• Twitter Insight #1: “S. Colamarino, VP Corp Comm @JNJComm: It used to be a 30 sec. TV spot and a PR campaign; 2day there is so much white space between the 2 to fill  #prweeknext”
  Much discussion at the NEXT conference was about how the communications paradigm, and the role of PR within it, is rapidly shifting. The sheer amount of “white space” through which we can reach audiences presents an exciting and often unnerving opportunity. As expert communicators, we must acknowledge and participate in this white space through masterful content development and syndication. During a panel featuring Edelman Digital’s Elizabeth Lee, J&J’s Sarah Colamarino and Unilver’s Christine Cea, we discussed the complex role that PR plays in the communications mix, and the importance of integrated, surround-sound campaigns. Yet even with all this change, one of PR’s greatest opportunities has long remained the same: tracking the bigger picture in real-time, and being nimble and brave enough to shift direction when needed.

• Twitter Insight #2: “Elevate authenticity thru messaging, voice, content, participation and purpose  #prweeknext”
  The concept that I found most interesting, and the one that was explored throughout the conference, was “authenticity.” Sure, this term has become a bit of a buzzy cliché in our industry but the conference discussion explored it in a more meaningful way. By spotlighting companies and brands like Unilever and Avon, who demonstrate their commitment to authenticity through the successful “Dove Campaign for Real Beauty” and “Speak Out About Domestic Violence” campaigns, the conference focused on authenticity in action which only happens when companies are true to who they really are. In the cases of Unilever and Avon, this is achieved by being loyal to their core audience of women and focusing on issues that matter to them, so these programs come across as credible and logical – hence, authentic. 
  

• Twitter Insight #3: “A brand is a promise & a great brand is a promise kept. We need to be promise-keeping as well as promise-making  #prweeknext”
  Another great topic at the NEXT conference was about corporate social responsibility. CSR is not a new concept, but one that is easily misunderstood, misrepresented and definitely under-funded.  CSR is wonderful when executed with purpose, integrity and commitment, but this is where some (often well-intentioned) companies miss the mark. During one panel, Panera Bread’s Linn Parrish showcased Panera’s commitment to CSR through a successful program tightly aligned with its core values and products: “Panera Cares,” non-profit community cafes where people take what they need and donate their fair share. Once again, it all comes back to being authentic. When executed correctly and supported from the top down, CSR can elevate a company’s reputation among constituents and do a staggering amount of good for the community at large.

• And Finally, Twitter Insight #4: “Don’t ask me ‘how can I help?’ but TELL me how you will help. Be specific,” suggests Kathy of @Discover #prweeknext”
  During a discussion on c-suite management, we heard from Discover Financial Service’s Kathy Beiser, who encouraged us to think critically about the value we bring to our clients. Beiser advised, “Don’t ask HOW you can help, TELL me how you will help.” It may seem like obvious advice, but it rang true, and applies to all industries. Think about it — how often have you called your client trying to be helpful and offering a vague but well-intentioned, “If there is anything we can do to help, let us know?” So the next time your client is in a difficult situation, devise a few specific, well thought-out suggestions and offer those up instead. The positive difference in response, and new opportunities it could present, may surprise you.

With all this in mind, my biggest takeaway from the NEXT conference goes back to a simple principle, which has withstood the test of time. Successful brands do what they say, and say what they mean. PR plays a critical role in conveying these intentions and achievements to audiences, and we can now share and manage this information in more targeted and meaningful ways than ever before. By listening to audiences and engaging with them based on those observations, we will always win.

In 2005, classified advertising had its best year ever. Classifieds brought in $16 billion in revenue, almost twice the entire Hollywood box office gross for the year, despite widespread Internet use. But by 2009, that figure had been cut in half, and then cut almost in half once more, destroying the finances of the newspaper industry.

It’s easy to imagine the sales force for classified ads in 2005 as being too blinded by success to reinvent themselves. Our challenge in PR is to avoid the same mistake.

The pace of change in PR is fast and getting faster, meaning that the “adapt or die” mentality I wrote about on Monday must be adopted by firms and their clients sooner rather than later. It’s far too easy for today’s Goliath to become tomorrow’s punch line.

To do that, we need to think broadly. There is a world of service vendors that all claim to have the only solution needed. Sometimes that’s a Facebook strategy. Or a search-engine-focused approach. Or one that relies on mommy bloggers, Twitter influencers, or a single mention from a top-tier reporter.

None of these approaches is wrong, exactly. Like the parable of the blind men and the elephant, each of these groups is accurately describing a corner of the communications world. But only seeing a corner of the marketplace is fatal. Success stories require the ability to weave together content creation, digital syndication, internal communications, and a dozen other disciplines. As I said yesterday, PR should be well-positioned to synthesize these different skill sets into a unified communications approach.

Tackling change in this way is not without risk. We will be challenged to find “non-traditional” hires to expand our thinking. We’ll need to invest in constant education to stay ahead of the curve, especially with the explosion of digital. And we’ll have to experiment – and risk failure – to test drive new and better ways of reaching our core audiences. That can be uncomfortable, and not everyone can stand that kind of uncertainty.

Unfortunately, the only other option is wishful thinking. But, as classified departments learned over the past few years, that’s no option at all. The time to act is now.

PR firms need to keep pace with the fast-changing economic and media environment by hiring a variety of talents, grounding strategy and recommendations in analytics and research, measuring results, and adjusting those strategies.

These are ongoing drivers in working with clients to build their business as proactive partners, not reactive vendors. By staying nimble and adaptable, firms can stay ahead of what promises to be a perpetually changing media, economic, and business landscape for years to come.

The formula to create success amidst great change is pretty basic and simple: hire the best people, work with the best clients, and do great work. The key is to expand and diversify what you can do yourself as a professional and in turn for your clients, whether you work in an agency or in-house. The goal is to become a trusted, invaluable partner building relationships and business together over a very long time, and stay able to adapt along the way.

The biggest challenges for many professional services firms, particularly for PR agencies, are size, structure, and their own success – or at least how they and investors have defined success in the past. They have done really well, but may now be finding it hard to shift their models because that requires a lot of investment, causes a lot of disruption and pain, and often creates some chaos that may not be worth it in their or their investors’ eyes. This is particularly the case when they have been growing predictably and steadily and need to please Wall Street every quarter by delivering double-digit margins.

Since the model has worked for many firms over time, even in difficult economic climates, it’s hard to make a case to change. But firms that invest in the best people and thought leaders, as well as technology, so they can truly innovate in partnership with their clients will do well in what is clearly a new economy like we have never seen before.

I believe that PR firms have done this much more than any other type of firm in the marketing and corporate mix, providing strategy and execution and increasingly winning integrated business from their colleagues in related fields. This profession has always been an inherently hungry, nimble one with much more to prove. My view is that it has never been a better time for the industry, at least those in it who are willing and able to adapt.

Early in the Brad Pitt movie Moneyball, his character Billy Beane says prophetically to one of his colleagues, “Adapt or die.” The Oakland A’s, the baseball team he runs, begins to work to leverage analytics, statistics, and technology to assemble a championship team with a small payroll and limited resources, compared to their larger, more well-funded competitors.

While pervasive instability is certainly uncomfortable to experience, in some ways it puts firms like WCG at an advantage. Public relations professionals have long understood the many parts of the marketing mix, working across multiple departments in client organizations. Likewise, PR firms have used their nimbleness to innovate and stay ahead, oftentimes producing results more efficiently than the competition.

PR firms in general are quite adept at leveraging change, especially those who have shifted their models and strategies in recognition of the importance of digital, online, social, and mobile communications. We are increasingly seeing the role of communications, and PR pros within companies and organizations, taking on a broader remit than ever before because communications are happening online in real-time where multiple stakeholders are seeing them all at once.

Organizations and companies can no longer communicate in silos and increasingly have to speak with one unified voice — something the PR profession is particularly well-trained and suited to help them do well.

Inherently, PR professionals have always had to be adaptable “jacks of all trades,” adept at multiple elements of the marketing mix and working across organizations on a variety of communications challenges. And they have had to do so under tight budgets producing ROI more cost effectively than other types of professionals and consultancies.

They also have spent a lot of time in the line of fire dealing with time-sensitive crises, having to respond in real time to stakeholders, media, and customers.  Responsiveness and transparency with relative speed and immediacy have always been qualities the best PR professionals possess. Never have those been more important than in the new social and digital media age.

Visualizing networks — to so-called social graph — this way exposes one of the great and underappreciated truths of the digital revolution: while the influx of new tools that have driven the cost of publication close to zero has empowered Joe Public (and spawned terabytes of “consumer-generated content”), the most significant impact of the digital publication revolution has been not on individuals but on organizations: non-profits, professional associations, advocacy groups and the like.

We’ve looked at several health related “ecosystems” and found that — perhaps unsurprisingly — that the glue that holds these communities together is associations. Examine heart disease on Twitter, for instance, and it becomes instantly clear that the American Heart Association and the American College of Cardiology are connected to all of the important voices in the area.

These organizations aren’t necessarily spawning trending topics or collecting hundreds of thousands of followers. Instead, they are quietly serving as the hub of a web of influencers, providing authoritative perspective on topics narrowly tailored to their own ecosystem. And the impact is clear. At the last two mammoth medical congresses — the American Society for Clinical Oncology annual meeting and the European Society of Cardiology meeting — the most influential tweeters by any measures have not been journalists or physician opinion leaders. It’s been the organizations themselves.

And the power of these kinds of groups will only grow as they build out editorial capabilities. The Mayo Clinic — another hub group in health ecosystems — is sending blogger and arthritis advocate Kelly Young (RA Warrior) to next month’s American College of Rheumatology meeting as a member of the press. It’s probably not too early to wager Mayo and Young (along with ACR itself) will dominate the information ecosystem of that meeting.

This all means that communications pros have to continue to expand their vision of “reporter” (or “influencer”) to included these kinds of groups, and re-tool their engagement strategies to account for the reach and authority of these sources of information. This requires a new skill set, one that’s different from traditional media relations and more complex than simple “blogger/Twitter outreach.” But acquiring that skill is crucial to the future of communication.

We can’t doubt or downplay the incredible importance of global business. Yet as Europe struggles, China slows and the US economy sees a widening income gap affect our chances for a full economic recovery, have we forgotten about the global, multicultural US?

I’ve been thinking about just how global the US is since I heard a terrific piece by NPR’s Elizabeth Blair on the challenges of marketing beer to Hispanic Americans. I was surprised to learn that, according to Jim Sabia, the CMO for Crown Imports (the distributor of Corona and Modelo), Hispanic Americans are 19 percent more likely to purchase beer than the rest of U.S. consumers. They’ll also make up an ever-growing percentage of the drinking age in the near future. But some marketers have failed to realize the diversity in the first place and even the diversity that exists within the Hispanic American population itself. Take Corona, which featured an ad in 2008 called “Nuestro orgullo. Nuestra cerveza.” It translates to “Our pride, our beer.” But if you’re Honduran, or Columbian, or Dominican, it’s not your beer at all.

So what does this mean? To me, it should remind us of a few things as we think globally as marketers and communicators:

1. Know your audience: When we think about how to write and communicate, will our messages resonate across a truly diverse US audience, or are we focusing too much on one group of people?
2. Broaden your content: Is your content loaded with symbols, metaphors of colloquialisms that only make sense if English is your first language?
3. Look for diversity: We have so much great diversity in the US and I believe our global, American community is hungry to engage with and participate in conversations with brands

Global is here to stay, whether it’s in the US or around the world, and it’s a great time to be communicators.

So as the barriers to boundary of work and family blur, the question of when outreach is off-limits is increasingly important. Just because we can connection doesn’t mean we should. Bloomberg’s Liz Lopatto’s voicemail is explicit: she only wants to be disturbed with “urgent” requests. But that, apparently, hasn’t kept her phone from buzzing long into the evening with requests that are not — by any definition — urgent.

So as a service, here are some guidelines for PR pros to consider before intruding, after-hours:

• Consider the Topic: Lopatto suggested that “CEO changes, M&A, halted studies” are all truly urgent. Event invitations are not. Larry Husten from CardioBrief pointed out that last-minute changes to embargo times or the unexpected lifting of an embargo probably merits a call: missing something like that means being hours behind.
• Consider the Publication: Brian Orelli, who writes for the Motley Fool, among others, noted that “urgency” varies from publication to publication. Those that don’t have after-hour copy staff, or those that have something less than a daily deadline can’t do anything overnight anyway, no matter how urgent the news may be.
• Consider the Medium: Email is far less intrusive than a phone call, and it’s a rare professional that goes without checking email from dusk to dawn. Evening emails aren’t ideal (heck, any non-urgent email is probably best avoided after, say, 3 p.m.), but for something important — but not truly urgent — shooting off a quick message can be a lot better than dialing a cell phone.
• Consider the Context: Lopatto admits to having slightly different standards when she’s traveling at a medical meeting, where journalists and PR pros alike clock 18-hour days.
• Consider the Relationship: Cold calls are generally unwelcome during the day, and they’re even less welcome after sunset. But once relationships are formed, everyone has a better idea of the rules. I work with some journalists who are explicit: they want a head’s up by phone — damn the clock — if something is breaking in the morning. Some are equally explicit on the other side: short of their beat being turned upside down, it can wait until the sun rises. And still others don’t mind the call if they’ve been warned something might be up.

Of course, much of this is something less than black-and-white, and there is ample room to miscalculate urgency. I’m sure I’m not free of sin, there. But I suspect it’s not those judgment calls that raise hackles. Lopatto admitted that she got a cell-phone call recently about a release promoting an event. An event that was 2 weeks away. It’s not clear what would prompt someone to treat that as “urgent,” so let me end with an urgent message of my own: cut it out.

(Media: additional guidance welcome. Leave a comment below or tweet it with the hashtag #afterhoursPR.)

[UPDATE: Over at Google Plus, Kevin B. O'Reilly from American Medical News makes an excellent point that I overlooked: calling after-hours with an exclusive is likely to be far more welcome than a standard-issue pitch.]

There are good reasons to view different media differently (and to treat them differently). Television relies on visuals; effective pitching requires b-roll or on-camera interview opportunities. Wire services rely on speed, meaning that the embargo system is hugely important. Magazines bank on design and depth. And so on.

But the revolution of publishing over the past 10 years is turning on its head the idea that format dictates content. While we still try to group writers in the online space — this one is a blogger, we’ll say; this one is active on YouTube; this one is a Wikipedian — those are increasingly meaningless distinctions. The New York Times‘ “Prescriptions” blog is a totally different animal than Len Lichtenfeld’s blog at the American Cancer Society or Kerri Sparling’s “Six Until Me.” All have top-quality content, but each has a radically different approach to information. Lumping them all together as “blogs,” does a subtle disservice to all of them.

The future of media relations, then, needs to focused a lot less on the media, and a lot more on the personalities that use the media. It used to be, if you had a list of newspaper science writers, you didn’t have to do a ton a homework. You could pull a few clips and have a decent idea what they covered and what they needed. Now, if you get a list of bloggers or other “online influencers,” the work only begins. There is a tremendous amount of read and research needed to drill down and understand what makes each author click.

It’s an exhaustive process, and the inability to automate media relations — even in this era of automation — means that the practitioners of the future will have to be more broadly read and more nimble. Ignorance will be harder and harder to hide. Sorting writers in certain, predictive buckets will be less and less effective (and spamming huge groups of reporters with the same pitch, which was never a good idea, will become more of an evil). Putting Kerri Sparling in a “blogger” bucket is a lot less useful than putting her in the “Kerri” bucket.

* I realize that Marshall McLuhan’s concept of “the media is the message” is a good deal more subtle than I make it out to be in this post and that I may have bastardized the general concept. To McLuhan fans: I apologize.

The answer, in a word: playlists. I have been creating playlists based on the recommendation of friends as well as the songs that are in heavy rotation at my favorite radio station of all time, WPGU. And I’m getting exposed to all kinds of great, unexpected stuff. With Pandora, the computer-generated playlists, no matter how fine-tuned, don’t bring me anything truly new. Yes, I can set up a Foo Fighters channel, but I’ll never get Allison Krause there.

The night-and-day difference between a WPGU playlist and a Pandora playlist has everything to do with the human DJ spinning tracks. You can’t (yet) replace that sense of “cool” with an algorithm.

But it’s not just music. Late last year, a Facebook friend sent an urgent missive: toxic sludge was fouling the historic Danube River. My friend was aghast, and nearly as upset at the media for not covering the story. Except that the media were covering the story — it was the Facebook community that hadn’t noticed. My hometown paper, a small, Midwestern daily with few ties to Eastern Europe, put the story on the front page. An editor there clearly made a news judgment: while not something that was immediately relevant to her readership, it was important in an objective sense. Score another one for human editors.

I think back to the Danube story when I hear heavy breathing about how, in a Filter Bubble world, prioritization can best be done by algorithms or crowds. And while I don’t want to dismiss the power of those tools (see Aaron Strout’s excellent take on curation last week for an example), it’s clear there remains a role for news (and radio, for that matter) as designed by experts. We’re now nearly 6 months into the New York Times’ grand experiment with its paywall, and it’s a huge — and surprising — success. I can’t help but think that part of that success is the recognition of the value of real-live editors.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to go check out what the kids say is hip over at WPGU.

The hyperbole is tongue in cheek, of course, but the promise isn’t. At a time when “print is dead” is considered as much a truism as “Congress is dysfunctional,” magazines are slowly re-establishing themselves as a media form with some distinct advantages. Glossy mags still give writers the space and freedom to write long-form pieces, breaking out of the shorter-is-better trend that defines content on the web. (Go and read “I Want my Prostate Back” or “The Runaway General” if you have any question about the power and draw of excellent storytelling.) And good design remains a hallmark, so much so that much of the “online magazine” technology that’s been rolled out over the past 20 years has set as its goal reproducing what looks so natural on a printed page.

I’m not just spouting old-media nostalgia. The New York Times noted last month that when Google — hardly a company that clings to the technology and assumptions of the past — chose a format for their deep-think exercise, Think Quarterly, they decided to do it as a print magazine (actually, it’s even more old-media: it’s essentially a book). There are nice Google quirks (heat-sensitive end papers), but the overriding logic is inescapable: if you want to publish targeted, deeply analytical stuff, you have to think hard about print.

And Google isn’t the only company betting on magazines. The number of new publications in the sector rose in the first half of the year, with 111 hitting the market. Many of them have titles that highlight their niche nature: Progressive Cattleman, Catfish Alley, Plum Hamptons. But that doesn’t mean it’s appropriate to dismiss the endeavors. If new media has taught us anything, it’s that those targeted audiences are the most valuable, and we now live in a world where it’s effective to hit niche audiences with rich, print content.

As I’ve argued before, the future of media isn’t 10 million people reading Sports Illustrated. It’s a 100 people reading a million publications. And with the birth of Catfish Alley and its brethren, we’re closer than ever to that future.

Now, I’d like to propose the “Alan Schwarz Problem.” Schwarz is the most influential person in football right now, the guy who cracked open the debate on concussions and brain damage. That debate — not the current, season-threatening discussion over how to divide the obscene pot of money that football now generates — is the one that is most likely to shape or threaten the long-term  future of America’s new pasttime. And yet Schwarz, a baseball guy for most of his career, was entirely invisible to the football community before he published his first concussion article 4 years ago. He was not an “influencer,” as social media type say.

Efforts to understand influence in social media are retrospective. They look at past history and assume it is indicative of future performance. And this is not a bad approach: unlike a stock portfolio, what happened yesterday is a pretty good indicator of what will happen tomorrow. But there are blind spots. Even the most careful algorithm is of marginal benefit in predicting when an Alan Schwarz will appear.

Solving the Alan Schwarz Problem requires a different mode of thinking, on that is driven by both data as well as well as old-fashioned human interaction. Successfully identifying emerging, important voices on a topic requires:

• Immersion in a Culture: The discussions that journalists, bloggers and other online denizens have in public is often distinctly different from those that happen in the back channel and hallways. Understanding — and participating in — those conversations can help identify shifts in authority before the become clear.
• Alertness for ‘Black Swan‘ Influence Moments: It can be hard for influence algorithms to make sense of a single data point. But the subtext of Schwarz’s first concussion article — it ran on Page One of the New York Times — screamed that this was an issue that the Times was unlikely to walk away from. Understanding the dynamics of any media ecosystem, from how a paper plays a given story to how RTs proliferate through Twitter to the pattern of blog comments can provide subtle context to what might come next.
• Over-Emphasizing the ‘New’: On the FDA beat, my old stomping group and an area of great interest to me, the primary reporter for a half-dozen of the most important outlets has changed in the past 6 months. Looking at how the old reporter viewed the agency is useless; we have to adapt quickly to what the new reporters are saying, even if they don’t have a long track record.

This is obviously as much art as science, and it requires more than a fair dose of human intervention and uncertainty. (As Yogi Berra once said: “It’s hard to make predictions, especially about the future.”) But that’s where the real value is. And if you want to spot the Alan Schwarz quickly in your industry, it’s a risk you have to take.

[In addition to the post, I've also created a Google Plus slideshow on the subject.]

On Thursday 7 July, WCG and The Holmes Report launched a roundtable series.  The focus of our inaugural event was Access (not market access – yes, we believe there is a difference!)

In short – below are some of the key takeaways that left each panelist and audience member with some food for thought…An in-depth analysis and report will be available in a couple weeks and will include exclusive interviews with the panelists, so stay tuned.

 1)       Access goes beyond Market Access, it has evolved

When I hear market access – I immediately think of a specific drug, medicine, treatment, management option, etc.  It is a limiting term in the healthcare world we now live in. During the WCG Access roundtable – panelists hotly debated issues that went beyond market access and the access to treatment. Access has evolved into a multitude of factors  – access to information, treatment, education, services…you get my point.  With this understanding, the term Access naturally lends itself to include each stakeholder relevant to the healthcare debate. These stakeholders, and it should come as no surprise, include the patient, the policymaker, the regulator, the provider and the supplier – Access defines and guides the way in which these stakeholders must work together to provide health and wellbeing and healthcare services and treatment.

2)       Delivering Value will only result from transparent and honest debate between stakeholders in Access

We can all agree that relationships are important in our personal lives; how important are they in our professional lives – just as much, right?  We maintain good relationships through honesty and understanding. Between the hours of 9 and 5, however, those two essential criteria for a healthy relationship are often lost.  We focus on goals that are limited to our perspective and place in the field without recognizing that we are working with 10 other players to reach one ultimate goal – delivering value for patients to promote health and wellbeing.

3)       Reorganization – Its not only a structural transition

In an effort to improve Access, many biopharma organizations are making structural organizational changes. Companies are breaking silos between marketing, health economics, medical and access functions (to name a few) and are promoting integrated working.  We can see similar restructuring from healthcare systems around the world. I suspect that most employees within these functions are measured against an access-related goal (and if they aren’t now, they will be soon).  During the roundtable, it was hotly debated whether this would be enough – and there was consensus that, “No, silo-busting doesn’t translate into integrated working” within an organization nor externally with partner stakeholders.   The shift we need must be rooted in cultural and behavioral change – not an easy task for the healthcare providers nor its suppliers.   

4)       Trust and Communications sit at the heart of Access

After two and a half hours of debate and honest discussion at the roundtable, the panelists and audience members came to many conclusions (to be shared in our full-report).  They did all agree, however, that without trust and communication, we cannot successfully improve access to healthcare – we all will fail in achieving the ultimate goal. Healthcare providers and suppliers must find themselves embedded along the entire patient pathway in health and wellbeing and not sit at just one point.  How we do this is not going to be easy as we move further into a world in which economic and financial crashes will be the forces of change – but as long as we work in partnership, we will improve patient access.

Personal note, as communicators we recognize the above isn’t an easy task. We aim to make Access accessible by creating forums and channels in which all the key players in healthcare can come together and relate.

 An in-depth analysis of the WCG Access Roundtable is currently underway. We want to make sure the learnings and debate live beyond the walls of a room. If you’re interested in receiving a copy or just further information, please let us know below with comments or email us at WCGAccessRT@wcgworld.com

 For those Twitter users, a real-time summary from the event can be found by searching #wcgaccessRT.

 If you’d like to participate in future events, or just want to share your perspective – don’t hesitate to get in touch.  Through conversation and debate, we go further – so let’s go ahead (together).

For more information on panelists:

Jon Sussex, Deputy Director at the Office of Health Economics

Mike Sobanja, CEO NHS Alliance

Helen Johnson, Helen Johnson Consulting

Elaine Cruikshanks, Acumen Public Affairs

Nigel Breakwell, WCG

Paul Holmes, The Holmes Report (moderator)

Originally, my colleague Bob Pearson, was supposed to present along with fellow author, Rick Mathieson. An immovable set of meetings combined with the fact that I too happen to be a book author (and know a thing or two about Bob’s book, Pre-Commerce) conspired to put me in the presenters seat at the event. After chatting with Bob and Steve, we decided to do a mashup — a best of so to speak — of Pre-Commerce and my upcoming book, Location-Based Marketing for Dummies.

What made my presentation relatively easy is that we live and breath the concepts from Bob’s Pre-Commerce book at WCG. It is also helpful that the idea of location-based marketing works nicely as a sub-discipline within Pre-Commerce. And lastly, location-based marketing fits perfectly across one of the most important core concepts of the book, namely the 4 A’s (which replace the 4 P’s), by providing ways for businesses to create greater awareness, assessment, action and ultimately ambassadorship for their products and services.

While I won’t share all of the slides I presented — you can find all the models, back-stories and anecdotes from Pre-Commerce in the book — I’ve incorporated three of the slides that really resonated below.

These are a few of the major shifts taking place in the world that are driving the way consumers want to (and should be) engaged by businesses big and small.

Leveraging the what people are doing online versus trying to change their behavior is critical to becoming a Pre-Commerce company

Recognizing the "Ten Channels" of online influence and how to create meaningful content for each is key to improving SEO and engaging customers.

As far as the location-based marketing portion of the presentation, I used the content from a previous blog post I did titled, Ten Keys to a Good Location-Based Marketing Campaign. If you want the Readers Digest of the ten rules, I’ve listed them below:

1. Claim your location
2. Pick a service (or two)
3. Find your influencers
4. Set goals
5. Pick a great offer
6. Measure, refine, optimize
7. Gamification FTW
8. Market your program
9. Operationalize, operationalize, operationalize
10. Play with the API

Based on the audience feedback, it appeared that the event was a success. It didn’t hurt that Rick picked up where I left off sharing several important trends from his latest book, The On-Demand Brand, including two that are near and dear to my heart i.e. mobile and augmented reality. My two favorite examples Rick shared were 1) the increasing importance of branded games (people like to play games) citing Burger King’s success with its Kings Game. It sold over 3 million copies and was linked to a direct increase in food sales at the locations where the game was sold and 2) the shopping experience of the future. This second example included not-too-far from reality concepts such as:

• auto-checking in as you walk into the store (he had me at “check-in”)
• receiving special offers based on your profile
• sharing which clothes you are trying on with friends on Facebook and getting their opinion
• watching videos of runway models wearing the item you are trying on background on design by the designers themselves
• the ability to walk out of store while wearing the clothing you just tried on because you are already registered with the store and an RFID or NFC reader scans the item as you walk out

Have you read Pre-Commerce yet? Or On-Demand Brand? If you have, what’s your favorite model or example from the book?

     About three pharma brands I know so well…

     It started way back in Quarter 3 …

     There was X, Y, and oh, brand Z….

Ok, Beastie Boys aside, there are, of course, a lot of brands out there – including those of us branded Mark Bennett.  I’d like to think I’m unique, but I’ve come to realize I share the same name with a lot of other guys… heck, a Google search returns nearly 3.5 million results and I KNOW a lot of those results aren’t leading to me!

“So what?” you say. 

Well… say you are in charge of a brand – for kicks let’s say “Mark Bennett” is your brand – wouldn’t you want to ensure that your content shows up (hopefully at the top) in those 3.5 million results?   Wouldn’t you want to have your name secured on Twitter, Facebook, etc?

Well, that’s the point folks!

Locking up profiles across the social web is a key strategic consideration for brands/companies across most, if not all, industries.  Ideally, you put this into place before you announce your (product’s) brand name – even if you have no intention of ever using social media.  This goes for all social media channels, not just Facebook and Twitter.  If not, don’t be surprised if some (sketchy) other person/organization registers a profile on a social network using your brand name.  It’s important to note, too, that if this happens, some – but not all – social channels will work with you to secure a trademarked name.

Thankfully, there are some free and paid methods to prevent and, to some degree, correct this should you be a victim of social squatting.

So what are you doing to protect your brand?   Me… I decided to use a unique handle across platforms.  Let me know what you think below.  If you’d like to explore options to protect (or take back) your brand, drop me a line at mbennett@wcgworld.com.

Fast forward 6 years, and half of top 10 podcasts in the iTunes directory are re-posting of shows that already aired on public radio. And the others are generally slickly produced, professional endeavors backed by big media companies. Yes: there is a lot more diversity in the iTunes directory that you’ll get on radio, but podcasting no longer a playground for would-be revolutionaries looking to overthrow the existing media order.

I was thinking about the taming of podcasting the other day, when Facebook suggested I “friend” Don Graham, the CEO of the Washington Post company. Needless to say, I don’t know Don Graham (I do share a handful of his 4,000-plus “friends”). But Facebook has been taken lately with pushing journalists on me. Facebook thinks I should, perhaps, friend New York Times advertising writer Stuart Elliot (don’t know him), or White House correspondent Peter Baker (ditto). Facebook used to be about friends. Now, it seems, it’s another platform for professional journalists to broadcast from.

And these are personal pages; Facebook has also been encouraging journalists to establish professional outposts on the site, via separate “pages.” And the growing media footprint is not just a Facebook phenomenon. Bloomberg is ushering reporters onto Twitter and the Associated Press now lists reporter’s Twitter handles with every story. Like podcasting, what used to be ground-up information networks are increasingly being co-opted by professional media. That isn’t to suggest that new media forms aren’t thriving — enormous media empires have been built from scratch on these new platforms — only that traditional media is getting ever better at capitalizing on those platforms.

The rise of “big media” on social media isn’t a bad thing. I like getting Marilynn Marchione‘s reporting in my Twitter stream, and I have to confess to listening to NPR’s Wait, Wait … Don’t Tell Me via podcast (no. 2 on iTunes). But the colonization of social media by professionals means that its increasingly dangerous to stereotype either “old” media (dinosaurs!) or “new” media (bathrobe-clad amateurs!).

The upshot is that we can’t view social media as a strange, technology-driven world unto itself. Old-school media relations will only become more important. That means reading more than 140 characters, understanding the importance of sourcing and transparency, prioritizing relationship-building over one-off pitching. That well-established skill set needs to be melded with increasing understanding of how information flows through online networks and how journalists — and others — want to interact using new technologies.

As we’ve said here before, social media isn’t about shiny objects. It’s about integrating a huge amount of knowledge and applying the knowledge across an ever-expanding number of channels. There was a time where self-styled “social media gurus” could get away with ignorance of basic public relations and media mechanics. Those days — like those days where I could produce a top-50 podcast in my spare time, from my basement — are gone.

I have worked my way through more than half of those social mentions, and I continue to compile tweets on my Social Abstract Project spreadsheet (you may participate by using this form). And though the project isn’t complete, there are some conclusions I can already draw:

• People Care About Everything. The attention at ASCO tends to follow the dozen or so pieces of research that ASCO promotes through its press conferences, but the Social Abstract Project — when complete — will probably flag more than 200 different posters and presentations that got social media attention. It’s great that technology is allowing docs to memorialize research that might otherwise be forgotten.
• Twitter is a Tough Medium for Medical Meetings. As several tweeters noted, 140-character tweets (or even a series of 140-character tweets) doesn’t allow for much nuance, and cancer is nothing if not nuanced. Adding to the problem is that Twitter is incredibly hard to mine for specific information; the number of tweets that referenced specific abstracts (either by including the abstract number or by linking to the abstract) was about 2 percent of the total number of tweets. That makes it devilishly difficult to sift through the tweets (remember, there are 10,000 of them), either by hand or in an automated fashion.
• The #ASCO11 Hashtag May Be Losing Its Effectiveness. The volume of tweets was simply too high for most ordinary mortals to process. Though hashtag proliferation often leads to confusion, it might be time to think about creative ways to segment ASCO commentary. David Miller proposed #ASCO11d for data and #ASCO11s for social. NPR’s Scott Hensley, slightly more tongue-in-cheek, suggested #ASCO11bs and #ASCO11truedat.
• “Socializing” the Meeting Can’t Be Done Without Help. Making the meeting more open to commentary means making it dead simple to participate, a weakness of my Social Abstract Project (despite the mobile-friendly form, commenting in that way required people to go outside their usual information-sharing habits). I noted last month, the easiest way to “get social” with regard to abstracts would be for ASCO itself to open the web pages for each individual piece of research to commenting. The other way we can turbo-charge this sharing is wider use of QR codes, which allow smartphone-toting attendees to scan a poster or slide and go directly to a place where they can weigh in. I saw three QR codes on research at the meeting; I’m hoping for 3,000 such codes within 3 years.

My goal, then, for the next 12 months, will be to work on making some of the small changes. The folks at ASCO are committed to staying at the cutting edge, technologically (their “Virtual Meeting” products, while not social, were nonetheless impressive and show a deep commitment to using all mediums to communicate), and I hope to open a dialogue with them. We’ll be talking with researchers about boosting the use of QR codes. And I’m hoping that we can develop some Twitter best-practices — such as the inclusion of links or abstract numbers, or the use of more specific hashtags — that will make it easier for those at the meeting or those looking later to make sense of the deluge.

I’ll keep updating the spreadsheet and following up via Twitter. Thanks to all that supported or participated in this experiment.

Two weeks ago, I proposed that ASCO open up its abstracts to commenting, all the better to allow perspective on data presented at the meeting that might otherwise go without remarks. Even though I realized it wouldn’t be possible for ASCO to re-design its abstract site for this year’s meeting – starting tomorrow – I have been nagged by the fact that so much of the commentary (and would-be commentary) from the 2011 meeting might be lost.

So over the weekend, I began creating a simple spreadsheet to capture some of the ASCO social media chatter in one place. I wanted to be able to create a single location where abstract-specific information being swapped on social media (Twitter, blogs, Facebook) could be aggregated. The first version of this effort is not elegant. It’s not simple, but I’ve started building it, linking to the tweets and blogs I’ve seen. Please take a look.

I plan to continue expanding this over the next week, but to maximize this resource, others must play along. Here’s how:

• Keep tweeting about research, especially research off of the beaten path. Tag your tweets with “#ASCO11” and include an abstract number to make it easy to index. (e.g. “Interesting take on combination therapy in metastatic bladder cancer. http://bit.ly/example, #ASCO11 abst. 5555″)
• If you have a blog or a Facebook post on a specific abstract or set of research, please let me know at breid@wcgworld.com.
• If you don’t use social media or want to comment directly, you can input your thoughts directly using an online form. The form is optimized for mobile, so you can bookmark http://bit.ly/socialabst and publish your thoughts directly from a session.
• If you’ve already tweeted and I’ve missed your tweet, you can input it yourself using the form, or just send me a message on Twitter and I’ll add it in.

Admittedly, there the limitations. The sample size so far is small, and this approach doesn’t take into account retweets, so I’m loathe to make sweeping statements about what “the Internet” thinks about this year’s meeting.

But looking through the social media discussion gives a different impression than following the mainstream press over the past two weeks. Focusing on social media has drawn my attention to interesting discussions of cost-benefit analyses and screening, as well as teases of important information yet to be presented. There are also references to deeper dives in specific areas that will be far more captivating to doctors and patients than to the national media.

In all, there have been dozens of different abstracts already highlighted or commented upon (nearly 40, as of this writing), which already outstrips the limited number discussed in the traditional media. I’d love to see that number grow. I’ll follow up again after the meeting and share what I’ve learned.

Let me know if you can help, and see you in Chicago.

One of the main reasons I moved out of the research scientist game was that I don’t believe that specialism is the only, or even the best, way forward. And yet here I am again, in a related field, fighting the same battle.

Where is this siloing behaviour coming from? Well many Pharma companies necessarily have different functions and, unfortunately, they aren’t always set up to facilitate or encourage collaboration between the functions. My colleague Manu Field and I have certainly seen over the time we’ve worked together several ways in which the Communications department can support others, but as he’ll tell you, sometimes it needs hard work to achieve even that.

In addition, there is almost a hierarchy of scientific rigour, just as I used to see in medical research, with different functions each battling with a perception that theirs isn’t ‘high science’ enough – it’s easy for everyone to be measured by the ‘gold standard’ of clinical trials, but without the detailed discovery work and the thorough pharmaco-kinetics and -dynamics work (just as rigourous but with fewer n numbers!), those trials wouldn’t happen. And of course, as a good friend of mine often reminds me, marketing is classed as an Art – yet we see marketeers striving to evaluate their work in ever more scientific ways. Does that belittle the evidence gathered by market research? Does the fact that health economics often relies on models make it less important? It really shouldn’t.

Which is why at WCG London we are forging a way through, with what Nigel Breakwell has termed a ‘translational science’ approach to communications. As a fully integrated company, with a strong base of healthcare clients, we strive to keep scientific rigour at the heart of everything we do, but we’re absolutely not going to dress up one type of science as another; we aim to find a way to translate one function in a way that can bring value to another and to the whole. We believe that if we can support our clients to take a clear cross-functional approach at every stage of the product lifecycle, we’ll have delivered insightful counsel and maximised the investment made by each function. In an era of increasing economic pressures balanced by empowered patient action, supporting access, making the most of budgets and truly delivering education and action in an inclusive and interactive way has to be the Holy Grail.

I’m aware that I risk sounding like a kooky holistic evangelist – I’ve always been obsessed with joining the dots; my mum tells me that as a small child, my pram could not be parked by anything long, otherwise she’d turn around and I would have tied it all together – so in my next post, I’d like to give you a solid example, using our approach to medical education.

1. Computer-assisted data journalism is going to be a big part of health journalism’s future. I’ve said this before, but I’m only more convinced after a parade of workshops and sessions on getting data, scrubbing data and using data. And I’ll say it again: PR pros need to be just as facile with these technologies as journalists are.
2. Alternative funding structures for journalism have come of age. The two organizations with the biggest profile at the meeting were Kaiser Health News and ProPublica, two nonprofit reporting organizations who have first-rate reporters and partnerships with some of the biggest news outlets in the country. They have proven that the resources of a newspaper or magazine aren’t required to do deep dives into medical topics.
3. Local journalism remains important. Though the decline of science and medical reporting in the mainstream media has been widely noted, the nametags at the conference — Tulsa, Oklahoma; Salem, Oregon; Providence, Rhode Island — proved that there is a huge and dedicated health-writing community  even outside of the top DMAs.
4. Jim’s makes a mean cheesesteak. Wit wiz, of course.
5. ACOs are hot. There was one official session on “accountable care organizations,” but it was the lips of everyone who was thinking health policy. Especially CMS head Don Berwick, who addressed the group on Thursday. No matter where you sit in the health ecosystem, you ignore this evolution at your peril.
6. HealthNewsReviews.org is having an impact. Five years ago, Gary Schwitzer began rating as many health news stories as he could find, calling out lousy (and fantastic) journalism. But Gary isn’t a pariah: he’s was rightfully celebrated as an important check on the work of journalists. If PR folks aren’t helping reporters meet his 10 criteria for quality health journalism, we’re not doing our jobs well.
7. Hype is dead. Journalists are still living with a post-genomic hangover. Breakthroughs from cracking the genome and other basic science advances have not meant instant revolutions in patient care, and both researchers and journalists at the conference made an explicit point — especially with interventions such as nanotechnology and gene therapy — of keeping discussions sober.
8. For intra-journalist conversations, Twitter is king. The conference had a hundred or so tweeting journalists, who managed to pump out more than 3,000 tweets during the four-day conference. That’s a lot of content for a meeting that might not have been “breaking news” in the traditional sense.
9. Information technology in health care is finally coming of age. From telemedicine to electronic health records, it appears that medicine is finally dragging itself into the iPad age.
10. Did I mention database-driven health journalism? Point #1 is worth repeating, and reporters at the event had cool tools through at them by everyone from mapping giant Esri to Berwick, who introduced healthindicators.gov, a one-stop shop for government health data.

“Information wants to be free” was uttered more than a quarter-century ago by a guy named Stewart Brand. What people tend to forget about Brand’s quote was that he said something really important right before he got to the “free” part: “On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it’s so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life.”

The dueling nature of what information “wants” is much in the air this spring, as the New York Times rolls out its paid-digital-content model. Unsurprisingly, the “information wants to be free” troops are out in force, pointing out both the technical loopholes in the paywall and trumpeting loudly their prediction that the Times’ business model will prove to be a failure. While the design of the paywall is fair game for debate, the Times’ move to charge for content is more mainstream that it appears.

Last  week, Times blogger Nate Silver published a breakdown of the sources that were most represented in the Google News and Google Blog search over the past month. Though Google is by no means a defender of paid content, Silver’s list is dominated by outlets that had their start offline. Only one online-originated site makes the top 10, and only five make the top 50.

What’s more, a closer look at the top five (the AP, the Times, Reuters, the Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg) shows something even more interesting (as former WSJ  reporter Keith Winstein pointed out): every single one of them charges explicitly for digital content. Now, the models are all different (the wire services have B2B models, the Times and the Journal now sell subscriptions), but they share the huge commonality of collecting dollars for information.

What does this mean for media relations? The places that are more influential — at least according to Google — also happen to be places where content itself (not the surrounding advertising) is worth cash money, meaning that subscription-only outlets are worth a closer look. That doesn’t mean that the era of the amateur is dead, but it certainly suggests that one way to look for valuable information, to go back to Brand, is to look for expensive information. After all, that’s what information “wants,” right?

A closer look at the report shows that *where* we consumer news is undergoing a sea change, and the move is clearly toward digital. But the news we’re consuming isn’t changing radically. When readers go online, they are — quite often — reading work that was produced by what we used to call “traditional” media outlets. The report includes a comScore chart of the top news properties, and — of the top 10 sites — four newspapers made the cut, along with two cable networks and one broadcast television network (and the others relied heavily on content syndicated from other so-called traditional sources). That’s hardly a sign that the content creation business has been radically reshaped.

To be sure, the old economic models are under tremendous pressure. Despite my personal commitment to having news printed on dead trees and delivered each morning to my doorstep, the Pew report makes it clear that the glory days of printed papers is quickly receding. But it is dangerous to conflate the economic problems in the industry with the continued, strong demand for professional news.

Go into any newspaper newsroom today and very little has changed in the past decade. There may be more empty desks, more multimedia and hugely increased deadline pressure, but the techniques, the quality and the products are very much the same. The audience, too, is as healthy as ever: add traditional circulation to web hits and there’s no doubt that more people are getting news that originates in a traditional newsroom than they did a decade or two ago. Distribution may have been re-invented, but journalism has not.

I don’t wish to argue that new information flows created by everyone from citizen journalists to Wikileaks hasn’t enriched the way that we receive information, only that the the gatekeepers of influence have changed less than a chart showing the sharp rise of digital news consumption might suggest. The Pew report, viewed from that lens, tells an encouraging story: news is still news.

Thank goodness.

A recent report from Oncology Business Review gives some insight. According to ImpactRx, which surveyed nearly 500 oncologists for OBR, the site most likely to be visited by oncologists is medscape.com. Medscape was followed by research-summarizing site mdlinx.com, nih.gov, nccn.org, asco.org, uptodate.com, sermo.com, ascopubs.com, epocrates.com and cancer.gov.

That’s not a collection of high-profile sites; only NIH.gov ranks in the top 1,000 for web traffic. And with the exception of Medscape, few of those resources have traditionally been targets for communications outreach. They get ignored because the editorial structures are too difficult to discern, or the focus is too narrow (or the information too complex), or they’re password-protected and un-indexed by Google. It’s easier just to focus on the trade press or some easy-to-find Twitter users and be done with it.

But we disregard those sites at our peril. As Pew made clear, if we’re not communicating with health care professionals, we’re forfeiting the ability to help inform important discussions between providers and patients. And if we’re not reading those outlets, we’re blind to how the news of the day is being presented to — and perceived by — some of the most crucial players in the delivery of health care.

We live in an era in which the reflex is to value easily-obtainable information over information that is – more objectively – more important. This is why the much-reviled content farms do so well: Huffington Post or eHow or Associated Content show up early and often on searchers, making them seem more central to the informatione ecosystem than they actually are. The OBR survey points in a different direction: the sites that really make a difference aren’t Google-topping household names, at least to the general public.

But those sites are top-of-mind for those making life-and-death decisions about how to treat cancer. That means they are — or should be — top-of-mind for communicators, too.

Less heralded — but perhaps more important — was a deep division in where people looked for certain kinds of health information. For support and basic advice on day-to-day living, most people turned to their peers, demonstrating the triumph of the web as an extended support network. But clinical information still came — in a huge percentage of cases — from a patient’s physician, not Dr. Google.

When patients wanted a diagnosis, they turned to health care providers 18 times more often than they turned to their peers. For prescription drug information, providers  beat out friends, families and fellow patients 81 percent to 9 percent. For emotional support, on the other hand, peers were twice as likely to provide information on emotional support. And in moments of need, offline information-seeking continues to dominate.

The Pew research lays bare a reality that too often gets forgotten in our enthusiasm for technology, especially in communications. There is a sense that society’s gatekeepers and middlemen are being picked off, one by one. Travelocity can stand in for travel agents. The algorithm-derived Google News feed seeks to mimic newspaper editors. Yelp replaces food critics. As — as my colleague Bob Pearson points out in his new book, Pre-Commerce — ratings sites and social media others make advice-dispensing salespeople disposable.

But not in health. As rich as the information is on the web, we’re still turning to doctors when the medical issues turn complex. The implications for communicators are clear. First, we need to understand exactly what people are looking for online (support, advice, diagnoses) and tailor online offering to those needs. And second, we need to understand that education patients still means educating health care providers (more on that next week).

Fox has said the Pew report was 5 years in the making, and it will no doubt be seen as a definitive work in online health. And those it clearly paints a picture of patients and caregivers with increasing digital savvy, it also serves as a reminder that doctors remain central to information seeking. Communicators who ignore that group do so at their peril.

“Hmmmm,” my friend said, agreeing with the general idea. “But I’m not sure that scales.”

This was intended as a rhetorical kill shot, an argument that the idea of super-engaged media relations might useful in small doses but impractical as a guiding philosophy. And she wasn’t alone in that critique.

In some ways, I couldn’t blame her. Public relations has been able to “scale” in a myriad of other ways over the past three decades. Press release distribution, which used to be centered on the time-consuming labor of copying items and stuffing envelopes (and, later, fax machines), is now a push-button industry. The intensive task of sifting through dozens of newspapers and magazines each day to create a pile of “clips” is now, in this era of Google News, Radian6 and automated listening solutions, almost comicaly quaint. Much of our business has scaled up, and we — and an industry — are providing better, more extensive service with fewer human resources.

But media relations remains stubbornly resistant to revolutionary change. If anything, the rise of technology has made our jobs more difficult. There are more media out there, and those individuals are being hit with more information than they can possibly handle (I’ve written about clinical study information overload before). The side effect of scaling up public relations means that the signal-to-noise ratio for journalists and online influencers is getting ever smaller.

The solution is not to try to scream louder or to pitch more (or even more creatively) in an effort to stand out.

Rather, the goal is prove to journalists, day in and day out, that public relations isn’t about constant pitching (no matter how well-crafted or well-targeted those pitches might be). We need to consider ourselves in a high-touch, high-value relationship, where we’re anticipating needs and filling them. We’ll need to to be well-read and able to make meaningful connections, regardless of whether those connections have any benefit to us. (For an excellent overview of how to think about this, you really, really must read Denise Graveline’s Tip More, Pitch Less post.)

That kind of relationship-building and information-sharing is not an easy task, and it certainly doesn’t “scale.” But the more you scale, the more you lose the personal touch. And — in this era of spam and near-spam — that’s a tradeoff that media relations pros can’t afford to make.

Now industry is catching up, not just by the numbers (there are now literally hundreds of pharma blogs, Twitter accounts and Facebook pages) but in tone. Because online has long been a place where human conversations trump corporate-speak, it’s important to flag great examples where the industry begins interacting with a human touch.

This month, two pharmaceutical-industry giants took big steps towards demonstrating that human touch. The first was the launch of a log by PhRMA, the industry trade association **. The Catalyst, as it is called, is still in its early days, but it’s already showing the power of engagement. The regular postings aren’t stale regurgitation of taking points, but thoughtful feedback to the news of the day, responding to news articles and blogs, musing on what the Jeopardy-playing robot Watson might mean for medicine and celebrating Valentine’s Day with heart-healthy tips.

And last week, AstraZeneca waded into new territory by hosting a “tweetchat”: a focused, all-comers exchange on Twitter. The event focused on prescription drug costs, tracked the hashtag #rxsave. The event was not exactly a meeting of the like-minded: it brought out fierce critics of the company, and it doesn’t appear than a hour of typing changed any minds.

But it might have changes some hearts. “Soulful Sepulcher,” a patient advocate, unabashed critic and vocal participant in the tweetchat, wasn’t mollified by the responses. But she got an audience with AstraZeneca, and that was hugely important. “I WAS HEARD BY ASTRAZENECA,” she tweeted. “All that matters now.”

The launch of a blog and the initiation of a single tweetchat doesn’t signal a new era in industry communications. But like the appearance of Pharmalot and the WSJ Health Blog four years ago, these may be early signals of a coming sea change.

** WCG consults with PhRMA.

• J.P. Morgan: Yes, I wrote a whole blog post on how social media could never touch the impact of the in-person magic of the J.P. Morgan Health Care Conference but — as it turns out — this was a best-ever year for online discussion of the confab. The number tweets generated about the meeting more than doubled versus JPM10, coming at north of 1,000. That’s a lot of back-and-forth and a lot of commentary. It still can’t give you the claustrophobic sense of being at the meeting, but the hive mind did hit the highlights. (See my post-meeting J.P. Morgan Health Care overview at Pharmalot.)

• Scienceblogging: Because I was in San Francisco for J.P. Morgan, I missed out on ScienceOnline 2011, a quickly sold-out meeting of the finest online science writers in the world. The enormous buzz around the meeting reinforced a point from a September post on the growth of blogging as the medium of choice among science writers (and publishers). It also gave the impetus for further revisions to the scienceblogosphere visualization I started. (Check out the shark and the schooner.)

• Computer-Assisted Reporting: I wrote last month about the importance of “data journalism,” and — as if to underscore the point — two of the leaders of this burgeoning discipline pushed out great how-to guides on getting deep into the numbers immediately thereafter. Simon Rogers from The Guardian published an indispensable list of tips, and ProPublica hosted a conference call — the transcript is now available — explaining how to work with its dialysis database. Even Google is getting into the game, launching Public Data Explorer this week.

• The State of the Union (and the State of Innovation): Every year, right after the State of the Union, the president unveils his proposed budget. It is a purely symbolic document, generally DOA, but it is a way of measuring how seriously the White House takes certain issues. When I posted about the State of the Union address, I wondered aloud whether NIH would get what it needed. The Obama administration, as it turns out, is pushing for a 3.5 percent increase in the budget, barely keeping pace with inflation. But in these economic times, that would be something close to a victory.

• Bad Health Information: The same week that I suggested the New York Times had it wrong in going after WebMD as a symbol of bad health information online, the Huffington Post, via Forbes, demonstrated that vetting by its “Medical Review Board” can be worse than no vetting at all.

• FDA Social Media Rules: I outlined some myths about FDA rules at the end of last year, as we waited for guidelines to drop on how pharma could use social media tools. We’re still waiting. Bob’s post this week offers a different perspective on why the FDA in a tricky spot. The agency is apparently working on a 1Q deadline now, so look for this issue to re-emerge over the next 6 months.

“Millions are in uproar in #Cairo. Rumor is they heard our new spring collection is now available online at http://bit.ly/KCairo -KC.”

Kenneth Cole has since deleted the Tweet and apologized via Facebook and Twitter both, however, the damage has already been done. For every opportunistic marketer in the world (ahem… Kenneth Cole), there are a hundred opportunistic users in social media who are just waiting to pile on. In the same spirit as the @BPGlobalPR account, there is now an @KennethColePR Twitter handle that is over 6,000 Followers strong. This account is a parody account that posts harsh and insensitive updates to paint Kenneth Cole as an opportunistic money grubber. I think it’s safe to say this account will have more Followers than Kenneth Cole’s real Twitter account before the weekend is over. Sad to see a brand like Kenneth Cole get hijacked in Twitter, especially given all the work they’ve put into having the brand and Kenneth Cole himself active on Twitter.

It will be interesting to see how Kenneth Cole and the real Kenneth Cole PR team react to this social media crisis or if they try to wait it out. The onslaught of social media users condemning Kenneth Cole for their Twitter gaffe is growing: Kenneth Cole Tweets

Meanwhile, few media outlets have missed the opportunity to post their opinions on Kenneth Cole:
WSJ: Kenneth Cole Apologizes For Tweet About Egyptian Protests
Fast Company: Kenneth Cole’s Tone-Deaf Tweet! Vodafone’s Coerced Texts! Salad Dressing Drug Charges! Business Misadventures in Egypt Multiply
NY Mag: Kenneth Cole Tries to Plug His Spring Line by Making Light of the Crisis in Egypt
BNET: Millions in Uproar Over @KennethCole on #Twitter; Rumor Is, He’s a D*ck
PC World: Kenneth Cole Feels Wrath of the Web After Egypt Twitter Gaffe

Update:
Unfortunately for Kenneth Cole, the @KennethColePR account is actually quite funny at times, which ensures that it will not disappear easily. Every funny Tweet is reason for users and media to revisit the Kenneth Cole Twitter debacle. In fact, HuffPost recently posted their list of the top, funniest Tweets from @KennethColePR – the Kenneth Cole parody Twitter account.

HuffPost: The Funniest @KennethColePR Tweets Yet (PICTURES)

Yet when it comes to health, it’s not the speed of information that is critical. It’s the quality and the external validation. For that reason, immediacy of coverage of health in the media doesn’t influence the opinions of doctors or patients in the way that yesterday’s box score influences what people think of the Red Sox.

From a communications standpoint, that means it might be wise to pay less attention to what is on the wires today, and more about what Google says. Google CEO Eric Schimdt, speaking at the J.P. Morgan Health Care Conference, said that around 4 to 5 percent of all searches are for health information. And it’s estimated that the first three entries on a search page account of nearly two-thirds of all clicks. That means yesterday’s big story about a medical breakthrough might already be digital fishwrap, but the top hits on a search engine will keep attracting enormous numbers of hits, day after day after day.

For that reason, we’ve been watching those top three entries in Google more and more closely, watching to make sure that information is accurate and up to date. This isn’t search-engine optimization; the top natural results for major keywords such as “cancer” or “multiple sclerosis” aren’t likely to be displaced. Instead, it’s about checking those links and forging relationships with those who are responsible for them. In general, the top three health links are coming from four sources:

• The Government: .Gov sites are increasingly seen as go-to destinations, though concerns about fragmentation continue to worry health info experts.
• A.D.A.M.: The Atlanta-based company feeds well-vetted information to a huge number of organizations, from the NIH to the New York Times to medical colleges.
• Advocacy Organizations: Groups like the American Cancer Society and the American Diabetes Association have hundreds of pages of consumer health information, backed by trusted brand names.
• Wikipedia: Though Wikipedia has both its fans and detractors, it’s hard to argue that it’s not a first stop for millions of web users.

In all cases, these documents have writers and editors, even if they are uncredited. There are editorial processes, and there are entire teams decided to making sure that information is accurate and up-to-date. And with Wikipedia, it’s even more transparent: every change to every page is tracked, and most editors are easy enough to contact.

The day after a Food and Drug Administration approval or a major medical journal publication, we too often ask what a given reporter thought about the news. The real question is what the Wikipedia editors thought or whether the news way big enough to get A.D.A.M. to fast-track revisions to the medical information.

Increasingly, then, our job as communications pros will be to work assidously to make sure that online medical resouces are updated quickly and accurately, not just to court news coverage. Hits to a Wikipedia page inevitably spike in the days following a new approval or a big study; failing  to know — and interact with — editors lowers the chance that information-seekers will get up-to-date information.

For that reason, I am striving to better know those influential (but often behind-the-scenes) individuals that provide so much of the medical information available to patients and providers today. Because while today’s news fades, Google is forever.

Computer-assisted reporting isn’t new. Last year, ProPublica scraped disparate government and pharmaceutical company databases to assemble its “Dollars for Docs” reporting on payments from industry to physicians and culled government data to assess dialysis care. Over the past few years, USA Today has worked with public data and private number-crunches to quantitatively assess hospital quality. And the Los Angeles Times, earlier in the decade, earned a Pulitzer Prize for a series of stories about FDA drug regulation that included some exhaustive analyses of more than 1,000 deaths reported to the FDA. And the tradition extends back far further.

But each passing year has made it easier and easier for members of the media to analyze enormous datasets cheaply, easily and without the need for exhaustive training. I believe 2011 will be the tipping point, driven by three factors:

1. The amount of raw, easily obtained and digitally formatted data is now enormous. Driven by a global push for transparency, companies and government agencies are now pushing out terabytes of unfiltered information; there is a opportunity for those that that would put that data into context. (This is to say nothing of Wikileaks, which clearly aspires to add to the data deluge in disruptive new ways.)
2. The tools by which reporters can clean and scour  the data have never been cheaper or more powerful (the ProPublica effort, for instance, was built almost entirely on free software and services). That means good computer-assisted reporting is available to an ever-broader swath of media, including not only mainstream outlets but also bloggers and others leveraging new media.
3. In a time when so much of news has been commoditized by the web, journalists are coming to understand that data journalism offers an opportunity to build scoops that can be branded.

This, in turn, should lead to a change in the way that we in public relations approach data and approach the media. Just as we check to make source that clients aren’t misquoted or taken out of context, we will need to be facile enough with computer-assisted reporting tools to be able to make sure that numbers are being crunched in ways that are accurate. We must also become increasingly aware of the data our companies and our clients push out into the world, even seemingly worthless information, and ask ourselves if that data can be examined — or mashed up with other data sets — to tell a story.

Finally, we must be proactive about analyzing data ourselves to help inform the pitches that we make to media. Media-relations pros have always prided themselves on the ability to help reporters spot trends, and an old press joke is that all you need are three examples to mint a trend. But now, rather than just three data points, we can use 3,000 — or 3 million — data points to illustrate stories.

The media has already been profoundly changed by abundant data and cheap and powerful software, but the change has been quiet: Access databases don’t get interviewed on CNN, and regression analyses don’t get published by the New York Times. All we see are polished final products of this exhaustive reporting.

All great reporting comes from digging into a subject deeply. In the past, that had meant a dogged reporter, out in the field, talking to source after source after source. Today, that digging increasingly means a dogged reporter, staring at a computer, looking at line after line after line of data. And if we, as PR pros, can’t do the same, we’ll be left behind on one of the biggest media trends of the next decade.