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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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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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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Welcome to the first of our weekly “Top 10 Social Media  stories” – something to start you off on a Monday morning!

1. Qwiki

The ‘information experience’ is coming soon, with brand new search engine Qwiki to launch soon. The founders are looking to solve the problem of information overload by providing users with information in a more interactive, engaging and visually stimulating way. Join the Search revolution, and sign up to get invited to become one of the first people to try out their new search experience.

2. The BAFTAs are to add a new category for social media gaming in 2011

Browser-based games such as Farmville, Restaurant City and Mafia wars will be recognised. According to the BAFTAs, more than half of users on Facebook regularly play such games.

3. Everybody uses twitter in their own way

This is just some of the worldwide trending topics and unique uses of twitter.

Politicians are reaching out to voters. In Brazil, all three Presidential candidates are tweeting about their campaigns; In Ecuador, the president declared a state of emergency via twitter during civil unrest after days of protests by the federal police; and South Korean Twitter accounts have doubled since June when a ‘go and vote’ campaign spread online and the office of the president began tweeting hopes of creating better communication with voters

Twitter has also been used as crisis control. For example, it played a crucial role in crisis response after the Haitian earthquake this year. And, sign-ups after the Chilean earthquake spiked 500% and have continued to grow since.

4. Tweet where you eat; Foodies turn to social media to pander and promote

The most effective way of doing digital marketing is to have your customers do it for you. That’s exactly what is happening in the restaurant industry.  Twitter has become the central hub to update Tweebs (people using Twitter) on “twomos” – twitter promotions and whether you still have additional tables, etc. Because of the multiplier effect that tweets can have, it is essential that restaurateurs understand this digital marketing tool. They must effectively deal with negative tweets to stop them spreading through re-tweets, whilst positive tweets can spread like wildfire.

5. The power of the internet economy

The internet is now more valuable to the country’s economy than the transport, construction or utilities industries. If the current growth rate continues, the report predicts the internet economy could account for between 10% and 13% of GDP by 2015.

6. LinkedIn Gives Brands a Platform to Promote Themselves

Looks like LinkedIn wants a bigger slice of the social networking pie…In a bid to better compete with Facebook and Twitter, LinkedIn have added new features for their business profiles to entice organisations to leverage themselves on this social networking site too.

7. Apple launches a store in China

This is another effort fromApple to strengthen its position in China. In addition to launching a Chinese version of its online store, Apple also translated its App Store to Simplified Chinese. Furthermore, Apple recently announced its plans to open 25 retail outlets in China by the end of next year.

8. Come Dine With Me launches iPhone App

Following Master Chef’s entry into app territory, another foodie programme has just launched its very own iPhone app, which will allow users to become more engaged with the show.

9. News Corp. puts MySpace on notice

There was a time when everyone had a MySpace, in fact we all probably have a long-forgotten profile floating around on the web. However, the social networking site has become a thing of the past with the likes of social network giants, Facebook and Twitter on the scene. MySpace has been given notice to shape up or be dropped by News Corp.

10. Twitter starts including ‘Promoted Tweets’from advertisers in users’ personal timelines

Promoted Tweets will be included in users’ timelines depending on who they like and what they are interested in. Twitter seems to have finally found a way to profit from its incredible popularity.

Funny: Facebook pre-emptively sued by Lamebook

Want to see the sources for this blog?

Check out our social media news bookmarks on Delicious

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I came across a really good video made by Googler Matt Cutts. Matt is currently head of webspam for Google and is actually very helpful in creating video’s for beginners and explaining very complex scenario’s.

For anyone asking me how Google works, this video is perfect –

Some vital pieces of information to take from this video -

- When you google something, you are actually searching their index not the web

- If your not in their (Google) index your not going to appear in their search results (Simple hey)

- Is your site good? (Not looking but does everything the right way)

- How many links does your site have? (One section of Page rank, the more links your site receives from other websites the more Google likes it, remember Google is an online popularity contest)

- All Google results are impartial.

- Ads only display if they are helpful (Matt forgot to mention they display these ads if people bid)

- Related searches help if you cannot find what you are looking for.

- Google searches tags not sentences

Do you have any questions on search engines? Let me know

Danny Denhard

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