach I’d seen from FDA was allowing patients to comment at advisory committee meetings. This is a big step forward. The proof will be in how FDA engages patients, and if it can expand this content onto the social media channels patients are already using.
2. Roni Zeiger wants to combine a clinical trials search engine with social networking for cancer. It’s like Google getting together with the ClinicalTrials.Gov and the best cancer patient forums out there: Haven’t heard of Romi Zeiger? I hadn’t either. Romi was the chief health strategist at Google. Now he’s working to create Smart Patients, a web site that will let cancer patients and caregivers – already extremely knowledgeable about their disease and treatment – learn from each other and let the healthcare system learn from them. The idea is exciting and has people talking. It’s made even more exciting by the fact that Zeiger’s co-founder created the Association of Cancer Online Resources (ACOR). Haven’t heard of ACOR? It’s one of the most widely used patient e-mail listservs for all kinds of cancers, allowing patients to share tips about treatments and ask questions about anything on their minds when it comes to cancer.
3. Dr. Susan Desmond-Hellmann wants physicians to let patients make their job better: Dr. Desmond-Hellmann is Chancellor at the University of San Francisco California School of Medicine. She knows physicians are under tremendous pressure and that the health care system is “stressing out the very people we need the most from.” To solve it, she says patient advocates can help expand access to medicines, and that “important, transformative things happen only because patient advocates and patients had a seat at the table.” But even if patients have a seat at the table, it’s not enough. She says patients have to drive their care and create a new social contract where patients supply big data for the greater good. It’s a tall order and may take time, but this social contract could offer something game-changing in how patients are cared for. Take the time to watch her TEDMED talk. You’ll be glad you did.
4. Natalie Stack’s wish is close to coming true. She has her parents and committed researchers to thank: The New York Times has the inspiring story of Natalie Stack. When she was 12, Natalie’s birthday wish was for her disease to vanish. Ten years after making the wish, she’s still alive. Natalie’s parents started a foundation to develop a new medicine for nephropathic cystinosis, a rare genetic disease that, if untreated, typically destroys the kidneys after only ten years. Even a kidney transplant may not help, and the disease is often fatal. Just last week, the FDA approved this new treatment, showing what’s possible when patients and caregivers don’t give up on progress. There will certainly be challenges over the cost of the drug, but the progress deserves to be recognized.

A new type of consulting firm is emerging, that we call S²aaS, in an industry that only had one S previously.

Within our firm, we like to say that we are in the process of creating a software firm within a services company.

It’s not a question of if…it’s a question of how.

Clients want relevant insights for paid, earned, owned and shared media, anywhere on earth, anytime of the day, for as far back as it may matter to understand an issue.

• Technology is allowing us to see what people say at the store level via their phone right now, while algorithms enable us to know who has driven share of conversation for the last five years.
• Customers are making decisions on their own terms.  How we reached them in the past is decreasingly effective.
• Competitive advantage will go to those organizations who are expert at identifying issues, opportunities, trends and competitor actions more quickly than their peers.

Hardware (physical labor), alone, is incapable of harnessing this combination of data and insights.  Software helps solve the problem.  Yet, in an industry where customers decide whether a brand is truly relevant, it will always be a combination of software and hardware (our brains) that wins in the marketplace.  Neither alone is enough.  Together, we enter a new age of strategic insights.

It means that communications leaders should look at the programmer in their office like they have looked at the creative director for years. They are the new artists, who can create solutions that were unimaginable a few years ago. Programmers are realizing that without the insights of client-facing teams, they will not build what is most relevant to the market.  It’s why we have creative and digital together.  We want our artists to know each other exceptionally well.

And all of us, when we strive to provide the best client service, will realize that fluency in software and “hardware” will lead to the best ideas and solutions.

The result is the emergence of the S²aaS consulting firm run by communications engineers. We are providing “software and services as a service”.  We’re in the cloud and on the ground.

Of course, none of this happens without two key ingredients.  Innovative clients and entrepreneurial agency teams.  When we were selected this week as the digital agency of the year and the specialist agency of the year by The Holmes Report, it made us realize why we are so fortunate.  It’s simple.  We work with some of the most innovative clients in the world and we are building a team of super smart entrepreneurs who believe in pragmatically disrupting the status quo.  This formula is leading to the creation of a S²aaS firm of the future.

Our goal is to help redefine the future of our industry day by day, client by client, as we figure out how to create software that makes a difference and “hardware” that knows how to achieve the right results.

We’re just getting started…time to get back to innovating with our team.

Today, we co-presented the second webinar titled “Blogging 101 — Helping You Get Started.” The webinar was an hour long with the first 45 minutes spent addressing key statistics, best practices on how to blog the right way along with a couple of case studies. The last fifteen minutes were spent answering questions.

During the presentation, I (Aaron Strout) was joined by SBA blogger, Caron Beesley and small business blogger/digital strategist, Simon Salt.

As promised, the full recording of the webinar is embedded below. You can also click through to see the video on Youtube.

In addition, you can access some of the key slides on Slideshare below.

Note: The next webinar on using social networks is coming up on May 22 at 1 PM ET. We will have a sign up link soon.

Via Diet Coke Facebook page

What do these brands have in common with Star Wars? What we’re seeing here is another example of brands newsjacking* holidays and current events for the purpose of generating buzz. It’s an interesting play, often associated with Oreo’s recent social strategy that inserts the brand into unrelated topics. However, most brands that apply newsjacking into their strategy are missing one very important element: the lack of product association with the topic. While the post may receive high fan engagement, does it leave a lingering product association with the audience? Let’s be honest, when I think about Star Wars I think about the Millennium Falcon doing the Kessel run in less than 12 parsecs, not drinking a bottle of Diet Coke while eating Chex Mix. The key here is for brands to talk to their audiences about their interests while still tying it back to the product.

Amongst these brands we see an example published by Oreo that takes the audience one level deeper and fills the gap between topic to product association. Oreo shared a photo of a glass of blue milk paired with an Oreo, referencing both the blue milk (or Tatooine milk) shown in Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope and blue Oreos once produced by the brand. The post prompted both movie lovers and brand fans to post comments about the blue milk image:

• “I was just thinking about this last night, have to say I made memories with oreos that turn your milk blue. Bring these back!”
• “In the “first” Star Wars Luke drinks blue milk with his Aunt and Uncle on Tatooine.”
• “I remember those!!! When you dunked them, they would turn your milk blue!”

While the image speaks primarily to the topic of Star Wars Day, it sparked conversation amongst fans and more importantly it sparked conversation about the product. While maybe not a conscious effort by Oreo, this example does highlight the necessity for brands to connect with their audiences by creating content that speaks to both the current event and the product. This comes as a refreshing change from Oreo’s recent push of creative for non-existent products (e.g. Bastille Day cookie). As brands continue to focus content on obscure holidays and current events, I’m interested to see how social and creative teams shape the message to speak to their audience’s interests without forgetting their product.

Via Oreo Facebook page

P.S. Check out our VIP guest at our 2^nd Annual W2O Mash Up Party below. The Austin W2O office mixed it up by celebrating Kentucky Derby, Star Wars Day, and Cinco de Mayo all rolled into one. (Yes, that’s our very own Bob Pearson with Chewbacca!)

*Source: Author David Meerman Scott for the term “newsjacking“

At the heart of that culture are a company’s core values – what “will never change” as Jim Collins points out. Unfortunately, these values can end up marginalized in marketing and communications, thought of as just another concept to shoehorn into messaging. The language is often dry and benign: Integrity, Growth, Customer First, et al. But what if I told you this language has the power to change behavior and shape the way your employees (and customers) see the world, your company or their jobs?

A 2010 article in The Wall Street Journal explored cognitive research into connections between language and perception, and how different parts of language – like terminology, verb tense, relation to space/time – can shape the way people think. According to author Lera Boroditsky, “All this new research shows us that the languages we speak not only reflect or express our thoughts, but also shape the very thoughts we wish to express.”

Core values provide a common language to guide employee actions and communications. In this light, differences between Japanese and English can be viewed similarly to the differences between the internal languages of Google and SAS (ranked 1 and 2 respectively on FORTUNE’s 100 Best Companies to Work For). So imagine a company’s power to guide employee, partner and customer perception, and achieve greater goals around employee recruitment, satisfaction and innovation, simply by choosing and reinforcing the right language.

Whether creating your company’s core values or finding ways to better integrate them into your organizational communications, here are three language considerations to help maximize their potential and overall engagement:

1. Negate the Negative: State what you stand for, not what you don’t. In the early days of Google, the founding few created the “Ten things we know to be true.” Now imagine if the list had been “Ten things we know to be false.” Seems like a small change, but that list would carry significantly less weight for current and potential employees, as well as customers and investors. Instead of discovering what the company stands for – what they believe will never change – you’d find the limited items Google believes are not true, exposing a whole world of questions on what it believes is true. It’s the difference between absolute clarity (what is) and ambiguity (what is not).
2. Language Should “Fit”: If the word “Integrity” isn’t already in your company’s vernacular, it probably won’t resonate with employees, partners and customers. This doesn’t mean your company lacks integrity, only that you may need to find creative ways to illustrate that moral footing. A great example of this is “OUR ISMs” by Quicken Loans (#13 on FORTUNE’s list). Rather than integrity, they use “Do the right thing.” They then elaborate with a saying you can imagine repeated in every company presentation across the country: “Remember, eventually three things always come out: The Sun, The Moon, and The Truth.”
3. Words Need a Story: Great core values contain history and strong rationale, perhaps a story or lesson reinforcing the company’s stance. Check out The Container Store (#16 on FORTUNE’s list), whose Foundation Principles feature themes like “Man In The Desert Selling.” This memorable metaphor is brought to life through an employee video sharing a story about this principle in action. Stories of core values in practice are also great ways to highlight employees and the company’s valued behaviors. Ideally, the stories themselves become a part of your internal language.

*Word cloud illustrates all the text (language) used on Culture pages for the top 20 companies in FORTUNE’s “100 Best Companies to Work For.”

Lists are fun. They get everyone talking. Granted, sometimes that talking is bad, but at least it stirs up a debate. We do these kinds of lists all the time at W2O Group for fun. Why, you might ask? The answer could be that we have a lot of geeks on our team (I say that in the nicest way possible – we cherish geeks here). The real answer though is that we love the process of taking existing methodologies — say the U.S. News World Report Top Colleges and Universities list — and trying to apply some of our social and digital analytics approaches to it. That is what we have done here.

Utilizing one of the algorithms we have developed internally, we took the list of the top colleges and universities and tried to understand the ranking if we looked only at each school’s social and web presence. How did we do that? Using a weighted index approach, we looked at the primary university social accounts (no athletics, or other school-related functions) on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. We then factored in the primary .edu website for each of the schools. There are dozens of metrics that go into this sort of ranking so I wont list them all here, but I will say that the metrics fall into one of two buckets:

1. Overall page reach – It wouldn’t be a ranking of this sort if we didn’t look at top-level page metrics like fans, followers, subscribers and unique monthly visitors. There are others, to be sure, but those are some of the high level metrics.
2. Content performance – In our view a list like this would fall flat if we only looked at how the page itself was performing. We need to analyze how the content is performing as well to understand each school’s social health. When we are analyzing content performance we look at things like sharing, liking, commenting and retweeting. Again, there are others, but those are some of the bigger metrics.

So with that as a backdrop, here is the list of the top five universities based on their social and web presence. We’ve also included a note or two as to why each of the institutions ranked where they did.

1. Harvard University – The former school of Mark Zuckerberg comes in at #1. Why? Aside from the school’s nearly three million fans on Facebook, they do an excellent job of providing consistent content to their followers. That content largely consists of highlighting academic achievement by professors and students.
2. Stanford University – While Stanford’s Facebook presence falls short of Harvard’s, they more than make up for it with their website and YouTube presence. A strong number of unique monthly visitors and inbound links vaults Stanford up near the top of the list.
3. Texas A&M University – Sporting the second highest rated Facebook page on the list, Texas A&M comes in at third overall. One of the reasons why their Facebook page scored so highly is the introduction of sports-related content. Given that the school currently hosts the Heisman Trophy winner, this ranking is less of a surprise.
4. Massachusetts Institute of Technology – MIT had the second highest ranked YouTube presence with over 50m total video views, and a high level of engagement per video.
5. Carnegie Mellon University – Carnegie Mellon was somewhat of a surprise on this list, but the university does an excellent job on Twitter and Facebook of highlighting the work of their professors and students.

Here is the rest of the ranking (Apologies for the formatting. If you click on the image you should be able to see the entire list):

Social Health of the Top 100 Universities

So there you have it. What do you think? Where does your school rank? A special thank you to Jessica Piña for helping to put this list together, and to Drew Carls for inspiring the idea to rank these schools.

Analytics is a subject that is slowly being embraced by communicators, but still strikes fear into the hearts of many. What you will find in this book is that we approach analytics concepts at a 101 and 201 level. Sure, there are some things tailored for the 301 or 401 level, but those are few and far between. It is not written in analytics-ese, though there are some concepts that could be foreign to you. As Greg Gerik said in his review, do not skip the early chapters. They provide the foundation for the rest of the book.

In addition to the basic analytics concepts what are we hoping readers take away from the book?

1. How to create your analytics toolbox – Unfortunately, there is not an analytics tool that solves every use case, or gathers every bit of digital data. You will need a search analytics tool, a social media monitoring tool, a content analytics tool, an audience analytics tool and probably an influencer analysis tool. These technologies will help you gather data in order to develop insights on how your customers are behaving.
2. Digital data case studies – Ken and I have worked with a number of Fortune 500 brands to implement both small and large scale digital analytics programs. Throughout the book you will see examples of how companies have used digital data. In some cases we can’t give you specific names because of client sensitives, but know that what we outline in the book comes from direct experience with large companies.
3. Measuring digital programs – We know measurement is top of mind for marketers, and in the middle of the book we will give you everything from a standard reporting cadence to how to construct your scorecard. Every company is different so do not necessarily take verbatim what we say in the book as gospel. It is meant to be a guide.
4. What is next for digital analytics? – We had to close out the book with a little bit of the geeky stuff, right? Toward the end of the book we talk about social CRM, mobile analytics, and what is next for a field that is changing as often as you and I change our socks.

Writing this book has been a great experience, and we hope you get a lot out of it when you read it. If you wanted to learn more about what is in the book and what some of our latest thinking about digital analytics is, we have created this very cool image capsule below. It should speak for itself, but hover over the various icons and you’ll see everything from the video previewing our book, to a recent digital analytics trends presentation on Slideshare. Thanks to the awesome folks at Nextworks and Erin Disney for creating it. Oh, and if you happen to be in the Austin area and do not have plans on Thursday night feel free to drop by the W2O Group offices for a book launch party. We will be signing books, and offering free food and drinks. Come one, come all.

No component of the business today escapes ROI analysis. To answer that critical question across the many facets of the business requires measurement to gauge whether the money and time spent on something is yielding the intended results.

But when we start measuring what’s happening among the people inside the organization, what are we chasing?

Let’s assume we can get a monthly read on what the employees are looking at on the internal website, how many are viewing what, for how long, what they’re doing with it, who they’re sharing what with, etc. Also, we can discern what they’re chattering about on internal social media.

But what do we do with that information? Do we become obsessive about it? Do we become reactive? Do we become too reactive?

Monitoring employee communications is certainly a critical and potentially valuable capability, insofar as it enables us to respond to employee information needs and adjust what we provide them, when, and through what channels. Beyond that, what are we looking for?

The problem with such monitoring is its potential to entice us to get ahead of ourselves – ahead of a curve that may or may not be critical, a curve that we may or may not be able to define – to make us too smart by half when what we need to be providing to our internal audiences is something far simpler than what analytics might lead us to believe.

At base, employees are just trying to do their job, to be good at it, to get better, to be acknowledged for their contributions, and to be aware of and understand the relentless changes that they and their company must adapt to.

Providing Relevance and Context
As communicators, our primary role then is to provide the context and information to help employees stay abreast of the shifting marketplace and its multiple impacts on them and the company. If we do our jobs well – everything else being equal – then the company thrives, employee attrition stays low, and high quality talent is attracted to the company.

In the alternative case, the business fumbles its opportunities, under-estimates challenges, and fails to meet revenue and profit targets. The best talent leaves and the mediocre remain. Growth and success elude the organization.

Measuring the quality of our employee communications, then, becomes an opportunity to stay on top of and eliminate the gaps in understanding among the internal audience that can fester into poor performance or activities that don’t add value.

Monitoring the conversation inside the organization should be less about numbers and percentages and more about the content and context of that conversation. If our analytics and monitoring allows us to determine whether key messages are resonating or not, then they become truly valuable. They can give us critical and timely guidance to help us adjust our content, relevance, cadence and context to assure maximum effectiveness.

So in that regard, yes, measurement is important and can be valuable. Rather than becoming obsessed with tenths of percentage points that measure intranet traffic, we must focus instead on delivering timely, relevant information and context. In that way, we are contributing to the success of the organization and its people, and delivering return on investment.

Richard Bach

What is culture? When and how does it guide employee behavior? Harvard Business Review sheds some light, “Culture tells us what to do when the CEO isn’t in the room, which is of course most of the time” (Frances Frei and Anne Morriss, Harvard Business Review). In this same article, it points out that culture happens where the employee handbook ends, and culture directs employees’ actions around new ideas, surfacing problems, and unusual requests. Employees must take numerous actions each day on their own, and when no manual or superior is around to drive decisions, culture can. Considering this, culture can become one of the most important elements to making a company successful and improving long-term profitability. It can encourage employees to want to get something done and not simply for their own benefit.

So what are some steps for building a strong company culture?

Forbes lists “four ways to put your money where your mouth is”:

1. Abandon Your Reliance on the Money for Time Contract with Your Workforce
2. Embrace the Idea of Allowing Your Employees to Work Remotely (When Appropriate)
3. Be Willing to Let Your Hair Down Once in a While
4. The “Why” is More Important than Most People Recognize

This article explains that standards have changed greatly in the work environment over a period of decades. Today, employees are usually giving a company more than the forty hours a week they are paid for, so the traditional contract with employees has changed. If an employee is expected to contribute more than the standard forty hours a week, then they are seeking other rewards and incentives from work to compensate for the difference. Ways to make up for that difference can include allowing employees to work remotely, play occasionally, and most importantly understand why they are working extra, what is the larger picture. Vision.

Why strive for a strong culture? There are a number of beneficial factors arising from a healthy company culture. These include: employee retention, company reputation, employee productivity, and quality of work (Luanne Kelchner, Houston Chronicle). Each of these aspects can lower expenses and/or increase revenue for a company. “In a business with an unhealthy culture, employees act as individuals, performing their duties to meet their own needs, such as a paycheck or health benefits. A healthy corporate culture values each employee in the organization regardless of his job duties, which results in employees working as a team to meet the company’s and their own personal needs” (Luanne Kelchner, Houston Chronicle). With a strong culture, employees will work for more than basic needs; they will strive to elevate the company because they enjoy the people and environment they work in as well as see and support the company’s vision.

Several companies have achieved wonderful results around company culture, and Google is an example of one company with a strong company culture. Google has held the spot as one of the best companies to work for over the past few years (CNN Money). And what makes it fantastic to work for? Its culture. There are many contributors to Google’s culture, but one that has been talked about is its compassion. Here is a TED talk about how Google works to spread compassion in its office:

Regardless of the type of environment a company decides to develop, one of compassion or innovation and so on, studies have shown that the foundations to a highly effective culture include: clarity, communication, and consistency (Frances Frei and Anne Morriss, Harvard Business Review). Essentially, all a company needs to do is define very clearly what type of culture they want, communicate the core values across the company, and consistently stay true to deep rooted vision and values it wants to succeed by. Culture comes not only from the vision of the company but also in the environment every employee helps to build.

Working with a ‘good looking’ brand is somewhat easy. Just take a look around. Billboard posters for cars, beers and deodorants, magazine ads for bags, shoes and watches, TV ads for phones, sofas and holiday packages; the list goes on. You can make pretty much make any kind of work look good if you’re working with something that isn’t very serious. But cancer or wet age-related macular degeneration are not good looking diseases. In fact, they are devastating.

So, how do you approach a project that requires a creative solution in order to communicate a message to an audience of stakeholders, scientists, advocacy organisations, doctors, caregivers and patients? They all have different needs. They all react to different messages.  They all are reached through different channels.

You start to wonder, ‘how does the graphic design I dreamt of doing fit into this picture?’ Well, let’s be honest, it doesn’t. It’s not Vanity Fair and it’s not Wallpaper*; it’s not even Scientific American. Designing for healthcare is a completely different arena, and you have to be prepared to change the way you’ve been playing the game. The way you use your tools, your thinking process, even your language has to adapt.  For me, the biggest challenge came when I realised I had to change myself and the way I work.

So I did it. I changed. Here’s how:

Step 1

I realised and accepted the fact that I work in a non-design related area (or at least the way I had initially thought of design and healthcare). Most of the people I work with probably don’t share my enthusiasm about grids, Pantone mugs or the Monocle magazine. They don’t even know what CMYK is. But that doesn’t mean they don’t care about what things looks like. And the truth is, if I can make the design AND the non-design people like what I have done, I have accomplished so much more.

Step 2

I learned to talk about my work like I did in university. I remembered the importance of presenting appropriately, explaining thoroughly and elaborating precisely. Most of the times I’ll hear one question, ‘why?’ I have learned to answer in a way that genuinely supports the strategic design decisions I made and the work I executed. And when I do that, they’ll mostly agree. Not always of course. But if they don’t agree, I have learned to listen and take their feedback, whether it be a colleague or a client, to make the next version something that excites all of us. Disagreement is part of the creative process in any industry– the only difference is in how we articulate and evolve the work.

Step 3

I embraced the challenges.  Anyone can make a nice ad for a Prada bag. But in pharma, the inherent limitations require us to be even more creative to bring the client’s messages to life. You might feel like you could have done more without the restrictions and guidelines, but then you remember that the design you just created has a purpose. That ad encouraged someone’s grandmother to get her eyes checked after her recent vision change, or someone’s dad to not just let the warning signs for a stroke pass him by without talking to his healthcare provider.

While I set out after university to make design for companies that I thought were ‘cool’, I am instead part of a creative process that aims to improve or save patients’ lives. And while that’s not what I had envisioned, it is something I don’t want to change anytime soon.

As promised, the full recording of the webinar is embedded below. You can also click through to see the video on Youtube.

In addition, you can access some of the key slides on Slideshare below.

Note: The next webinar on blogging is coming up on May 8 at 1 PM ET. We will have a sign up link soon.

Some key takeaways and learnings from the event included:

1. We are moving from engineering to imagineering and we are going to be focused less on how to perfect a technology and more so how to systematize technology for populations, possibly for the masses.
2. Cancer is not something you get, it is something that you grow per David Agus, M.D.  Keeping the body in optimal health is worth the investment every day.
3. The hypothesis that maybe the vicious cycle of diabetes is actually reversed raising the question: Is it possible that we have an insulin resistance epidemic that is causing obesity and not the other way around?
4. Data, analytics and mobile technology can dramatically improve how people can proactively embrace their own health and healthcare and will allow for connecting of the dots, provider to provider, provider to patient and beyond.
5. If all influential leaders “walked the walk” on population health like Mick Corbett, the mayor of Oklahoma city, we could all do what he did and go from one of the Fattest Cities in America to one of the Fittest Cities in America… this one literally took a village and a great leader.
6. Physicians need to take a bold approach via new channels to increase disease awareness and get people to take action like ZDoggMD does by rapping on a music video.
7. Lastly, everyone was rushing to get a Smartphone bodyscan looking at their ear drums, retinas and Carotid arteries… pretty awesome and doesn’t seem so far off for all of us!

TEDMED brought out the 2nd grade scientist in me… when science was first introduced and we developed our very first hypothesis and worked to figure out how to test it. This is the core of science that even bench scientists sometimes have a hard time holding on to in this fast-paced, high pressure world where we are all racing to find answers and find them fast.

If TEDMED is supposed to inspire us to look at science in new and different ways and help push our minds into what is possible… job well done!

These are only a few recent of a mounting number of examples of the power of these relatively new media channels to move people to action, report events, create movements and set the national and international agenda.  In much the same way radio did in the 1920′s and 30′s and TV in the 1940′s and 50′s, so the Internet and online media (social and otherwise) have changed the way we receive, process and share information.  This is isn’t news and I’m not the first to cite this but I did see quite a bit of coverage on CNN, CBS, ABC and other networks over the weekend in the wake of the Boston bombings about the power of social media, its speed, reach and “coming of age” and ultimately posing the question: is it time to take “social” out of social media?

Like radio and TV, it has been much maligned and mistrusted and in many cases is biased and inaccurate.  It also brings with it myriad social, economic, legal and policy issues that will have to be debated and worked out in the coming decades — giving pundits, lawyers, bloggers, talk shows, think tanks, policymakers and the like a whole new frontier to keep them busy till the next big thing comes along that changes everything yet again.

As the new rules are being contemplated and written, people, businesses and organizations of every kind smart enough to have caught on to this have already gotten policies in place, trained their people and invited them to learn about and participate in this phenomenon.  The train left the station a while ago.  That said, because it’s the most democratic of media, you can opt in or out or choose to turn it on or off at your control and even filter out a lot of the bad stuff.  That’s anyone’s prerogative in a free market society. Yet ignoring it will be hard if for no reason other than tracking the progress of a favorite sports team or a child’s whereabouts and well being.  Like TV and radio, it will help us accomplish great things we can be proud of that will bring our world closer together and in the wrong hands it will cause some problems.

Clearly, there will be good and bad stuff to learn along the way, but make no mistake, we will all have to learn how to live with this media because it will be downright anti-social if we don’t!

That said, there are a number of free-to-inexpensive tools that you can use for quick analytics needs. If you are a smaller business there is a good chance you have heard of, or are currently using some of these. If you are an enterprise business you might think some of these tools do not work for you. You would be wrong. Some of these tools, like Google Trends for example, provide valuable (and quick) information on how people are reacting to your brand online. Other tools, like Simply Measured, are used by enterprise clients every day to measure the effectiveness of social media channels versus benchmarks and competitors.

Google Trends and Simply Measured are two of my favorite free-to-inexpensive tools currently on the market. What are some others? Below you will find a list of my top 10. Is there every free-to-inexpensive tool that I like? No, it is not. Are these the ones I have used most often over the years? Yes, it is. You may have a tool that you use regularly that isn’t represented below. Feel free to let us know what that is so we can all expand our tool vocabulary.

But I digress. While great ideas will surely emerge from TEDMED, I think there’s something unrelated, and while not as sexy as TEDMED, it’s as important. Real movement on social media guidelines.

This week, Tom Abrams, who heads the FDA Office of Prescription Drug Promotion and its efforts to create social media guidance, provided some of the best updates yet to Pharmalot on when we can expect it.

Since 2009, when they first were discussed, healthcare social media guidelines have really been like the Loch Ness Monster. Each time you were sure you’d seen them, or at least caught a glimpse, they rose vaguely to the surface, filled you with hope – and probably fear – and then disappeared quickly into the depths.

Of course, pharmaceutical and biotech companies haven’t just been waiting and hoping. They’ve made great, responsible efforts to establish a social media presence, and I think stakeholders from physicians to advocacy groups to patients have all benefited tremendously. But as my colleague Brian Reid has written about before, it’s the smaller companies who are still struggling to jump into murky waters without firm guidance.

As we wait for the final guidance, expected in 2014, here are some of my brief reactions to Abrams’s comments along with some questions I would have asked

Abrams says FDA is looking at how to promote and fulfill regulatory requirements in venues with space limitations. This applies mostly to Twitter, and I’m glad to see the focus on it.

• What I didn’t see is any thoughts on how fair balance will be communicated beyond vague descriptions of the “one click” rule. What else is being considered? Could a company post a follow-up tweet with fair balance? Is that enough?
• Also, what will a company’s responsibility be to reply to a user who’s tweeted about an adverse event? Will one reply to that user be sufficient? What will constitute full due diligence?

Regarding Facebook, Abrams was somewhat evasive when it comes to a key issue, whether a “like” on the channel is equal to a product endorsement.

• Specific guidance on this is crucial if companies are to keep engaging on these channels and provide patients with accurate information about a product.
• If the FDA is going to ramp up enforcement of this social channel, I’d like to see a stronger commitment from them to have comprehensive guidance on Facebook use

We’ll have to keep waiting for these guidelines, but this seems like one of the bigger steps yet. I’d love to know, what questions would you want to ask the FDA as they consider social media guidelines?

Practical Considerations to Improve Your Town Hall Gatherings

What comes to mind when you visualize a town hall-style meeting in its most traditional sense? Many organizations hope to tap into this New England tradition of democracy, picturing their employees engaged in a rousing and lively dialogue with senior management. Instead, the end result is often a quiet, disengaged audience with heads bent over smartphones as leadership drones on about the company’s financial and operating performance. Even worse, leaders are often convinced the session went well because they were in the midst of the workforce and even saw people smiling and nodding during the talk.

Internal surveys often tell a different story – employees have become increasingly “numb” to town halls. While numerous reasons are cited, the real cause is that town halls are now choreographed events with little “authentic” dialogue and opportunity to better grasp the thinking of leadership while comprehending the future state of the business.

WCG recently conducted research on the relevance (or lack thereof) of town hall meetings as an effective leadership communications effort. This brief summarizes the key findings from that research.

The term “town hall” may be used in the context of large employee meetings with leadership, but few such meetings actually evoke the desired back-andforth interaction typical of true town halls. To make sure that these types of meetings are truly conversational and barrier-breaking in nature, it’s important to remember that there is no one-sizefits-all approach.

There are many ways to help communicators create a constructive dialogue between audiences and presenters, thus ensuring that your next town hall is a successful part of your larger employee experience or engagement strategy. The 18 considerations below reflect some of the next practices being undertaken by organizations large and small to optimize the original purpose of the town hall – to engender dialogue, discussion, and debate all in the name of learning and alignment:

1. Promote the Event Ahead of Time.
Using internal social media, intranet and all other internal communications tools, alert employees about the Town Hall in the days leading up to it. Make them aware that they can participate either in person or remotely through live web streaming. Consider posting podcasts of select leaders talking about the event and the topics they will be addressing. Let them know they will be able to live blog about the event on internal social media (see tip #11, below).

2. Minimize the use of PowerPoint.
Corporate America may love PowerPoint, but keep the presentation lean, with supporting visuals and brief bullet points at a minimum. This forces leaders to make eye contact with the audience and talk more informally.

3. Don’t be afraid to ad lib.
It’s okay to speak off the cuff. Any hope of building trust through spontaneity and candor is lost when the presenter sounds overrehearsed. Coach senior leaders to talk from brief bullet points instead of fully scripted remarks.

4. Include Non-Leadership People Among Presenters.
Have a project manager present the latest product offering or give a business update alongside the leader sponsoring it. This gives rank-and-file employees exposure and helps to keep the meeting dynamic and relatable.

5. Include an Interview Segment.
If you’re discussing a dry topic, keep your audience from tuning out by using a talk-show-style interview format, with a member of the communications team “interviewing” the leader.

6. Try a Panel Discussion.
Ask a quiet audience point-blank to offer up questions to the CEO and you’ll likely be greeted with silence and averted eyes. Instead, try a panel discussion with the leadership team and a mix of “regular” employees. Have conversation fodder on hand if no questions are posed initially by soliciting them ahead of time. To encourage day-of questions, have index cards in each seat at the meeting for employees to submit anonymously.

7. Prep the Audience.
Alternatively, before the meeting, meet with the live audience and talk with them. Employees sitting before the company’s senior management are nervous about asking questions, afraid of sounding uninformed or invoking the wrath of their bosses by asking “the wrong question.” Help ease their concerns. Find out what’s on their minds and, when good questions are posed, encourage them to ask them, exactly the way they framed them with you.

8. Senior Leaders Should Model Positive Attitude.
Positive morale about the event starts with top leadership. Require that senior leaders go to the town hall (even if they’re just sitting in the audience). Strongly advise them against grumbling about the meeting “taking up valuable time.”

9. Relax, Be Funny, Have Fun.
The more informal nature of a town hall means that leaders have a chance to let their hair down and allow employees to see a more relaxed side of their personality. If leaders have a hidden talent or a proclivity for cracking jokes, this is the time to bring those out.

10. Bring In an Outsider.
Keep the audience guessing by teasing a surprise guest speaker beforehand. A celebrity always gets people talking, but a well respected, retired company leader, community figure or industry thought leader is also a memorable and effective option.

11. Take Advantage of Social Media.
Incorporate audience feedback in real time by assigning the meeting a unique hashtag before the meeting. Publicize the hashtag and encourage both on-site and remote participants to post their thoughts throughout the event on internal social media like Yammer or Jive. Have a live feed of the trending hashtag on display during the meeting, so employees can see the conversation as it takes place, which further promotes engagement with peers and leaders present.

12. Don’t Forget the Remote Employees.
Stream the event live on the company portal. Ensure that hourly workers and those at outside locations can participate, either through meetings on the plant floor or video conferences. To that end, make sure to film all updates, or have someone on point to
stream live updates via your company’s blog, intranet or internal social media. Also, give the employees watching online an easy way to post questions. Screen them, and then use the best ones.

13. Alternate Between Heavy and Light News.
Take a page out of the newscaster’s book: keep your audience’s attention by alternating between meatier topics such as performance updates and lighter fare such as employee recognition pieces.

14. Inform Employees About Meeting Content.
Give employees a taste of what they can look forward to at the meeting by sharing the town hall’s agenda ahead of time. Well-informed employees are more likely to be engaged employees.

15. Break Bread.
After the meeting, host a meal with seating and room layout that is conducive to mingling. Invite senior leaders to serve the food and then sit at tables with employees, providing those who may not be comfortable speaking up during a Q&A session to pose questions to leadership one-on-one. Consider including a raffle or contest around key aspects of the business or brand(s) to build anticipation and encourage participation and attendance. Link prizes to trivia questions pertaining to updates delivered during the town hall.

16. Recap the Meeting.
Send out a brief synopsis of the topics covered and questions asked, with corresponding answers and how management intends to act on those questions.

17. Follow Up to Learn What Was Heard.
Ask participants to complete a brief (five questions at most), anonymous survey, printed or electronic, immediately after the meeting. Emphasize that their feedback will directly drive the next town hall agenda and format.

18. Extend the Event From a Single Day Into an Experience.
Keep the event alive in people’s daily lives by capturing highlights on video, edited in quick bites, for later viewing on the intranet. Have the CEO blog about the experience from his perspective. Build a *Content Capsule™ on the intranet to capture key messages, linked back to over-riding themes to put the meeting in a larger context. Components might be select video snippets, related blog posts and background materials on topics covered, podcasts, etc. Use the capsule’s tracking analytics feature to do a deep dive into the pieces that your audience especially engage with, using these findings to inform planning for your next town hall.

Not all of these tactics will work for every organization, but a little variety can grab your employees’ attention, incite enthusiasm for mundane topics and get people to look forward to town halls. What works for your company?

# # #

*Content Capsule™ is a proprietary internal platform developed by WCG that captures video, audio, graphic, data, and other content to better dimensionalize a story for employees.

WCG is an integrated digital/social marketing and communications counseling firm offering communications, marketing, business and technology solutions focused on product supremacy, brand reputation, and organizational excellence to organizations in diverse industries worldwide. WCG is a member of the W2O Group, a network of independent, complementary marketing and communications firms.

“But wait,” my classmate interjected. Who, exactly, was reading the Bloomberg wire at 11 p.m. on a Saturday night? Or, to be cliched about it, if a story breaks in a forest and there is no one to read it, does it really matter?

The famously tempestuous Winkler’s face reddened. “You’d better believe Ted Turner is watching our wire on a Saturday night.” Pause. “Or he pays someone to watch us!”

Winkler’s point was simple: important people read what Bloomberg had to say. Readers paid tens of thousands of dollars to be in the know, and Bloomberg was 100 percent dedicated to serving that small group. They didn’t need a million eyeballs. All they needed was the attention of Ted Turner and a handful of other moguls, execs and investors. And for those folks, the tobacco scoop justified the cost of the content.

I’ve been thinking back to that early interaction with Winkler lately as the evidence has piled up that the future of the newspaper industry will be funded on the back of digital subscribers: those who have anted up (or will ane up) to be let through a paywall. The Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellent in Journalism says that 450 daily newspapers in the United States have a paywall in place. And Newspaper Association of America said that digital-only subscription revenue jumped 275 percent last year. Ladies and gentlemen, we have a business model.**

This has major implications for how we can examine influence online. There’s still an assumption that the valuable content is the content that’s shared (for an in-depth look at the future of viral news, check out the New York profile of BuzzFeed), but creating viral isn’t the only way to success. The other path, the Bloomberg-esque path, is to create content that’s so valuable that people will pay for it. The knee-jerk reaction used to be that, in a world of nearly infinite information sources, no content was worth actual cash money when there were free alternatives. But that thinking is out the window, disproved by the 640,000 New York Times digital subscribers, the 1.3 million Wall Street Journal digital subscribers, and the thousands of readers at smaller papers who are also voting with their pocketbooks. (Heck, the Rutland (VT) Herald has 5,200 digital subscribers. Not bad for town with a population of 4,954.)

This is good news. It frees newspapers, somewhat, from the tendency to serve up stories that are “viral” or “shareable,” which is altogether different from what is influential, in the traditional sense of the word. As I write this, the most-shared Buzzfeed post is a series of photos of a baby surrounded by bulldog puppies. The New York Times’ most-blogged content over the past week, in contrast, was a preview of President Obama’s budget. People who follow the Buzzfeed trends are likely to be popular with their friends on Facebook, but are going to have a limited impact on society. Those who are reading paid content, on the other hand, those are the people who will be busy moving the world.

(Of course, paywalls are porous and, of course, nearly all web content remains free. But in an era where quick decisions and in-depth information are increasingly prized, those who find workarounds to search for information will be at a disadvantage to those who have it delivered, fresh and unrestricted, to the device of their choice.)

The rise of paid online content and, more important, the rise of an influencer class that is consuming this information, has the potential to re-shape online authority, putting power back in the hands of those with the credit cards. In 1997, when the Bloomberg settlement story broke, the most influential people in the tobacco world were the ones who paid thousands of dollars to have a Bloomberg Terminal on their desks. Today, as in 1997, if you want to be an influencer, you’re going to have to pay for it.

** I’m ignoring the fact that the growth in subscription revenue doesn’t come close to offsetting the still-plummeting advertising revenue. There will clearly be more pain in the years to come. But it’s also clear that subscription dollars are likely to be a stable source of revenue for the foreseeable future. 

The TEDMED conference is being held this week (April 16-19) in Washington, DC … but this year we have the unprecedented opportunity to gather with our Austin-based colleagues in health innovation to watch a live simulcast of the event, in two different locations:

On Thursday, April 17 at 10:30 AM, the McCombs Healthcare MBA Association at the University of Texas will be hosting a simulcast at the AT&T Conference Center, running until 4:30 PM. And on that same day, the Texas Medical Association will be hosting a simulcast at the DoubleTree Suites Hotel from 1:30 – 4:30.

TEDMED Live @ UT – Details + Register HERE
AT&T Executive Education & Conference Center | 1900 University Ave, Austin, TX 78705
Registration opens @ 9.30am CT |  Welcome @ 10.15am  |  Livestream @ 10.30am CT

TEDMED Live @ TMA – Details + Register HERE
Double Tree Suites Hotel | Bluebonnet Room | 303 W. 15th St, Austin, TX, 78701
Registration opens @ 1.00pm CT  |  Welcome @ 1.15pm  |  Livestream @ 1.30pm CT

And for the first time this year, we have the opportunity to watch the ENTIRE program at www.TEDMEDLive.org. In a spirit of collaboration and information sharing, all 10 TEDMED sessions are available via individual laptops and tablets in two formats:

REAL-TIME: view TEDMED with the rest of the DC Delegation from April 16-19th
ON-DEMAND: experience TEDMED on your schedule through Sunday, April 21st

Even if you can’t join us in person — you can *join* TEDMED anytime, anywhere, with anyone.  www.TEDMEDLive.org (test it out today!)
Access through TEDxAustin Affiliate Location ID: L41553

I was able to attend last year’s simulcast at St. David’s Hospital, and thought it was fantastic – not just to be able to watch the speakers live … but to interact with a room full of Austinites who care about the same things I do … innovating healthcare.  Don’t miss the chance to participate live this year!! For any questions leading up to the event, contact TEDxAustin‘s Shawna Butler – shawnabutler@gmail.com.

Strong core muscles provide a source of stability and balance for the human body. The same fundamental principle of core strength is true for organizations and companies. From global corporations to boot-strapped start-ups, companies develop core values to structure, strengthen, and maintain their corporate vision.

Core values cannot simply be installed into the culture; they are as organic and soul-driven as the employees themselves. These principles are the standards that employees live by and are held accountable to. Clearly outlined values provide context for internal communications, as well as inspiration for external social responsibility. Overall, core values are the foundation of a company’s unique identity.

Core values serve four distinct purposes:

Compass: The core values guide the employees as they make internal and external decisions.

Origin: The core values support the company culture. They serve as a reiteration of the vision and mission of the organization.

Resource: The core values provide a benchmark for recruiting and evaluating employees. This concept gauges whether potential candidates are aligned with the company’s values. Zappos CEO, Tony Hsieh emphasizes the importance of core values by incorporating them into the interview process to determine if the candidate is a cultural fit.

Empower: The core values enable employees to set goals that are parallel to the brand’s mission. These principles inspire each employee’s role and purpose which leads to an increase in workplace engagement.

Foundational principles are not developed by Googling synonyms for “integrity” and “respect.” Outlining and identifying core values should be a thoughtful, collective process, taking into account the history and individuality of the company. These essential principles inspire the culture of an organization, breathe life into the soul of the company, and, ultimately, contribute to its success.

In today’s rapidly-paced corporate environment, soft disciplines, as in the development of core values and fostering of company culture, are the first things dropped in exchange for double-booked meetings and full calendars. Chairman and CEO of Levi Strauss & Co, Robert Haas once said, “What we’ve learned is that the soft stuff and the hard stuff are becoming increasingly intertwined. A company’s values—what it stands for, what its people believe in—are crucial to its competitive success. Indeed, values drive the business.”  Strong, relatable values should serve as a nucleus for every business decision the company makes and contributes to the interpersonal relationships of the employees.

What are some companies whose values inspire you?

Here’s a few of our favorites:

Google

Zappos

 

During my Microsoft days, it was sacrilegious for me to own or support anything produced by Google. They were the arch-rival, the antithesis of establishment, and the pesky yet incredibly agile innovator. These days I fancy myself as an impartial tech enthusiast and avid believer in free market forces, and like my fellow Austinites I can barely contain my excitement over Google Fiber’s expansion into the heart of Texas. From this marketer’s perspective, the rising tech-tide will lift all boats.

Infrastructure costs/timing/regulations aside, let’s assume the Google Fiber announcement signals a not-too-distant future expansion of affordable broadband to the masses (Google or any other ISP). Consumers and brands alike should have plenty of reasons to rejoice. I’ve explored only a few of the reasons below, but as always I’ll welcome your feedback.

CONSUMERS

1.  The entrance of new broadband technology puts pressure on established ISP’s, which drives down cost, boosts service quality, and ultimately drives more rapid innovation

• Benefit: affordable and flexible internet, cable, and wireless plans
• Caution: the hidden cost is privacy, Google now knows EVERYTHING about you

2.  Ubiquitous connectivity leads to the genesis and availability of value-added on-demand services and applications

• Benefit: a fully-connected and “always-on” home, internet in every device in every room and on every street corner, startup paradise
• Caution: “with great power comes great responsibility” – once again buh-bye to privacy

3.  Enhanced digital access leads to greater interactive and connected experiences for events, products, and services

• Benefit: adding a social “surround sound” to your favorite shows, concerts, and shopping experiences
• Caution: human social interactions regress exclusively to six second loops and 140 characters

BRANDS

1.  Expansive broadband will enable rich, high-fidelity media options, ultimately enhancing commercial experiences and customer touchpoints

• Benefit: videos, banners, and ad placements won’t be device or bandwidth dependent, technologies such as augmented reality can flourish
• Caution: brand saturation and customer intrusion, focus on consistent/relevant vehicles and messages

2.  Increased interactivity –> bigger data

• Benefit: digitized dialogue can lead to loads of data, which can be distilled into insights revealing unmet customer needs, market opportunities, and competitive activity
• Caution: data and insights are not synonymous, and organizations can drown in irrelevant datapoints

3.  Organizations can separate themselves from competitors with the adoption of digital collaboration tools, which will be critical for partnerships, employee and team dynamics, and customer connection

• Benefit: no longer will you be constrained geographically for access to talent or customers, face-to-face interactions can literally happen anywhere, any time, on any device
• Caution: as Marissa Mayer discovered, remote-connectivity may actually depress productivity, and sometimes there’s no substitute for the good ol’ fashioned water cooler

Google’s investment in Austin perpetuates our reputation as one of the most innovative, vibrant, and exciting cities for commerce and entertainment. We have a unique combination of academic thought supported by The University of Texas, and an active, diverse, and growing population of progressive thinkers, resulting in rapid startup incubation and corporate growth. You couldn’t design a better petri dish for invention and investment. South by Southwest, Austin City Limits, and Formula One may be the most recognizable symbols of our city’s distinctive culture. But those of us living here know that beyond all of the bells and whistles, it’s really just a damn cool place to be.

(Check out the video here)

Building on all this exciting news, today we learned that we were named the number one PR firm in Texas by O’Dwyers. Even more impressive is that we did it with just a presence in Austin — unlike some of the other agencies on the list, we have no official presence in Dallas or Houston.

As we concentrate on Austin as our digital hub, it’s important to remember that we continue to maintain focus on all aspects of our business including corporate communications, influencer engagement and training. Bringing the best of these “communications” offerings combined with our world class analytics, social engagement, agile content and strategy is where we know that we add the most value to our clients. It also helps us stay competitive when it comes to recruiting new talent (hint: we are hiring across all of our offices for multiple positions).

Of course being named number one in the second most populated state in the United States is quite the honor. But for those that know us, you know we are not ones to rest on our laurels. We have our sights set on being number one in the U.S. and once that’s under our belt, number one in the world. That may be a few years off yet but we are hungry, motivated and excited to build on our momentum. Building the agency of the future takes work but we are enjoying doing it, one success at a time.

Aside from Oreo and the Superbowl, what do you think were some of the more interesting brand/marketing developments in the first quarter of this year?

I’ve seen a few things that I found interesting. One is that I’ve seen more advertising featuring men in more of an “involved parent” – almost “Mr. Mom” – mode (making dinner, doing laundry, etc.). Typically, the father has been portrayed as an incompetent menace when it came to household chores (other than yard work) and now he’s shown making gourmet dinners, caring about how clean the laundry gets and so forth. Quite a change! I’ve also observed the increasing presence of same-sex couples in advertising. The Amazon Kindle was the most notable one where a man and woman are on lounge chairs talking about the glare on their tablets (or not) while both of their husbands get them a drink. You probably wouldn’t have seen that on mainstream TV media even a year ago.

I continue to be impressed by JC Penney’s advertising. A great campaign with a more modern Americana vibe, taking a page from the Target campaigns. Still, it doesn’t seem to have done much yet for their business. I think it’s going to take a lot more than just an ad campaign to change the perception people have of that brand. The “no discounts” strategy didn’t work and I think the jury’s still out on things the Levi’s Denim Bar are actually attracting buyers of Levi’s who will also shop around to buy some other items. JCP is trying to reinvent itself while distinguishing itself from peers like Target, Sears, Walmart, Macy’s etc. It’s not really any of those…so what is it? I’ll be curious to see how things shape up for that brand later this year.

How do you see B-to-B businesses leveraging social media for customer engagement?

One of the biggest trends I see in business-to-business social media is lead generation for sales. Through my LinkedIn profile alone, I receive tons of requests for meetings, product demos, etc. I’ve accepted some and also follow some of the blogs from these people just to see what’s out there. So, I guess you can say that blogs are also keeping me engaged.

What is your point of view on how agencies can best support clients in this era of analytics based social engagement and content marketing?

First, make sure they understand how your business works and how it makes money. If that’s clear then all of the ideas, regardless of the medium, should ladder up to how they contribute to the growth and health of the brand and its business. With social media, the key is to translate the strategies into how they support the business objectives. Help clients understand what a more engaged customer does for them. Provide examples of how deeper social engagement translates into stronger sales or greater brand affinity and preference. Is there really an ROI to social media and what is the best way to assess and measure its value? I don’t think anyone’s quite been able to quantify what “engagement” really means and that’s an essential piece of information to help determine how and why to keep investing in this space.

In the marketing discipline, what are three qualities you look for in new job candidates?

Be curious, be flexible and be resourceful. Curious people have a desire to learn new things that will help them figure out how to do their job (and other things) better. They have a desire to learn more than just what’s required and this means they can grow in other ways than what the current job requires. Flexibility is important because you want someone who can roll with the punches and not get too bent out of shape when somebody’s moved their cheese. Being flexible doesn’t mean be a pushover and don’t take a stand. It means being able to take in new information, figure out the next best course of action and still move forward without too much trouble. So many industries have periods of uncertainty and you want people who can deal with that and course correct when Plan A doesn’t work out. Resourceful people get things done. They are typically self-starters and don’t need a lot of hand-holding for each step of the project. They can usually size up the situation quickly and then they tap into the strong internal and external networks they’ve built to get what the information they need to get the job done. Having people like this on your team is a gift when you’re under pressure to deliver something quickly.

What advice would you give to someone entering your industry straight from college this summer?

Be a sponge, be hungry, be courteous and remember – not everyone gets a trophy at work. Read everything you can. Listen first and then ask tons of questions to make sure you understand. And then ask more questions to make sure you really understand. Be hungry about wanting to do more than is asked of you and make sure that whatever you do, no matter how trivial it seems, don’t assume it’s “beneath you”. At this stage of your career, it’s not. Have high standards and don’t accept “good enough”. Be respectful to your colleagues and give the more seasoned ones the courtesy of listening to some of their “sage advice”. You may know all about the latest and greatest technologies to do your job quicker and more easily, but many of your colleagues (and maybe even your boss) have a level of business wisdom that comes with experience. The trophy comment is meant to tell people that there is real competition in work. You won’t all get the same rating, bonus, opportunities, period. Work hard and be honest with yourself. If your work isn’t as good as someone else’s – it matters.

What resources do you turn to keep abreast of marketing news & trends?

I subscribe to a number of e-newsletters about my industry, I read blog posts on LinkedIn, I read Adweek and other magazines about marketing when I have the time. I basically read whatever I can, whenever I can. I always click on cnn.com, nytimes.com and other news sites to see what’s happening in the financial markets to see if there are any news items that might be impacting my company or my company’s clients.

Courtesy plug time: Tell us about an organization, person, movement, etc. that is important to you and that you think more people should be aware of.

I just learned about www.code.org, which is a group focused on helping all kids in school learn how to write code. It’s a cool site and organization, but I’m just at the early stages of learning about it. I would love for them to do it at my kids’ schools because I think it’s important for them to understand all the possibilities once they learn how to do more than just consume or use technology. I’d love for them to combine their imagination and technical skills to develop massively popular apps that will make me and my wife rich enough to retire early!

Ok, just for fun… borrowing from James Lipton: what profession other than your own would you like to attempt? What profession would you not like to do?

Believe it or not, I would probably consider acting. I always thought it would be fun and a good test of your mental endurance in the face of such rejection. However, I was always too chicken to really take it on. I like to eat and was never too keen on being a “starving actor”. I would never want to be one of those guys washing windows on a skyscraper. I’m not really afraid of heights but I don’t have any desire to do that. From what I can tell, there’s really no safe, quick way down when you have an emergency or have to go to the bathroom.

The news is welcome, especially for an agency that expects transparency, but I wonder if these social media channels are still underused when it comes to communicating with shareholders and, more importantly, how investors will welcome the SEC decision.

The Wall Street Journal, reporting on the SEC’s decision, cited a 2012 survey from Stanford University that said only 14.4% of companies communicate with shareholders via social media. This comes despite the fact that over 75% of the survey respondents said they use social media to interact with customers. In this case, it seems companies, while rightfully focusing on social media to improve corporate reputation and customer loyalty and satisfaction, aren’t using it to mitigate risk and communicate fully with investors.

The reluctance to frequently use social media to share market-moving information is understandable for several reasons.

• First and foremost, the lack of guidance from the SEC likely kept companies from communicating more easily with investors and other interested parties
• Second, despite the ease of using channels like Twitter and Facebook, social media does have its limits. Facebook, in my mind, still exists primarily for consumer announcements and brand engagement, and Twitter’s 140 character limit doesn’t always support the easiest disclosure
• Third, a press release is a deeply rooted part of any company’s communication repertoire, and this is unlikely to change

Still, despite the challenges of social media, in my view, the pros greatly outweigh the cons. Companies do not and should not dispense with a press release or 8-K announcement in favor of using social media exclusively. Instead, the communication should be multi-channel. Social media should provide ease and speed of access, which any stakeholder values, while a press release should provide fuller, deeper context around a significant, market-moving event. It will be interesting to see how companies take to the new SEC guidance and harness social media to more fully engage investors and all interested stakeholders.

Despite current challenges and uncertainties in healthcare, this sector of our industry continues to evolve and expand faster than we have ever seen. 

As the #2 ranked Healthcare communications agency by O’Dwyers , W2O Group continues to stay one step ahead of the changing landscape of our business to partner with companies in all areas of the health industry — from pharmaceuticals to health IT to health insurers .  What makes us different?   1) We have the best, brightest and most dedicated people in the industry, all who come from different sectors of our business converging here to deliver a more holistic, streamlined, flexible, 360 model across one long hallway; 2) We are deeply rooted in analytics to gain a deeper view of what and who influences patients and healthcare professionals in real-time.  This has enabled us to develop meaningful educational platforms and tools to that make a difference and improve patient outcomes.

Having spent the last two decades immersed in health, I can say there is no question that those of us who choose to focus in this area come with an intense passion to make a difference in the lives of people fighting and living with some of the most challenging diseases.  Nothing is more gratifying than that feeling of creating a groundswell of awareness of an important diagnostic test to get ahead of a disease, helping bring a new treatment to market, or simply creating a screening tool that brings a physician and patient one step closer to working together to improve that patient’s health.

I have always found that if you let your passion guide you will find yourself on the most gratifying and fulfilling journey you could ever have imagined.  I am a science geek at heart and being able to apply that passion to my career has made my journey more fulfilling.  I can only hope that it is an inspiration to everyone else who has found or is searching for a career that allows them to fulfill their personal passion through their work.

Question: When does technology become a burden?

Answer:  When it’s not assimilated into the operations, culture and management of the enterprise.

More and more organizations are introducing internal platforms to encourage collaboration, innovation, discussion, and more effective work styles.  Just as many are finding the technology lying dormant as managers and employees continue to conduct work in the same old manner.

This issue of CommonSense…for the C-Suite provides answers and specific questions for handling this dilemma.

We hope you find it useful and relevant.

Best,

Abigail Rethore

Doing its part for the environment, the W2O Group and its agencies and partners (WCG, Twist Mktg, BrewLife, Health 360, NextWorks) will no longer be issuing printed business cards to staff. I think we all knew this day was coming. I mean, think about it … of the standard stack of 1,000 business cards you’re issued, how many do you typically use? Unless you’re selling products on a showroom floor, probably not many.

Here’s a list of ways I’ve been using my business cards as of late:

1. Holding an air conditioner louvre in place
2. Toothpick
3. Unnecessarily fattening my wallet
4. Note pad
5. Leveling an uneven table
6. Ninja throwing star

And when I do pull a business card out of my wallet at a meeting, it’s the wrinkled, frayed, ugly card that’s been in the wallet far too long — not a good first impression.

What do we really need out of the use of a business card? The transfer of contact information. Over the past decade the number of ways of doing this digitally is innumerable (LinkedIn, Facebook, SMS, MMS, E-mail signatures, Bump, Flock, FullContact, et al). So why the printed card? Has it become the skeuomorph of introductions? Lobbyist from Dunder Mifflin? Who knows?

Whatever the reason, it is done. So the next time you run into one of us at a conference or meeting, prepare to be Bumped!

What is an API?

An API — or Application Programming Interface — is a protocol that programs use to interact with each other. There are different kinds of APIs, but the Twitter REST API (like most APIs) boils down to a standardized format in which developers can pose questions to an online platform and interpret the corresponding answers.

For example, the Twitter API tells developers how to ask “Who follows @sigpwned?” and to expect a list of the IDs of the users who follow @sigpwned in return.

What is a rate limit?

Answering the questions programs pose to an API takes some computational power, especially for platforms as big as Twitter is. (Once you have more than 100M active users in your system, it takes some time to figure out who follows whom.) For this reason, an API will only answer so many questions from any one program before it stops answering questions from that program for a while. In this way, an API can make sure no one program takes up all its resources. This policy by which questions are answered or ignored based on usage is called an API’s “rate limit.”

How did Twitter change its API Rate Limit Policy?

The old rate limit policy was very simple: a user could pose 350 questions to the API per hour, and any questions after that were ignored until the current hour had passed. The hour-long windows started at the top of the hour, so if you asked 350 questions between 12:00 and 12:30, you had to wait until 1:00 before you could ask any more questions.

As rate limits go, this rate limit policy was a good one. Sure, you could only ask 350 questions per hour, but you can get a lot of work done with 350 questions, and planning for different workloads wasn’t too hard since all questions counted against the API rate limit the same way.

This most recent change affected three key elements of Twitter’s API rate limit policy:

1. Rate limit windows are now 15 minutes instead of 60 minutes. New rate limits start every 15 minutes instead of every 60 minutes. This change doesn’t affect much.
2. Rate limits are counted per-question type instead of across all questions. Asking “Who follows @sigpwned?” does not affect whether Twitter will answer you when you ask “What lists is @sigpwned on?” The rates are counted separately. This change wouldn’t affect much either, except for change #3.
3. Rate limits for some question types have been increased 2x; rate limits for other question types have been decreased 6x. Because rate limits are counted per-question type now, users can ask significantly more questions of the API on an hourly basis than they could in the past. While this sounds good at first blush, it’s not all upside since some endpoints got their allowed usage decreased. If you use a question with a decreased rate limit a lot, this definitely isn’t good news. You can find the full list of question types and rate limits here, but here are the ones analysts will care about:
   • Increased Rate Limit: “What public information has @sigpwned provided about himself?”; “What tweets has @sigpwned sent?”; “Who is on the list wcgworld/wcg-people?”.
   • Decreased Rate Limit: “Who follows @sigpwned?”; “Who does @sigpwned follow?”

How does the change affect analytics?

If you make regular use of API questions that just had their rate limit reduced, like W2O does, your life just got harder. For example, doing graph analysis on the accounts a group of users follow will now take about 6x longer, all things being equal.

The reality is that if clients need data, they’ll get data. With these rate limit changes, though, if a client deliverable requires data that takes longer to collect, the client deliverable may take longer to finish. Ultimately, managing these new API rate limits and keeping the trains running on time will require companies to get more clever about how they approach API usage.

Cleverness always implies an investment, whether it’s in time, money or both. It’s curious that Twitter wouldn’t simply offer a paid model for its API that would capture some of the investment these companies will now have to make and add it to their bottom line. Instead, this investment will just get “thrown away” into more and more complex processes and software.

While the reasons behind this decision are interesting to speculate about, the question of “Why?” is a different discussion.

EDIT: Podcast!

Because of the importance of the issue, we did a short podcast exploring the issue in more detail. You can find the link above.

Last week was one of those weeks for me. As part of the Center for Social Commerce at the Newhouse School on the campus of Syracuse University, several colleagues and I had an opportunity to speak with many different classes to share what we have learned during our respective tenures. To say the students soaked it up would be an understatement. The number of short-form videos, tweets, storify updates and blog posts following our sessions has been astounding. We clearly have a new generation of content creators who are about to join our midst. A copy of the presentation is below.

As part of the week’s activities, I had an opportunity to give a lecture on how big brands (like Red Bull and Intel) are using digital data to gain a competitive advantage. During the presentation I talked a little about how the communications landscape has changed, and then transitioned into the ten trends in digital analytics. Those ten trends are largely techniques and ideas analytics professionals are adopting in order to meet the new information needs of marketing and communications professionals. What were the ten trends at a high level?

1. (Tool) Buyer Beware – The explosion of digital media and the subsequent explosion of available data has led to the development of too many tools. There are literally hundreds of available listening tools on the market, which is entirely too many. The other element to this is each tool provides a certain kind of data. That means it is incumbent upon communicators to build a tool box, and not rely on a single tool to do the job.
2. Two Clear Listening Models Emerging – Listening is a complex exercise with applications extending beyond public relations and marketing. However, the vast majority of listening that is currently done is either to inform real-time content development or a program.
3. HR, Sales, Product Development, Customer Service Join the Digital Data Party – In 2009, Ken Burbary and I outlined a process for organizations to adopt to use digital data outside of the public relations and marketing functions. There are a number of quality social customer service examples (e.g. Samsung, Delta, Bank of America), and those brands are using digital data. Unfortunately, those brands are still in the minority.
4. We Drop “Social” From Social CRM – When we were doing research for the book we uncovered almost 20 different definitions for social CRM, and therein lies the issue. We do not need a new term to describe this activity. What we need are traditional CRM systems to evolve in order to incorporate digital data.
5. Internal Ownership Becomes Critical – Companies that have digital analytics programs are collecting a tremendous amount of data. That data currently lives in presentations and spreadsheets. As the digital data needs become more complex companies will begin developing new technologies to make that data more accessible to key internal and external stakeholders.
6. Command Centers Are Valuable…Kind Of – Command Centers like those built by Gatorade and Dell have value, but less so as an analytics tool. The real value they hold is as an internal rallying cry for social media and the importance of listening to customers.
7. Measurement Finally Becomes Integrated – Communicators have fought silos for years, and it is time to start building integrated measurement scorecards.
8. Analytics Goes Hyper-Local – Utilizing tools like SnapTrends, marketers can gain tremendous insight on how customers are talking all of the way down to the street level.
9. Forensic Analytics Becomes Critical – It is not enough to just count mentions these days. Marketers must think about developing advanced customer profiles based on their behaviors online.
10. Influencer Analysis is not Synonymous with Klout – If you are simply trying to identify people who are talking a lot about a topic then Klout might be the tool for you. If you want to develop a highly relevant influencer list made up of people who have strong reach and syndication then developing your own approach will be required.

Realistically, I could have outlined 20 trends and it probably would not have captured everything that is happening in the industry. As digital media changes and evolves, so to does digital analytics. We’ll be watching to see what else develops in the coming weeks, months and years.