The inspiration for this post came when someone alerted me (and the rest of their Twitter followers) to Google’s NGRAM service. This allows the user to see on a graph the incidence of specific words and phrases that have been included in books over time since around 1600!

After a few minutes of messing around with various keywords, I reverted to a little obsession that I have with a very modern problem; obesity. The ‘obesity’ keyword in turn was probably triggered by the recent news that the UK is now the proud home to the largest men and women in Europe.

Using the tool, I found that over the last twenty years or so the incidence of the words ‘obesity’ and ‘malnutrition’ (although extraordinarily not mutually incompatible) in books published have diverged. You can see the graph below.

As society has stopped worrying about food availability due to improvements in distribution, longevity and of course the ability to pay for it, we seem to have gotten a little carried away and forgotten to stop eating.  Obviously the reasons are complicated and numerous, ranging from basic accessibility, laziness, evil trans fats through to psychological issues. But, whatever the reasons, the results are pretty sad with ramifications to society as a whole and our over-stretched health systems.

So, what’s this got to do with digital? Well there are loads of connections between obesity and subsequent health complications and the possibilities for digital platforms to help improve our health, through understanding and action, will without doubt become more and more important.

Colorectal cancer is just one of the diseases which has strong links with over-eating, so we’ve produced a nice little infographic that includes some key facts (taken from sources found in Google, obviously) about it – see below.  The key take-away is that everyone can take measures to reduce the potential of suffering from it through exercise and healthy eating.  But then all health advice does come back to eating sensibly and exercising, doesn’t it?

This often repeated advice, however, doesn’t seem to be getting through though.  Infographics, least of all ones released via our blog aren’t going to change opinions, but wide-ranging effective communication does need to be developed.  Perhaps, instead, there needs to be some sort of incentive for people who don’t seem to understand, or even be able to connect fast-foods and unhealthy eating with the effects on their bodies?

Perhaps governments, or other private initiatives could ‘gamify’ the process?  We could be rewarded for eating healthily somehow in return for food, gas, electricity, or other essentials?  A little short term gain is needed in order to bring about long term change for us whilst we are still dominated by our lizard brains that can’t resist short term reward.  Perhaps all food retailers should be co-opted into issuing a modern version of green stamps that ‘players’ can redeem for other essentials when selecting the ‘right’ purchases.

We should all be encouraged to grow fruit and vegetables and become more self-sufficient anyway.  I think I’m right in saying that houses built in Victorian England included a fruit tree in the garden to help encourage healthy eating (and freely available).  In these austere times it probably not a bad idea to become a little more self-sufficient, but add some competition to it to encourage greater volumes of natural produce being grown, consumed or even traded along with exercise sessions completed.

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Let’s start with an old style disclaimer from NovoMedLink. It’s over a transparent background, and gives you 5 options to choose from. In our experience, sites that use this type of disclaimer tend to have high bounce rates and low engagement levels. If you were new to the site, would you take the time to fill this out? It does have clear direction for patients and non-US healthcare professionals, but doesn’t state that the site is for US healthcare professionals.

Now, let’s look at Amgen Oncology, which requires a region choice to progress onto their site. Great idea, but the language is a bit confusing for some. The international site says “this website is intended for healthcare professionals practicing outside the United States”, which is clear and well worded, but the US option just states it is for residents, not patients or professionals. That’s not so clear, and when you click it becomes obvious that the US site is for HCPs as well. So, a good idea, but the language needs cleaning up a bit, and also there needs to be an option of some kind for patients who’ve landed here.

Novartis Oncology comes much closer to hitting the mark. Next to the “Welcome” message, it clearly states it is a Global Site not intended for US residents. It should ideally have a link to the site for US residents in this area as well. In the primary navigation, you have clear options for patients and caregivers, and for healthcare professionals. There are no barriers to the site, so theoretically patients can see things like the pipeline and obviously prescription drug news which is on the home page. To some people, this may be a grey area, but it is intent that matters in the ABPI code of conduct, and if a patient really wants to see your pipeline and HCP information, a few disclaimer clicks is unlikely to stop them.

The Pipeline page does have additional disclaimers at the bottom. These are necessary for legal reasons, but we doubt they are widely read. The product pages also have disclaimers under each product description, and these are much more visible.

Disclaimers on websites are moving towards providing clarity, and addressing the needs of patients and professionals. This is good user experience for everyone, and also best practice for the industry. No matter what page you land or whether you came from an email, a search result, a social network, forum or community, you should be able to easily determine if the information is meant for you, and if not, then there should be clear direction for you to find the site or information you need.

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As of Tuesday, Google+ has launched branded pages. Given that they appear to be very similar to the ones on Facebook, numerous bloggers have criticised the new feature for being unoriginal. Nevertheless, a number of companies (including Nitro!) have decided to see for themselves how they could utilise this new social media channel. After using the page for a couple of days, we have spotted a number of advantages that Google+ has over Facebook that pharma brands can really embrace.

While it is unlikely that Google+ will eventually become a serious rival of Facebook, for pharma, Google+ can be of real value for a number of reasons:

1)      Privacy: A key difference between Facebook and Google+ is Google’s so called ‘Circles’. This feature addresses some key privacy concerns that Facebook has so far failed to tackle. These Circles allow brands to exercise control over what content is being shared with whom. What this means for pharma brands is that they can now reach out to specific interest groups by having separate patient/HCP circles for instance and thereby, they can easily block people from seeing certain pieces of content.

2)      ‘No Promotion – No Problem’: At present, Google+ does not allow promotions on pages. The content policy for Google+ Pages states that “you may not run contests, sweepstakers, offers, coupons or other such promotions directly on your Google+ page”. For many industries, this is devastating news, but for obvious reasons, pharma is not affected by this policy and does not have to worry about having their pages labelled as ‘uninteresting’ compared to other brands.

3)      Hangouts: A ‘Hangout’ is essentially a group video chat, which is a truly unique feature to Google+. A company could host a ‘Hangout’ with their customers where they get to ask questions about products and services. Pharma could utilise this feature to keep key opinion leaders up to date on industry developments or use it as Q&A sessions for healthcare professionals.

4)    SEO benefits: While this benefit is not unique to pharma brands, it is nevertheless worth mentioning. Google+ pages are factored into Google search results and there is also a recently launched ‘direct connect’ search feature where by typing “+” ahead of a search, visitors can go directly to your page.

5)      A potentially more reliable alternative to Facebook?: In August, Facebook’s new ‘no comment’ regulation has caused quite a stir in the pharma industry. By banning pages that do not allow comments from visitors, a number of pharma brands decided to quit Facebook altogether. Facebook has thereby proved to be a rather unpredictable platform and many pharma marketing professionals have come to hope that Google+ will offer a reliable alternative.

Will Google+ become the social platform of choice for pharma brands or is it going to become just another unexplored territory? Let us know what you think by commenting below.

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Real-time (beta)

This report gives you an idea of what is happening on your site right now. It gets interesting if you have a website that has high traffic volume. Also, you will easily benefit from this report if you are running a social media campaign or a TV campaign. You will be able to find out how quickly users react to your Facebook page update, a tweet, or a TV ad and get the first impression on how effective a campaign is to engage users.  This video by Darren from problogger has given a great demonstration on the Real-time feature.

Improved custom reports

One of the first changes I noticed on the new Analytics was the filter feature in the custom reports. Clients often request reports on the performance of a specific event/product. The new Analytics custom reports have made reporting on a specific page or an event very handy. Below example is a report which shows the client the performance of one of the events called Buy Submit. If I were using the old GA, it would take me a while to show the client how to set up the report on their profile and how to find the statistics. Using the custom report filter, this kind of report can be easily presented to clients.

In addition, you could add multiple filters to show a more detailed report.

Visualized user path

Google is said to be rolling the visitors flow report and the goal flow at the moment. This example on the GA blog looks really cool.

Basically, the visitors flow report turns user journey into a graph with various nodes. It gives you a clear idea of the most popular path and how many people drop off in different stages. In terms of the goal flow report, it provides an excellent graph that details the goal funnel. GA users can define key steps of a goal. I can’t wait to use these report as they will improve the current funnel/path analysis significantly.

There are a lot more new features (E.g. event goals) in the new Analytics. If you are interested in exploring more, the GA official blog has series of blog posts which feature the new Analytics.

What is your favourite report/feature of the new Google Analytics?

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It just so happened that yesterday I was polishing off some work in Russian. I love keyword research, so I decided to play a game to make it even more interesting. Instead of batch translating all the keywords from the Google keyword tool using Google translate, I did them individually, and didn’t copy them over to my excel sheet, but typed the answers in manually.

I can’t read the Cyrillic alphabet, but even so, the keyword tool producing as many repetitions of the same word as it does, I found myself actually recognising the words that were coming up.

After 20 words, I was able to complete most of the 100 keywords I had chosen without using Google translate! I even checked them afterwards and found I was mostly correct!

They keyword tool also comes up with common misspellings that it records significant search volume for. Google translate doesn’t pick up on these, it just translates them to the correct English. I imagine that if you were to use a real dictionary to check, which I would advise for anyone learning a language, then you could extract an even more significant language learning value from the exercise.

FYI: Nitro does the following languages:

• Japanese
• English
• Hungarian
• Hindi
• Guajarati
• Turkish
• Mandarin
• Cantonese
• Portuguese
• Italian
• French
• Polish

We’re a bit of a mixed bunch, but if we weren’t I don’t imagine I’d enjoy working here as much as I do

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Both definitely want ‘in on’ the others ‘domain’. Facebook want to integrate web searching and buying, and Google wants to integrate our social lives into the SERPs. If either succeed they will make a serious dent into the others market. Google will increasingly use social criteria to enhance the relevance of the results and therefore increase their significance for advertises. If Facebook on the other hand, can integrate searching and buying activity within their community to effectively harness e-commerce across communities they will act as a huge super-affiliate; a ramped up Groupon, and then some.

I love Google for making my life easier by organising and filtering the web, but then I also love ‘social media’ –the term generally defined to mean social interaction on the web. Both could and will get ‘better’ by increasing the ease and relevance with which they provide their services to me, but I cannot accept that Facebook, or any other social or community platform will make Google superfluous.

I’ve read numerous comment declaring how Facebook is highly relevant and how Google just isn’t as relevant for brands/business/advertisers as it was because of social platforms. They point to how Facebook is capturing more and more advertising budget because of their demographic targeting used in conjunction with the community effect. I agree, a well executed campaign can be enormously successful, but to make Google irrelevant, really?

But it is not the norm for successful business to be able to execute successfully in Facebook, and certainly not without considerable effort, whereas advertising in Google is (or certainly should be if the website is designed and built to convert users into sales) simple. Google’s advertising auction concept was revolutionary, Facebook is merely word of mouth on speed.

My comparison is a little unfair I grant you, but the point is that whereas an advertiser can use Google to convert users and drive sales, they must use Facebook for branding and awareness, to deliver trust first and foremost. Sales come as a result of that, and other activity.

Until Facebook can deliver sales (or conversions) for business on huge scale it cannot be considered as an advertising alternative to Google. It should be considered as complementary, but that is no bad thing for advertisers. A campaign that blends social and search into an integrated campaign that aggressively targets users where they are whilst being transparent, open and valuable is how a business should market themselves. Right now where better to start than Google and Facebook?

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Imagine what you could do with your body is technology allowed you…well thanks to Google we can go back to using our bodies the way that they were meant to open mail and reply to messages.

Gmail Motion allows you to move your body to perform certain actions, picked up by your computer’s webcam. Imagine the possibilities!

However, considering the date (April 1st) it may be worth considering that this is another Google April Fool’s joke. Very clever guys…

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It’s all kicking off in the world of search engines. News broke this week of the results of a sting operation conducted by Google on the suspicion that competitor Bing was copying their results.

Apparently Google had been suspicious since May 2010 when they noticed Bing was returning identical results for misspellings of uncommon words, and without even correcting the misspelling. On the hunch that there were some shenanigans going on, Google set up a ploy worthy of a spy movie (albeit a very geeky one): create a trap whereby they would consciously falsify their own results for searches involving random strings of letters.

So around December 2010, Google got some of its engineers to run searches for these strings of letters from their homes using Internet Explorer. They would then click on the first (falsified) result. If Bing was really spying on Google’s results, then searches for the same strings of letters would return the same (falsified) results.

Sure enough they did and without going into the detail, the results strongly suggested that Bing copy Google’s rankings, at least for searches that bring up few matches.

So how does Microsoft do it? Well, Internet Explorer’s privacy policy mentions that, by default, it will collect some of your browsing data. This is particularly true when considering the Suggested Sites functionality. Another likely instrument in this industrial espionage would be the Bing Bar, which also includes in its privacy policy that it will collect browsing. Both privacy policies explicitly include search related data.

Since then, Bing has responded to Google’s accusation and admitted to the charges. However, they seemed to insist on the fact that they were collecting the users’, rather than Google’s, data.

One commentator raises the valid question of whether or not users (should) care. Well, the issue I see here is that if, as a search engine, you compensate for your shortcomings by looking to another search engine’s results, you will never get to improve upon that second search engine. I think this suggests users should’ve have just gone there in the first place. Cue funny video:

It would be funny if it turned out that Bing was just a pretty user interface that just Google’d everything in the background and then forwarded the results, but it would also raise the point: if Bing’s contribution to search engines innovation is merely superficial, then I would expect it to be much prettier.

Check out my sources for more info.

To find out how you can be Google’d (or Bing’d) a lot more, check out our Search Engine Optimisation services.

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Those boffins at Google have done it again with the demo of a product on their Google Labs project called Google Body Browser. This aims to do for the human body what Google Earth did for maps – hopefully make users more aware about the world inside of us all and enable leisurely exploration of our own body’s detail in the same way that we pour over the areas we live.

The browser will allow user to peel away the body layer by layer, zooming in and out and navigate through selected areas and no doubt will be a useful aid to doctors, medical professionals and students.

Nitro Digital will be more than curious to see how we can utilise this tool into our clients sites once it is released to the public and we sincerely hope that we’ll be able to integrate it into sites with the ease of Google Maps. Allowing our clients to demonstrate how the body works alongside the various condition awareness, consumer health care and health care professional websites that we are adept at creating will enable the user to have a fuller experience when interacting with your site and we are excited to see the potential of such a release from Google.

You can view it here if you have a browser that has a WebGL implementation. Otherwise you can see it in action viewing the video below:

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When I first discovered the internet, I was intrigued to find a world mostly made up of text and images. Finally, I had an outlet where my word would be appreciated.

However, the web has not been “that” kind of place for a long time. Anyone who has used Facebook or Twitter understands that these guys sort your newsfeed.

The same is true of the rest of the web. When you Google something like “Angiogenesis” there are 32,300,000+ results, and one of the main ways in which they are sorted is by PageRank.

So, how are results sorted to increase the probability that a user clicking on links entirely randomly will encounter any one page? The probability of a page encounter is increased by links directed toward the page. As a page with more links pointing towards it is of higher authority than those with fewer, there is a greater probability that the page with links to it will be encountered.

This is thought to be largely reflective of how humans regard how influential something is. After all, if one academic is referenced more and more by influential sources, you are likely to think that they have something powerful and significant to say.

I am inclined to agree, but think that there are shortfalls in this approach. While this does a fairly good job of looking at the way that individual cases are connected via a system of links, it cannot account for things that cannot be linked properly. Like the rewarding view from a mountain top where no roads lead, where there are no signposts.

I took the time recently to benchmark a number of websites for HCPs and was astounded by the quality in particular of Amgen’s site on Angiogenesis. It’s a great condition awareness site, it explains stuff pretty well and it has some cool features like 3D.

The only problem is that it is written in flash, rendering it difficult for search engine crawlers to read, and fairly impervious to links penetrating anywhere other than its front page. It ranks pretty lowly.

I know that in order to win you have to play by the rules and the website doesn’t do itself any favours by constructing itself in this way. However, sites like this seem to be like our mountain view, difficult to find, despite nicely glistening atop a company like Mt. Amgen.

While Google have made leaps and bounds in improving the way they index flash, I guess my problem is that if we are always led along the path that we are most likely to go down, our destination will never be that fantastic, and even worse if everyone is complicit we will never reach any new conclusions and be directed to only resources that are constructed upon the easiest path to walk.

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