I’m grumpy. This Saturday morning I got up with a cup of coffee and set out to look at my RSS feeds for news on the web. For those of you not familiar with RSS, it’s a RSS is a content delivery vehicle. You could think of RSS as your own personal wire service. I find it incredibly useful to keep up with news on healthcare social media, what’s up with Facebook and Google, and the occasional joke or stupid picture.

The only trouble with RSS is that it creates a firehose of information to digest. Even if you categorize the feeds into different folders and priorities like I do, it’s a lot to manage. If I don’t look it at for 2 or 3 days, it’s easily over a thousand articles.

For the past few years I’ve relied on an incredibly useful little plugin called Postrank. Postrank scores each post in an RSS feed by the relative number of comments, inbound links, mentions on Twitter, saves on Delicious and other social media metrics. So, it became an easy matter to scan through my feeds and pick out the top 10% of articles to look at. It was a great time-saver and a wonderful way to separate the signal from the noise.

Enter Google. Last year Google bought Postrank. They bought it for its other side, which is functionality that show a website publisher the virality and social analytics of its posts. Obviously, that’s very important.

So, today when I turned to look at my RSS feeds the Postrank ratings were gone. As of May 1st Google had ‘sunseted’ Postrank. They have included it in Google analytics where early reports say it’s a great addition. However, they eliminated the user or consumer side of the product where it was tremendously helpful. It was a utility also used by social media analysts like myself to rank bloggers and other influencers in a specific category, similar to Klout.

Sad, sad. I love that the Postrank creators got their payout. But, this is the type of innovation that disappears when the big Borg-like goliaths buy you out. I would have been happy to pay a monthly fee for Postrank, but they never asked me.

Surprisingly, I don’t see a lot of buzz about the sunsetting and need for replacements for the user side of the product. There’s a thread staring on Quora for replacements, so if you have any thoughts that’s a good place to go.

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If you have any doubts on who is in charge of calling the shots on Social Media, stop wondering. It’s Facebook, by size and impact. The platform is in control and the timelines to adapt to change are shortening. Facebook rolled out Timeline to brands on 2/29 and all brand pages will be forced to convert to the new layout if they have not opted in already on 3/30, no exceptions. We had a few months to look at the implementation for individuals, so at least we had a preview of what was coming at us.

There are some fascinating case studies of what brands have done to leverage Timeline, particularly brands with a rich history, such as The New York Times, or Coke. I’ll leave those analyses to others, my concern is what will happen to heavily regulated industries, like pharma. A collection of those other articles is here.

It seems just yesterday that we had to adapt to open commenting on pages (previous blog post Facebook Pharma Earthquake), but the changes today are in some ways more substantial in that they will force brands to truly engage or be sidelined. Take your pick, Timequake or Time Tunnel, there are lots of people who’d like to roll the clock back right now.

I’m going to assume you’re familiar with the most significant changes driven by Timeline, and just lay out the possibilities and issues with each of them (see the articles above for an introduction to these features). So, this is not a post for neewbies.

Cover Photo

Cover photos are the main billboard upon entering any page. For brands with a visual approach they can be a huge plus. Facebook rejects cover pictures that have an overtly promotional motive, such as a call to action, etc. However, a big issue with pharma is fair balance – reasonably similar prominence of risk information along with any claims. Cover pages are a natural location to make this happen. Will Facebook reject covers with disclosure or legalese embedded in the image? For now, Facebook has said, no ISI in the cover photo. [continue reading…]

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Many of us who use Microsoft Outlook at work are stuck with using Outlook Web Access from our personal computers. It’s pretty awful. The interface is primitive, it’s clunky, and don’t even ask me about the address book.

Wouldn’t it be great to access that work email using your favorite email program, maybe with calendars working too? Well, you can.

While Microsoft Exchange has the capability to provide standard protocols like IMAP and/or POP these are frequently disabled in the name of misguided security, leaving Outlook Web Access (OWA) as the only remaining hope. It doesn’t matter whether you’re the CEO or the most junior staff, you’re stuck with it.

One quick tip is to use Internet Explorer with OWA if you can. Microsoft has built in special bells and whistles and the experience is much closer to the Outlook program.  If you’re on a Mac you’re out of luck. Or read on for the good stuff.

All you need is something to connect a mail program with Exchange using standard compliant protocols. DavMail is just such a translator. An ingenious coding project, it works seamlessly and extremely well. Once installed, you can use Thunderbird, Postbox, Sparrow, Apple Mail or even your personal Outlook. Calendars and address books work too.
[continue reading…]

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Yesterday Google made a major revision in its search algorithm  called Search, plus Your World. This change has been called ‘the most radical change ever’ on Search Engine Blogs. Google will now be incorporating data from its social network as well as the public Internet when delivering search results to people.

What this means in practice is that now if you are searching on Google for Diabetes, social media interactions on Twitter, Tumblr, etc, from your contacts will be highly ranked in the search results. So, social media’s ripple effect is about to become much stronger. This will also be a boost to Google+, Google’s Social Network. Since so many people start an Internet session with a search session, and so many people use Google, the impact will be immense.

This change will only occur in English on Google.com. Posts that are not ‘public’ on Facebook will not be picked up by Google. Here is Google’s blog post on the change.

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Over the holidays, and without fanfare, the FDA issued Draft Guidance for Responding to Unsolicited Requests for Off-Label Information. The title of the guidance is a little deceptive in that within the document lies some draft guidance on dealing with social media in the form of ‘public’ platforms where some of this conversation may take place. The guidance doesn’t give us a road map for working with social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, but it is progress. The most noteworthy element is that unsolicited public inquiries for off-label information, as an example in YouTube comments for a pharma YouTube channel, should only get medical affairs contact information as a response.

The guidance came out while everyone was still digesting their Christmas dinner and it flew right under the radar of all the pharma Twitterati during the lull between Christmas and New Years. People returning to their offices in January found it in their inbox and panicked that the FDA has said something, anything, about social media. Digital agency leads scrambled to produce a POV on the guidance and the blogs began (email me if you want my POV).

There are now many, many interpretations and analyses out there, and Fabio Gratton did a great job of collecting them into a Storify stream listing all of the articles from media, agencies, pharma companies, and law firms. Another great tool was created by Jon Richman of Dose of Digital fame – this one is a flowchart for deciphering the sometimes tangled logic in the guideline. I love the sense of humor.

The FDA has some sharp people on their staff that clearly understand social media. The original request for response on social media (over two years ago, now) demonstrated a strong grasp of the issues. Therefore, it’s surprising that the FDA does not address moderation in the draft guidance. Moderation may be used to pre-review comments prior to public posting on platforms managed by companies.  It is possible using moderation tools to prohibit posting of off-label comments entirely and to respond to an inquiry privately without it ever being seen by the public.

We’ll see if 2012 is the year to finally see some guidelines.

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