Category Archives: Health

How to promote your healthcare product

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Thought I’d share the benefit of my experience in the NHS/healthcare e-commerce & web 2.0 with the following quick & dirty guide to promoting your healthcare product using web 2.0 tools:

Say your product currently already has a product site which has tons of great information about the product. Without too much time/effort the information could be lifted for pages to sit on a new blog. Product information would included along with independent sources such as the Mayo Clinic to ensure all medical issues and good practice is covered to help establish the blog’s credibility.

The marketing aim of this customer-centric blog would be to engage customers into giving reviews of the product, a well-documented highly trusted source of product information for customers. Your existing product video on YouTube would be embedded on a blog post, with a link from the current YouTube comments section to the blog. The idea would be for the UK-centric blog to have a mixture of customer video testimonials, and expert content on the proper use of your product. The RSS feeds off this blog could then be syndicated to websites and blogs to help bring in traffic and raise page rank.

Key is the fact that customers can post questions and queries in the comments, and see them answered by a moderator. They would also be encourage to post their own testimonial videos, pending approval of course.

This blog would then include the clear opportunity to social bookmark pieces to Digg, Stumble, and Twitter from each post, which would help SMO for the site.

To track conversations use Twitter search engine and pick up the RSS feed, to keep an eye on relevant key word terms and collect these in your RSS aggregator. This would also collect Google blog/news/Technorati conversations. These would then feed blogs to target as appropriate for link swops/rss syndication/comments/forum discussion involvement. You might also establish a twitter account such as twitter.com/myproduct to also take part in discussions with customers too, and invite them to the blog and Facebook Group via this route.

More importantly there would be a clear banner link through to a Facebook Group branded as per the blog, which would also include much of the same content as the blog (you can use the api which allows blog post to be posted automatically into Facebook for example).

The Facebook Group would nicely serve as a parallel marketing arm, seeded with group members, who in turn on joining would auto-alert their friends to the group’s benefits. Initially this would involve a search for existing UK Facebook Groups currently focusing on your product, and an appeal to their members to join. The Facebook Group would also include a clear banner link back to the blog. Facebook works via linking through profiles to make network marketing success, blogs work through conversations. This neatly divides the two arms of the campaign, though obviously there is cross-over.

I would start looking to see what’s listed as links for your healthcare product on a key public site such as NHS Choices, and therefore likely to be gaining significant traffic. Clearly those sites with discussion forums are most useful.

As stated above very quickly other blog & sites would be identified for involvement in discussion.

Plus a PPC/online advertising strategy could be considered for Facebook and Google Adwords based on identified ‘hotspots’ for likely customers. To back this up there’s this remark from Headshift’s Cybersoc from the new media event in Dubai via Twitter: “The guy from Microsoft advertising seems to be recommending advertising on Facebook. Odd. Probably true though.” On the other side of the debate check this out, though it does say Facebook CPM is cheaper than Google, there’s a reason for that: essentially that Google users are on a specific search page for a search-related reason, whereas for Facebook the prime reason is visiting a friend:

“Facebook impressions run 13 to 16 cents CPM. For comparison, our clients in aggregate pay $10 eCPM on Google, and $6 eCPM on Yahoo. The fact FB can’t command higher CPMs speaks volumes to how advertisers value those impressions.” Also see Bryant Urstadt’s Tech Review piece (Social Networking Is Not a Business*) from which this insight is taken from on the challenge of turning a profit from social network sites.

In the longer term would look to contact patients support societies to ensure factual info on your product plus web links are included in their ‘patient pack’.

The two productions of knowledge paper

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TOWARDS A WORKING NON-LINEAR SCIENCE OF EMPOWERMENT

 

Stuart  G. Hall, m-power

 

A paper for presentation during the Ninth Annual International Conference of the Society for Chaos Theory in Psychology and the Life Sciences in Berkeley, California, July 23-26, 1999

 

Abstract: This paper is based on the believe that people have an intuitive ‘chaos’ understanding of the world in which they live. This understanding is comparable to non-linear science.  “The two productions of knowledge differ only in their argumentation premises, methodology, and consequently in their distinct manners – both valid – of reading the world.” (1)

 

Educationalist Paulo Freire found that by teaching illiterate people using a theory and action based on love, they learned to read and write by overcoming the cause – powerlessness. I have harnessed Freire’s approach in developing a non-linear science of empowerment based on people’s intuitive ‘chaos’ understanding. The aim is to help people to overcome their fears and lack of confidence.

 

Keywords: chaos, consciousness, empowerment, envionment, love, metaphor, non-linear science.

 

CONTACT INFORMATION: Stuart G. Hall, 12 Cross Rd, Leicester, UK LE2 3AA; Tel: 00 +44 (0)116 2707586.  e-mail: stuarth@dircon.co.uk  www.m-power.org.uk

 

Introduction

“The deepest error of modern biology is the entrenched belief that organisms interact only with other organisms and only adapt to their material environment. This is as wrong as believing that the people of a village interact with their neighbours but merely adapt to the material conditions of their cottages. In real life, both organisms and people change their environment as well as adapting to it.” (5)

 

In ideal terms people are equal to other organisms in the ability to change the environment. We are different from other organisms, from animals, by virtue of our consciousness. We are different from other people for the same basic reason. The problem is that the environment in which we live is organised according to need, not love. Consequently we can easily grow up in an environment colonised by contradictory values. For example Darwin in his ‘Descent of Man’ attempts to confront the contradicatory values of Victorian England by arguing that human evolution is based on love. (6)

 

All people have the ability to change their environment, but not equally. While ‘most people’ appear to simply adapt in order to survive, conversely: “The educated individual is the adapted person, because she or he is better ‘fit’ for the world.” (5) Both have been colonised by the values of the powerful, argues Freire, utlising psychiatrist Franz Fanon’s observations of the effects of French colonisation in Algeria (6).

 

Understanding is Survival

 

The idea that there could be a people’s knowledge substantially equivalent to educated knowledge is acknowledged by Edwin Lazlo in terms of “the growing convergence between the mystical worldview (predominantly, but by no means exclusively Eastern) and the emerging paradigm of reality among scientists at the cutting edge of contemporary knowledge”. (7) It is rare to find anyone arguing this kind of equivalence in the West, and for good reason, the colonisation of consciousness by the values of need and knowledge has had longer to run: “European mathematics is mathematics: all other mathematics is anthropology. That explains why this other mathematics belongs to what has been called ethnoscience.” (19) Consequently people’s collective silence is correlated with stupidity, when it is first and foremost an adaptive response to an environment where people perceive they do not have a ‘voice’.

 

Labov makes this point in his study, The Logic of Nonstandard English in refuting educational psychologists who argued that Black speech patterns were unable of logically (logic=linear=standard) expressing abstract concepts. He examines a statement about the non-existence of heaven by a boy called Larry to illustrate his point:

 

Non-linear:

“’Cause you see. doesn’ nobody really know that it’s a God,

y’know, ‘cause I mean I have seen black gods, pink gods, white gods. all

color gods, and don’t nobody know it really a God. An’ when they be sayin’

if you good, you goin’ t’heaven, tha’s bullshit, ‘cause you ain’t goin’ to no

heaven, ‘cause it ain’t no heaven for you to go to.

 

Linear:

1 Everyone has a different idea of what God is like.

2 Therefore nobody really knows God exists.

3 If there is a heaven, it was made by God.

4 If God doesn’t exist he couldn’t have made heaven.

5 Therefore heaven doesn’t exist.

6 You can’t go to somewhere that doesn’t exist.

 

That is an example of non-linear understanding in expressing an abstract concept.  If you need more proof of people’s intuitive understanding of chaos, of its equivalence to knowledge, how about in survival? An example of what I’m trying to say is provided by a recent study of drug users from the late 1970’s New York, and their response to the emergence of a fatal new illness:

 

“In the period from 1976 to the early 1980’s, seroprevalence in New York rose from zero to about 50%…The epidemic then entered a period of dynamic stabilization…Although mathematical models have suggested network saturation may have been an important part of the stabilization process (Blower, 1991), the sociometric analysis of drug injectors’ networks conducted during the research for this volume suggest that the extent of network saturation may have been quite limited.

 

“Behaviour change probably made a major contribution to the stabilization of seroprevalence. In spite of a popular image that would suggest that either “slavery to their addiction” or “hedonistic, selfish personalities that ignore risks and social responsibility,” drug injectors in New York (and indeed, throughout the world) have acted both to protect themselves and others against the AIDS epidemic. Thus, by 1984, before there were any programs other than the mass media to inform them about AIDS or to help to protect themselves, drug injectors in New York were engaged in widespread risk reduction…Furthermore, observations on the street confirmed this by showing that drug dealers were competing with others for business by offering free sterile syringes along with their drugs as AIDS-prevention techniques.” (10)

 

Understanding unpredicatability is key to survival.  “Case study after case study of the human rather than the chemical level reveals our capacity – by no means 100% reliable, but to a higher degree than present chaos theory dictates – to predict the future in situations of extreme instability.” (11) 

 

Before the advent of meterology people’s understanding of the unpredicatbale behaviour of weather was key to the success of their harvest, and hence their survival. Fifty years ago a panel of US scientists was set up to examine the validity of 153 traditional weather sayings: “The panel found that at least 80 of them were sound. The early weather forecasters had come to the same conclusions about what they saw in the sky as have today’s experts with modern knowledge and scientific principles to help them.” (14)  Typically people’s understanding is expressed in metaphor – a powerful tool in simply communcating the principle that simple laws can result in complex results for example (15: schroder-quote in previous text):

“For want of a nail, the shoe was lost; For want of a shoe, the horse was lost;

For want of a horse, the rider was lost; For want of a rider, the battle was lost;

For want of a battle, the kingdom was lost!”(Gleick)

 

 

Towards a working non-linear science of empowerment

 

Non-linear empowerment works by working with people’s understanding of chaos and change, often understood in spiral metaphor:  “The desert is not a circle. It is a spiral. When we have passed through the desert, nothing will be the same.” (18) In other words: “The psychology of the mature human being is an unfolding, emergent, oscillating spiraling process marked by progressive subordination of older, lower-order behavior systems to newer, higher-order systems as man’s existential problems change.” (19)

 

As an example of how non-linear empowerment  would work in practice I provide the following model I designed where the goal is to supporting consumer group leaders:

 

Non-linear empowerment for self- help/consumer-run services

 

1 Strengthen consumer group leaders by empowering them with greater self-confidence.

2 Support and strengthen consumer group leaders by enabling them to use those new found skills and confidence to help empower individuals greater self-confidence regardless of gender, race, sexual orientation, age etc.

3 Promote greater individual participation in groups at all levels as a result of individual empowerment.

4 Enable groups to participate more widely in their communities, encouraging further individual self-empowerment with the support of group leaders.

5 Support efforts to change communities’ perceptions/actions regarding people with experience of mental distress, and in encouraging reflection on their own experience.

 

I believe Paulo Freire’s pedagogic model based on love is useful here, as he emphasises the  importance of ‘student’ and ‘teacher’ working on an equal level – despite their obvious differences in power. To paraphrase Freire, both must be ‘co-intentional’, as both are subjects in the task of unveiling reality (21).

 

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References

(1) Freire, Pedagogy of Hope, chap 6. Or to put it in more intuitive language: “These peasants know more than we do.”.

(2) Lazlo, The Whispering Pond, Foreward. “Perhaps the most significant development in recent times… is the growing convergence between the mystical worldview (predominantly, but by no means exclusively Eastern) and the emerging paradigm of reality among scientists at the cutting edge of contemporary knowledge .”  For mystic I use the phrase intuitive chaos understanding – a phenomena hidden to most academics in the West because they have been educated to see the world along linear lines.  Not surprisingly therefore the orientation of current non-linear psychology is ‘top-down-linear’, as its aim is essentially improved control of the human environment, rather than to attempt to work with it.

3.  Hall, Chaos & Love: A non-linear model of empowerment in philosophy and action for self- help/consumer-run services/programs, workshop to be presented at the International Association of Psychosocial Rehabilitation Services Conference, Washington, May 2000.

 

Loye, Darwin’s Lost Theory: A New Grounding For The Chaos Revolution

 

Introduction

1. See ‘Chaos and Crime’, T.R.Young, in ‘Chaos, Criminology and Social Justice: The New Orderly (Dis)Order, Ed. by Dragan Milovanovic, 1997 for the inspiration for this distinction. (SPIS 364)

2. ‘A Way of life for Agnostics,’ James Lovelock, Gaia Circular, Summer 1999.

3. See Eric Fromm, ‘The Art of Loving’.

4. Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed; Pedagogy of Hope.

5. ibid, Pedagogy of the Oppressed.

6. Franz Fanon, Wretched of the Earth

7. See my web site: www.m-power.org.uk for further proof. The web designer was my father, Dr Bob Hall.

 

People’s Knowledge

8. The Logic of Nonstandard English, William Labov: cited in Sociology: Themes and Perspectives: M.Haralambos/R.M.Heald.

9. Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of Hope.

10. Friedman SR, Curtis R, Neaigus A, Jose B, Des Jarlais DC, ‘Social Networks, Drug Injectors’ Lives, and HIV/AIDS,’ 1999. New York, Kluwer/Plenum.

11. James Gleick, ‘Chaos: Making a New Science.’

 

People’s knowledge of chaos: ‘It’s raining by planets’

12. Jonathan Wilshere, Leicestershire Weather Sayings, 1980.

13. Ibid.

14. Weather Wise, Reader’s Digest  publication, 1980. Folk sayings even recognise the dangers of correlation: “The moon and the weather may change together, But change of the moon does not change the weather,” in W.G.Willis Watson, ‘Calendar of Somerset Customs, Superstitions, Weather Lore & Popular Sayings’’, 1920.

17. Jonathan Wilshere, Leicestershire Weather Sayings, 1980.

 

Interaction between the two sets of chaos knowledge.

18. Ervin Laszlo, The Whispering Pond: A personal guide to the emerging vision of science. I include ‘people’s knowledge’ with the mystical, and in connecting it with Freire’s point about people’s knowledge contained in metaphor, it is worth citing Julien Green, “Suite Anglaise,’ 1972: “It is tempting to believe that mystics lack intellectual clarity, and that they easily confuse one thing with another. It is the symbolism they use which explains this mistaken view: a careful reading of the writings of the saints dealing with their visions, shows that once the transition is made from the tangible to the symbolic world, they never mix their images, but consistently adhere to the proportions they have chosen. Why is this? The answer is these images are the exact representation of the truth which they contemplate. In fact no-one is more precise than a mystic, and the mystic is not a dreamer.”

19. Thomas Crump, ‘The Anthropology of Numbers’, 1990.

20. Jurgen Habermas makes a call for an equal discourse in his philosophic writings. However, his idealistic approach fails to recognise the material & power differences between participants. CHECK.

21. Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed.