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Trends in medical searches online: How e-patients use the internet | Pew Internet & American Life Project

42% of all Americans say they know someone helped by online medical advice. 3% say they know someone harmed by it. Fascinating.

Trends In Online Medical Activity

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Copyright 2009 Pew Internet & American Life Project · Site Map · Privacy PolicyThe Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project is one of seven projects that make up the Pew Research Center. The Center is supported by The Pew Charitable Trusts.

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Surprising fact about online donors in Pew Research's latest report

Buried in the latest report from Pew's Internet and American Life project about civic engagement is an amazing gem:

"charitable donors seem more willing than political donors to make large contributions over the internet"

Giving online (and especially large giving online) is an affirmation that a sector has gained enough in the population to conduct large transactions online.  (Pew defines large as $500 or more)

Check out the full report at Pew's website.

The number of people that watched a video online yesterday has doubled since 2006.

The Pew Internet and American Life project released a study showing that daily video sharing website usage has doubled since 2006.  While there are a number of measures in the study I don't find interesting, here's the one that really is:

Check out that bottom blue line.  That's the number of internet users that watched a video on a video sharing website, most likely YouTube, yesterday.

For a communicator, the implications of that are staggering. This means is that if you can produce a video that's good enough (and funny enough) to have people share it*, you have a good shot at reaching a significant part of the 1/5th of the Internet's population within about 24 hours.

According to Miniwatts Marketing Group, your 24 hour video reach audience is almost 50 million people just in North America.  That's a lot of people.  The broadcast networks would be jealous.

This, by the way, is why I cringe when organizations tell me they are starting their own social networking site, or their own photo/video upload sharing hub.  You've got these audiences already aggregated on YouTube and Facebook, why are you trying to do the hard work of competing with them?

* And now for my little Andy Rooney moment

Can we stop using the word "viral" to describe a video, an image, or a song so good people want to pass it around?  Can we just start calling it "good"?  When people say they want to make something "go viral", but don't actually have any budget to make it not suck, I cringe."Viral" is a part of the Internet as old as email.  We pass around stuff that's good, more often than not, that's funny.

Good content is viral content.

The Gawker / NYT article theft debate: how does it measure?

So I came across the big debate from last month about the Washington Post writer accusing Gawker of stealing it's story.  If you're unfamiliar, see this roundup from the New York Times. In short, someone writes a story at the Washington Post about a business coach for companies who don't understand their 'Generation Y' employees.  Gawker excerpted it to make fun of it.  The original author is flattered at first, but then angry that Gawker is making money off a reporter's hard work.

Hyperbolic rhetoric ensues.

So I decided to do a little math.

The original story was 1,500 words.  I counted up the excerpted words in the Gawker story, and even counted a hyphenate as two words, and came up with 177 excerpted words.  Yes, they were quotes.  But still, 177 words.  Gawker excerpted 12% of your story.

Interestingly enough, Gawker's story is 445 words total, which means they wrote 268 words as well, or about 60% of the story.

I'm incapable of finding a well of outrage for excerpting 12% of someone's story, as well as linking back to it to drive more traffic.  What I'm finding is an inappropriate attempt to use a common situation to solve the business model problems of premium information producers in a media environment in which people don't expect to pay for information.  Business model disruptions just don't fit the litigation model we have in this country, where my business is harmed and someone must pay.

Nobody will pay.  Sort of like the great recession made a lot of wealth just evaporate.  The revenue for premium information just evaporated as the Internet expanded.  Criticizing Gawker is misguided.

Your "Oh My God" moment for Facebook

The formula for web success for most organizations (except Internet businesses) has been pretty clear from the beginning:

1. Create compelling content
2. Listen to your readers
3. Repeat

With the advent of YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook, the formula has changed slightly:

1. Create compelling content
2. Post it to lots of different places as/where/how appropriate
3. Listen to your users
4. Repeat

There's a couple of facts that are worth considering with the addition of #2 and especially Facebook:

1. Facebook has 175 million users
2. Half of these users visit the site DAILY
   
3. Facebook is starting to surpass Google as a feeder of traffic
4. Your work on Facebook is not hampered/helped by the arcane arts of Search Engine Optimization.  It's a much better meritocracy than getting to be #1 on an important search term.

You should be spending more of your time on work on Facebook that people would want to pass along.  If you don't have an active project to produce and distribute content on Facebook to drive sales, leads, or donations for your organization, contact me at shabbir@safdar.net.

Data on the Motrin Mom outbreak

Jason Alcorn and I took some time and examined the data around the Motrin Mom outbreak last week.  In case you missed it, Motrin put a video ad up on their website that managed to offend some mothers because they claimed it insulted them for wearing their infants.  As a babywearer myself, (and my wife as well), neither of us were offended, but that's neither here nor there.

The driving force of the conflict was mostly people talking on Twitter, which generated news coverage on a slow day, which caused people on Twitter to discuss it more.  The news coverage was what created the momentum, but the discussion on Twitter is what started it and gave journalists something to write about.

Motrin's brand handled this well.  The quick apology made a story that shouldn't have created lots of coverage evaporate quickly.  There are some lessons, big and small, that you can learn.

Apologies are cheap and worth their value
Motrin apologized and the story, which probably shouldn't have had legs in the first place, evaporated.  You barely heard anything in the news 3 days later, except from web pundits like me.  Take a look at this graph of digg.com traffic voting up one of the original Motrin Mom articles.  It rises and falls with the Eastern to Pacific business hours, and then expires.


People go to search when an issue breaks out
If you had any doubt that you need to pay attention to your search engine profile, data like this graph should put that to rest.  On the 16th and 17th, when the story hit the mainstream press, searches on the phrase "motrin" spiked on Google.  Here's a graph of how people's searches on Motrin (and as a baseline, Tylenol and Aspirin) during the time period in question.


Search engine optimization cannot protect you
In a situation like this, you would hope that having scrubbed and push all the bad things out of your Google results would save you, and that over time, it might become problematic if your crisis continues.

During the 48 hours of coverage, we examined Google's search results on the core brand, "Motrin".  We found that although the results did not reflect the conflict, Google was interspersing search results from news items, which most certainly were tainted.  In fact even today a search on Motrin reveals a news story embedded within the top 10.  Though keeping an eye on your Google results is important, you cannot depend on it to be a firewall in a crisis.



Disclosure: Neither Jason nor I work for Motrin or any other J&J health brands.

Benchmark your 2009-2010 online efforts

Forrester Research recently published a survey about marketers use of different online techniques. Consider these as you plan your 2009 and 2010 budget.  Circle the boxes below that apply to your situation to compare yourself to where other marketers stand.

Very few organizations should be doing all of these and you shouldn’t just start one because “everyone’s doing it”.   That thing your mom taught you about jumping off a bridge with your friends?  It’s good professional advice too.

But if you’re not doing any of them, then you’re probably stalling.  If you’d like to explore which of these tactics would match well with your audience, e-mail me and we’ll discuss what might be right for you in the 2009-2010 budget year, and what you should be planning.

How to use the chart below: Take the tactic on the left and see which of the columns corresponds to your use of it.  In that same box is a percentage of the 300 marketers surveyed that are in the same place as you.

                                                                                                   

Tactic	Used for less than one year	Used for more than one year	Not using, but plan to	Not using, and have no plans to
Regular outbound e-mails	6%	90%	4%	1%
Search marketing (Google, Yahoo!)	14%	71%	9%	6%
Video (either on your site or YouTube)	20%	45%	19%	16%
Podcasts	19%	30%	28%	24%
Blogs: writing or contributing to	21%	27%	31%	21%
Social network (Facebook, MySpace)	21%	19%	36%	23%
User-generated content (user reviews, forums, contributions)	17%	23%	32%	28%
Widgets (small web tools included on other websites with your   content)	17%	12%	34%	37%
Mobile (a mobile site, mobile ads, or text messaging)	12%	16%	15%	67%

Half of all Internet users search daily

Really, I'm like your personal web researcher.  I follow the trends of what's happening so you don't have to.

The Pew Internet and American Life Project tracks how people use the Internet, and this research is crucial.  You should be tuning your budget and your focus as Internet users change their habits.  That's not to say you should spend time on everything, but after certain types of behavior hit a critical mass, you need to focus on it.

Today's wakeup call is about Search.  As in that little box that not only appears on Google and Yahoo, but also WebMD, facebook, and others. It's how people find you when they're interested in your issue, but don't think or know you're the thought leader in the field.

Pew's research shows growing usage of the activity of search.  Here's my summary of their findings:

Half of all Internet users search daily.  Only 60% check their e-mail daily, and only 39% of them check the news daily.  40% of 50-64 year olds search daily.  Most importantly, most of these people have broadband connections at home, and turn to search as their first step in answering a question.

This would be an excellent time to ask yourself the following key questions:

1. Do I know what my Google rank is for the key phrases that describe my organization and the field we work in?
2. Do I have a program designed to maintain or increase this rank?
3. Have I talked to Shabbir about how to accomplish #1 and #2?  (ha ha)

Check out the full report from Pew on the changing behavior of Americans and search.

Chinese Internet users surpass US

The Associated Press reported this last week that China's Internet population (253 million) has passed the United States (225 million).

What's particularly striking about this is the growth potential.  In the US the Pew Internet and American Life Project puts Internet penetration at 71 percent, and growth has been slowing.  In short, people who want to be online are, and the rest aren't that interested.

In China, however, Internet penetration in the general population is just over 19 percent, and analysts expect additional rapid growth in coming years as the Chinese online population completely overtakes anything else on the planet.

Are the over 50-years old on the Internet? Heck, half of them have broadband at home!

If I had a nickel for every time a prospective client told me the 50-and-over set aren't online I would have stopped writing this newsletter long ago and started my second career as a professional poker player years ago.

Now the Pew Internet and American Life Project comes out with data not just about who is online, but who has broadband.  What's the big finding in the report?

Half of Americans between the ages of 50 and 64 have broadband at home.

This is an important development, since this total doesn't include 50+ year olds with dialup, or 50+ year olds with broadband in the workplace who are also online.

We can probably stop worrying about whether or not this segment is online, they are, and they have the capability to waste an hour with YouTube videos, just like them gosh-darned kids.

Read the entire Pew report on broadband penetration here [PDF].