Archive | October, 2011
Oct 31st 2011 

The Right Way to Use the Facebook Like Button

This has annoyed me for a long time, so I’m finally going to fix this for the entire world once and for all.

You’ve probably all found yourself on a Facebook page and have seen something like this:

(Try it out on the Oreo page for yourself).

What’s annoying about this? Rather than including a Like button in the tab, they point you to the button at the top of the Page. Sometimes this is more egregious like in the case of BMW’s Page.

From a design standpoint, I don’t know what’s visually less appealing than a giant arrow jutting out of your Page. What’s more, it’s not necessary. It’s possible to embed a Like button that does the same thing as the button on the top of the Page right into your tab content. No giant arrow necessary. Read More…

Oct 24th 2011 

Visualizing Pharma’s Use of Social Media

A while back, I got a note from Leigh Householder (@leighhouse) who had the idea to take the Pharma and Healthcare Social Media Wiki and make it much more visual so people could appreciate just how much the pharma industry has dove into social media. Since infographics are all the rage these days, I gave her the go ahead. A few iterations later and her team at the IQ Lab at GSW developed this simple, yet elegant (I think) way to visualize pharma’s participation in social media. Rather than a bunch of confusing stats, Leigh’s team took a page (literally) from each of the existing 265 pharma social media campaigns and put them into a great looking collage.

If you’d like to get a slightly larger version than the one above, then click this link. If you want a full-size, poster-worthy version (42MB), then click here.

So, now when people question whether or not pharma is really using social media and you don’t think they’ll look at any of the 700+ examples of healthcare social media found on the Pharma and Healthcare Social Media Wiki, you can simply give them a copy of the poster and let them figure it out from there.

Thanks to Leigh and her team for putting this together.

Oct 11th 2011 

Using the New Facebook Insights to Improve Your Page

In case you haven’t heard, Facebook has updated its platform once again. If you want to catch up on all the new features and our point of view on what they all mean for marketing on Facebook, then I invite you to download my company’s point of view on the subject: Major Facebook Changes and What They Mean for Your Brand (919 downloads). I’ve also just written two other posts about how these changes might impact healthcare. You can check them out here and here. Today’s post will be the final post in this series about the new Facebook Page updates.

This post is going to cover one very specific change to Facebook that’s definitely a positive. I’m talking about a big upgrade to Facebook Insights, which contains all the performance data you need about your Page. All Page admins should now have access to this information. The image at the top of this post (click to enlarge it) shows you what the main Insights page now looks like. Also, you can see that it is accessible in the left column of the page, which shows all of your Page’s tabs. The Insights tab is only visible to admins.
Read More…

Oct 10th 2011 

Two Simple Ways Pharma Can Use the New Facebook Features

Let’s be clear on the title of this post. The key word is “MIGHT.” I put it in all caps hoping everyone would notice. I plan to share some more details on some of the new Facebook features that have been released (or will be shortly) and how these could be used in healthcare including by pharma companies. However, I’m not quite saying to run out and leverage these features or do exactly what I will describe. It still has to make sense. I’ll talk more about that in the rest of the post.

One more caveat…I’m not saying that Facebook is or will become some healthcare information destination (quite the opposite actually). However, it will be where more people look to gather advice from trusted friends just like they do now in real life whether in person or via, say, telephone. We often turn to friends for medical advice especially when that friend has personal experience with a particular condition. There’s nothing wrong with that. It’s part of the normal research process. This advice needs to be combined with other sources (especially a physician) to come up with a final decision. So, again, Facebook isn’t a replacement for other sources, but could be an additional source providing a very specific bit of information into the decision making process. For all of you thinking about commenting that Facebook shouldn’t be a healthcare information source, those last few lines are for you.

Onto the good stuff…

First, as you probably have heard or noticed, Facebook recently rolled out a bunch of changes to its platform. Some more are coming soon. I just wrote a post about how one of these coming features, called Timeline, might actually make in impact on healthcare. Before moving forward, I’m going to quickly skim over some of the changes and won’t go into a lot of detail about how these changes work or how they might impact brands and companies who use Facebook. If you want to catch up on all the new features and our point of view on what they all mean for marketing on Facebook, then I’ll invite you to download my company’s point of view on the subject: Major Facebook Changes and What They Mean for Your Brand (919 downloads).
Read More…

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