Digital Commuting Rule of 2-1-1

Every morning I ride the NYC subway from my home to the CementBloc office in Manhattan.   Needing things to do, I have taken to conducting an informal poll of everyone in the subway car.  the poll is observational, and I am categorizing people based on how digital they are on their morning commute:

A)  Digital: Using some sort of electronic device:  smartphone, tablet, even an MP3 player with headphones

B) Analogue:  Reading a newspaper or a book, or a magazine.

C) Totally disconnected:  taking a nap, speaking with a neighbor, or thinking idly.

The typical results of my poll:  Roughly,   (A) is 50%, (B) is 25%, (C) is 25%

By the way, if you are like me, with the newspaper (Wall St Journal) and the smartphone (iPhone) checking email and music concurrently, ou get assigned to the Digital

In other words, the ratio is 2-1-1.  Of course, this depends on the audience and the time of year.  I find that around 7:30 am or 8:00 am the 2-1-1 holds due to students and business commuters that need to stay connected.  In summertime or midday if I run late, a different demographic takes over and you can get more like a 1-1-1 or a 1-1-2.

What does this mean for advertisers who are seeking CRM acquisition prospects?  You may have a captive audience if you can get mobile.  

Patients online finding, rating, scheduling doctors

Two websites that empower patients like never before have really taken off. 

ZocDoc lets patients schedule appointments with physicians, by linking directly to their office  scheduling systems.

HealthGrades enables patients to find a specialist near them, and rate the experience afterwords.

All about extending the convenience and immediacy of healthcare to patients, while providing access and promotion to talented capable physicians. 

Both are available across a growing number of major metropolitan areas, going national and perhaps beyond.

Think of this as a new entry channel for CRM systems.  Additionally in the future there should be a chance  to really perform analytics and understand the health consumption patterns across the country, by specialty.

Going organic: customers, markets, and analytics

It is fascinating to think about the depth of data and connections that one can find when focusing on a particular topic. Take "organic" or "all natural" My colleague Elizabeth Elfenbein and I wrote a Mediapost article with stats on organic trends in the USA. What seemed amorphous is actually quite organzed and is named: Lifestyle of Health and Sustainability. The trend is of continual growth.

We also brought up the perennial nature of organic online behavior, which tends to be of higher quality than promotion responses.   This is because organic visitors to web sites usually have already gathered some other information and are motivated to learn more.

We were also brought into the community of the National Marketing Institute, who has done significant research in this area. They contacted us directly with their expertise. Lesson learned: explore a research project in depth, and reach out to the experts.

Lessons from the ePharma summit

It was a pleasure to participate this month in the ePharma summit in New York, giving a lecture entitled, "Transform Your Organization through Interactive Selling." The messages of gearing your whole organization for iPad selling, segmented messaging and measurement were quite resonant.
Please feel free to contact me for a copy of this presentation.

There were other lessons as well.

* Mobile pharma applications are increasingly common, and vary from text messaging to full scale applications.

* Social media presence in pharma remains predominantly corporate, but content is reaching out to consumer submissions.

* Professional non-personal and multi-channel promotion has become manstream, and solutions are proliferating.

All in all, a dynamic marketplace for sure. Keep reading here for the latest. Or read The Bloc's latest on Convergent Times.

New Year's Resolution: Pilot innovative analytics

With the new year coming, companies are thinking fresh regarding innovative programs they will be running. Examples may be:

* multichannel marketing,
* digital interactive sales aids on iPads, perhaps with segmentation,
* social media presences, or
* online portals or communities.

With these efforts and the appropriate measurement planning, will come innovative data sources for your companies. Your new year's resolution can be: let's explore analytics for these new data sources, learn how to analyze, and discover what trends there may be.

The right analytics partner can help in translating your business objectives into analytics frameworks. Your partner or staff can also determine the approriate exploratory analytics software. The image posted here is one example of a data visualization and dashboarding tool called Spotfire, of which I have found valuable during yeras of use for detecting trends and bookmarking insights. In addition, I remain a frequent user of Netbase for social media, SAS products for data cleaning and statistics, and Angoss data mining software. There are more tools, a great resource to find them is KD Nuggets.

So, don't wait, make it your resolution to dive in and mine those behaviors.

Rise in use of QR Print to Online Codes

hSince I last blogged about these 2-D print  "action codes,"  especially QR codes, in February, boy has there been a dramatic increase in their usage.  Take a look at the exponential increase in 2-D action codes in magazines:  over 500 in the month of September, as Mediapost quoted a study by NellyMoser.

QR codes have the highest market share of these at 60%.
The codes are mostly in consumer magazines, and mostly in advertisements.  Healthcare specifically is not cited.

 Thanks to the comment (below)  by reader Ardash K, we can also see there has been a dramatic rise in Google searchers for QR codes.

This shows the mainstream exposure to certain core demographics, and that is a trend that consumer healthcare marketers should realize is at least worth a test.

Long term consistency: harder than it looks

There has been lots of attention in the USA this past week spent on Derek Jeter of the Yankees getting his 3,000th hit. This is a measure of an expert artisan performing well at his draft for over 15 years, a model of consistency. Even as the game has evolved around him, and some competitors changed.

What does consistency mean in analytics? It means continually providing valuable consulting and insights, even as the promotional channels and the hardware platforms evolve. Even as the clients become more cost conscious than ever, and even as the marketplace for analytic services becomes more competitive. Consistency also means staying ahead of the curve on the prevailing technology trends,and the newest data sources and software tools.

Yet, just like a base hit to the opposite field, some principles of analytics endure: synthesize the right data, reduce the dimensionality, show the insights that are directly linked to business decisions and actions.

Invest a Bit to Measure

When investing millions in a new major promotional campaign, or a new selling technology, think about this: how will you be accountable for that investment? How will you know if that investment in advertising, communications, and technology is actually paying off? In today's corporate environment, answering those questions is paramount.

The Dutch physicist Heike Kamerlingh Onnes (1853-1926) cleverly remarked in rhyme: "Door Meten tot Weten:" Through Measurement is Knoweldge.

Yet I often see clients, and agencies, omit the small proportion of the budget required to measure, which insures understanding of success, and the ability to optimize and improve. I would say 8% to 10% is a good minimal requirement benchmark for a measurement budget -- others would go much higher -- see this ClickZ point of view.

What does measurement look like? Especially with new technologies like multichannel, closed loop marketing, RM, iPads, QR codes, etc?

Ultimately, you want linkage between your promotional investments and incremental sales.

However, there are other critical evaluations that should be performed, on how the marketplace is behaving and how perceptions are being changed. Some call this "engagement." I like to think of it as: "are my stakeholders behaving the way I intended?"

Measurement is in large part the comparison of actual behaviors to what you expected when you set up your mutli-channel program, or your sales force automation system. Are the sales reps detailing as you intended? Are the physicians or consumers interacting with the media you have placed? Is navigation on websites achieving to goals that move your brand?

Therefore, when investing in promotional platforms, give some thought as to the expected marketplace experiences. And save some funds for measurment to confirm or optimize your plans.

Healthcare is Digital and Pervasive

This Tuesday our firm The CementBloc hosted an event during New York's Internet Week demonstrating multi-channel solutions in the Health and Wellness Sector. We received an impressive response of over 100 registrants, and we showed four waves of attendees through our offices. The context was a patient journey for a prospective traveler to the Far East, and how that consumer learned about all of the required vaccinations from web, mobile, office materials, EMail, and so on. Furthermore, healthcare professionals, be they primary care physicians or travel clinic specialists, hear about vaccine updates via professional portals, Epocrates, and ipad tablets from their pharmaceutical sales representatives.

For some first hand accounts of this exhibit, please see Yahoo and also Mediapost. For an impact on how this affected TheBloc and beyond, see My Life as a Focus Group.

Communications in healthcare can only be impactful when they can reach the target audiences where they gathering informations and making decisions. By necessity, that means placing portable information assets at various places: online, within communities, in office, (E)mail, out of doors, and in various media: print, digital, and video. The days of building monolithic websites with many bells and whistles is drawing to a close. Instead, one must design an interconnected distributed system that collectively accomplishes CRM or PRM.

Furthermore, that means working in medical communications is an exciting place to be.

Convergent branding: hitting the spot.

When I was studying for my math major at MIT, I learned over and over theorems about convergence: how a sequence of numbers gets arbitrarily ever closer to a target. The same concept holds in multi-dimensional space, like in the figure to the left: from all directions, follow the trend and get to the same point.

At The CementBloc, we also talk about convergent branding. From whatever channel a consumer, healthcare professional, or payer comes from, they experience the brand in the same consistent way. Ironically, this does not mean that all of your marketing is located at one point in space. Quite the contrary, the convergence is to the customer, wherever the customer goes, in whatever channel, that is where you place the consistent message.

This has implications for promotional planning. Say you have an audience of healthcare specialists, or consumer caregivers, with a high-volume central portal or community. Then make that favored location part of your convergent messaging plan. But in a subtle way. If you seem promotional, you steer the sequence off course; rather, continue the pattern, and let your true message flow within the direction of that active customer destination.

Heavy stuff? Want to find out more? Make a comment or send an email.

New Book and Special Discount

Very exciting! After over a year of researching, writing, editing, proofreading, and the patient support of so many, we are just one month away until the new book is available. Printed books to be out early March; E-books in April.

Whether you are a practitioner of CRM or PRM, a healthcare marketer, or a university instructor, there should be something in this book for you. It is intended as both a course and a reference that pulls it all together in Healthcare RM.

Come talk to me with any questions or interest. This author would be happy to give a guest lecture as well.

Pre-orders can be made now, and below is a special 35% off discount offer valid through March 31st:


Discount 35% off new book Healthcare Relationship Marketing at Gower Press website Enter code G1DLT35 at checkout

Book description below:

Healthcare Relationship Marketing: Strategy, Design and Measurement


Ira J. Haimowitz, Ph.D


In recent years there have been dramatic changes in the pharmaceutical promotional landscape, affecting both consumers and healthcare professionals. One consequence of these dynamics is the need for pharmaceutical companies to plan new kinds of dialogue and relationships with their stakeholders. The evolution has been from mass-channel "push" marketing to two-way, multi-channel relationship marketing. Targeted Emails, webinars, mobile messages, and social networks are expanding in usage.

This book is a practical overview and resource guide for the design and measurement of pharmaceutical relationship marketing (RM) programs. There are descriptions of each aspect of pharmaceutical RM design and measurement, including a running case study with follow-up exercises. The author has also conducted interviews from several pharmaceutical marketing industry experts, each having 15 years or more of working healthcare RM knowledge, and each speaking on their specific specialities.

For newcomers to healthcare marketing, this book can serve as a foundation and introduction that provides framework, details, and examples of both relationship marketing designs and associated measurement disciplines. Healthcare Relationship Marketing will also be valuable to readers currently working in pharmaceutical marketing or sales who may not have exposure to the particular disciplines of relationship marketing and direct response measurement and optimization. Even for the experienced practitioner this will serve as a convenient reference that pulls together all of the program components and measurement frameworks within a single book. This book may also serve as a textbook within a university course in marketing, or a pharmaceutical business program.


Contents: Preface; Healthcare trends and relationship marketing's role; Foundations of relationship marketing; Discovery: situation assessment; Strategy: planning the relationship marketing program; Analytics planning for relationship marketing; Execution: placing in the marketplace; Measurement of healthcare relationship marketing programs; Optimization and the new cycle; Conclusions and the future; Appendix; Bibliography; Index.

2-D "QR" bar codes

There has been an acceleration of awareness and usage of QR (Quick Response) 2 dimensional bar codes over the past year. A current article in the trade publication CRM Magazine has a QR code overview. This technology is described as an innovative gamble that marketers are taking; it is a low budget allocation, and small but growing awareness by consumers, and readability by smartphone apps. There is even a running blog about 2-D bar codes with very active community postings, including about which mobile phone bar code readers are effective.

A good overview of QR codes and their history is in Wikipedia; they started in auto manufacturing for tracking parts and shipments. Now, an active growth area in QR code usage is in commercial sales and marketing applications.

For an array of pharmaceutical and healthcare advertisements using QR codes, see this link in AdPharm.

At The Bloc we have healthcare clients investigating QR codes for RM related purposes. The primary reason is consumer acquisition, driving from printed offline pieces to a registration website or a promotional offer. The QR codes may in principle be on:

* print ads

* packaging

* patient brochures

* outdoor advertising

All of these are typically a challenge to measure accurately, particularly in a direct response way. As consumer usage of QR codes grows, they may serve as a replacement for vanity URLs which are not always remembered.

Hard data on response rates for QR codes is not standardized yet, but that may be forthcoming within a year or two. In the meantime, this appears a worthwhile experimental healthcare CRM acquisition tactic.

Twitter, my second business news channel

A Twitter account can serve multiple purposes, but it is best not to mix them. Some people view Twitter as a way to keep track of the latest whereabouts and activities of friends. Others, including myself, find it a terrific, focused continual news source.

I am fairly selective on who I follow on Twitter, and on what I tweet about. I keep it to business and professional interests. If you would like to see who I follow on Twitter, check it out.

The categories include Analytics areas like:
BI Analytics News

Analytic Bridge, by Vincent Granville

KDNuggets, by Gregory Piatetsky Shapiro

and Health Topics like:

Dr. Jenny K

New York Times Health

and advertising news such as AdTech, Ad Age, and Agency Spy
There are also a few pharmaceutical companies that tweet, and I follow some, and try to keep pace.

Finally, there are like minded professionals I respect for passing along good news.

Why is this my second favorite professional news source, after The Wall St Journal? Because the social network is sending my way filtered content rapidly; like a marketplace of filtering. My network of colleagues and sources has interests that overlap mine, but do not exactly duplicate. They re-tweet breaking topics that I find fascinating, and I try to reciprocate when I can. So I am exposed to news items and trends that are aligned with my interests.

I suppose RSS Feeds can accomplish the same thing, but Twitter also enables the multi-way, networked interaction. I do not check Twitter often, maybe once every other day. But that's enough for me to keep track of the industry and professional trends I care about.

Managing display and search simulatneously

An interesting new research study by Efficient Frontier and Forrester Consulting showed that digital marketers are struggling with managing integrated search and display campaigns.

I have witnessed these struggles on my own as a pharmaceutical manufacturer employee, and see it now in my clients, as we deliver communications and we partner with media companies.

Some possible underlying reasons for the struggle

* Media companies are often conglomerates, and have acquired distinct and separate sub-agencies that handle search from the people who handle banner placement.

* The two tactics have fundamentally different objectives: search is for mid to bottom of funnel consumers that are expressing an interest in finding out more or in making a transaction. Banners are for upper funnel consumers, where you catch them by surprise in their reading other web pages, and hope your visual branding and offer may be appealing to warrant an interaction or a click.

* You cannot use impressions for both in the same way. Search text boxes do not grab the same share of attention as banner ads do.

* Therefore click through rates mean slightly different things.

* Interestingly, search click through rates are much higher than banner click through rates, since the consumer is more interested in the results. This despite the over-inflated impressions.

Nonetheless, a good marketing agency or media company should explain the relevant value of each of these digital channels, as they relate to the client's brand goals.

Automated speech processing: commercial state of the art

I have always been fascinated by progress in the area of automated speech processing, since my days as a Master's student at the University of Cambridge in Computer Speech and Language Processing and I spent time with Professor Steve Young at the Cambridge University Machine Intelligence Laboratory.

Thus it was with great interest and pleasure that I read this review of the state of the art of commercial speech processing systems within Scientific American earlier this month. Like many high tech fields, there have been mergers and convergence in the suppliers, to the leader Nuance Communications. Extensive pre-training is no longer required. General listening is now possible in structured sub-languages and categories. Plus, the commercial applications have become widespread, especially related to phone interfaces.

Why is this relevant for healthcare relationship marketing. Possible applications include:

* Acquisition and registration into programs via mobile smartphones, for either patients or professionals.

* Automated dictation transcription processing of the highly structured clinical reports that physicians issue after seeing patients.

* speech to text social network inputs as a convenience, or for the visually impaired.

* processing call center transcripts for marketing intelligence.

* insert your brainstorm here.

Tracking privacy in online advertising

The climate is really shifting in online advertising the past few months. There is heightened awareness from the press on what behavioral information that digital advertisers are collecting. The government is responding:
the Federal Trade Commission has recommended universal “do not track” mechanism that would allow consumers to opt-out of the monitoring systems that follow users’ movements from site to site. For a gooda nalysis on the FTC ruling, see the Privacy Law blog article.

In addition, the leading web browser company, Microsoft, has announced that
the new Internet Explorer browser (IE9) –due out next year will include a “tracking protection” feature that allows users to limit third party data requests.

Meanwhile, online advertisers are trying to insure they are able to deliver effective ads, educating the public on the benefits. See the Wall St Journal blog on their planned campaign.

What are the consequences of increased privacy tools available to consumers? A Forbes magazine blogger notes that this will require marketers to be more intelligent and persuasive with messaging, and not merely rely on consumer background data stored in cookies.

I would say there is another consequence to online advertising and media placement: the premium will be contextual ad placement on relevant content areas, as opposed to websites merely statistically correlated with the advertiser's website.

One final thought ... how many consumers will take advantage of these new privacy features? There has been a mix the past few years.
The "do not call" consumer list gained a fairly high response once it came out. Email span opt out rates can get as high as 10 percent or more on a campaign, showing positive momentum. On the professional side, at first Physician "AMA opt out" of Rx tracking, on the other hand, was fiarly low at the start.

Uptake on privacy tool adoption will depend on publicity, ease of adoption, and the consumer mindset.

Display banner click rates - falling, but relevant?

A recent article in eMarketer cites a Mediamind study on banner response rates shows a decreasing average annual banner click through rate over the past three years: from .12 percent in 2007 to .09 percent in 2010.

For those not used to reading small banner CTR numbers, what does this figure mean: if you put a banner campaign out in the consumer world, then for each million impressions - per million - then 900 people would click through to your website. Note that if you are running and acquisition campaign and have a great website rate of 10% signups, then your million exposures get you 90 acquired leads.

Thus banners for consumer RM acquisition are, on the surface, not as effective a source as they used to be. True? Is it still a wise choice? That depends on the cost you pay, measured as cost per "lead". You might think of a lead as a website visitor, but really you should get as close to "purchase" as possible.

The study claims that viewers of banners are more likely to purchase than the average person.
However, keep in mind that since banners target by demographics, geographics, and past website viewing behavior, this targeting effect is expected. Also, people rarely view banners in isolation, but as part of a combined media campaign.


To download this report and see the details, click here

The more I experience banner campaigns in pharma CRM, the more I feel that banners are best thought of as brand awareness advertising to reach people near the top of the funnel. Like magazines and billboards, but usually cheaper. Success for banner campaigns is about placement to target audience, and cost efficiencies.

Cost per acquisition buys do exist. However, in healthcare and pharma, the question remains as to whether they can acquire enough.

Thankful for an Astonishing Age

Thanksgiving is a day when we all can be thankful just for health and family. Yet since I was a boy I've always admired sports columnists on this day who write about being thankful for professional reasons: athletes who are good leaders and exhibit sportsmanship, inspiring stories, etc. As I reflect on Healthcare Relationship Marketing, here are some reasons to be thankful for professionally in this revolutionary age:

* The astonishing era of new drug development we live in. Thanks to genomics, stem cell research, and other technologies, diseases once intractable are gradualy becoming dissected and understood, and innovative medicines are extending lifespans and their quailty. See this MIT Technology Review index for a few examples of the cutting edge. Or start at The National Cancer Institute and see the wide range of clinical trials.

* The multi-channel revolution in promotion to both consumers and professionals. No longer is it merely print and TV to consumers, and sales forces and congresses to professionals. There are alternative tactics that can be rapidly developed, orchestrated according to designed experiences, tested, and measured for success.

* The remarkable acceleration of data mining and visualization software tools with gradual learning curves. See KD Nuggets for a great software index. Gosh, in graduate school I wrote my own LISP code, and then I thought SAS and S-Plus were transformative. Now it's revolutionary just being able to install a shrink wrapped software and dive right into clustering, decision trees, multivariate modeling, or 3-D trellised scatter plots. Unbelievable.


* Search engines, around since Archie and Veronica of the early 1990s, then Excite and Ask Jeeves of the mid to late 1990s, to today's Google dominance, Bing challenge and embedded search in online portals. Gives the masses access to critical health information, and delivers a way for mid-funnel interested parties to reach their health seeking goals.


* Social media, that is giving people with serious medical conditions access to clinical trial and treatment information critical to their health in ways faster than ever. Could Patients Like Me have existed ten years ago? Of course, caveat emptor, not all news in the social frontier is accurate; still see a physician for treatment. But social media helps you know which specialists to see and how to discuss health topics.

* This transformation of the publishing world, where E-books enable wider and greener distribution of traditional edited tomes (mine included, see forthcoming book and an online book seller ), and blogs like this one can spread readership virally around the world in a loose meritocracy.

* Most appreciative to forward thinking marketing and sales clients who are willing to push the envelope of their professions in order to better serve patients and healthcare professionals.

Advertising's future in the digital world

An interesting article this week in FastCompany about how digital is transforming the advertising industry. The perceptions are changing about traditional notions of "agencies of record," and marketing clients need to have digital, traditional, mobile all in place for consumer, professional, and payer to effectively launch a campaign.

How can this be achieved in the most nimble and cost effective way: some may say
via networks and sub-networks of conflict shops each with their own niche and specialty. Our CementBloc solution is a different: a single convergent agency across disciplines and customer segments, in one shop. With a strong campaign management group to insure the components and channels are working together, and with a multi-faceted analytics team to measure the synergistic effect across segments and channels.

Moms on Social Media -- Behavior Segments

I've worked on a variety of consumer social media monitoring analyses across therapeutic categories. When analyzing the source of consumer posts, there is one commonality: mothers networks. Conversations on allergy, immunization, nutrition, diapers, cosmetics, and a host of other health topics are being talked about on major Moms' social networks. After Facebook and Twitter, the next leading source is often from Moms.
There are plenty of communities, have been for years, and they keep growing. Here is one search result which leads to indexes of Mom social sites.

Thus, it was fascinating to find this recent article in the latest print edition of Quirk's Marketing Research Review, a great synethsis of practical research results. (see the online portal).

The article summarized the BabyCenter 2010 Mom Social Influencer Report. Definitely worth a read if you are marketing in a health category where mothers are a core segement.

The emphasis is on influence, and breakouts are by segment. Take a read, and learn about:

Influencers are:

* Field Experts: Young, stay at home, 8% of Moms, 33% of influence

* Lifecasters: Lifecasters, tell everything online, 8% of Moms, 34% of influence

* Pros: Gen-X Moms, sharing expertise and advice, just 2% of Moms, but a high index at 11% influence

The influenced are:

* Butterflies: Young professionals, self-confident, online to socialize; 16% of Moms, 7% of influence

* The Audience: online to listen, 66% of Moms.

Essentially the splits are based on generation, educator vs listener, and how much social media is within your life's fabric. Field Experts and Lifecasters are large and disproportionately influential, in sharing their experience, and also recommending brands they favor. Pareto's 80/20 rule also holds: according to the segmentation and analysis: "18% of social moms wield 78% of the overall influence." Most are learning from the hard core bloggers, posters, and stay at home enthusiastis.