A few personal updates and points of interest:

In the News:

The acquisition of RDVO by Cambridge BioMarketing was covered in a number of media:

• New York Times
• Boston Globe
• Boston Business Journal
• DM news

Recent Blog Posts and Commentaries:

From Cambridge BioMarketing Biorhythms:

Apple iPad – Three Potential Uses for the healthcare marketing
While the announcement of Apple’s iPad didn’t elicit the oohs and ahhs that many anticipated, healthcare marketers were quick to see the promise of a powerful and user-friendly tablet PC…

Illustrating Conditions through Healthmaps
Helping patients and healthcare providers understand the various dimensions of a condition is something those of us in healthcare communications can struggle with. Each aspect of a disease definition—from symptoms to diagnosis to treatment—can have multiple layers of complexity…

Related posts:

• Motion Magazine Demo Shows iPad Potential
• The team at the 2009 Healthcare Clio Awards
• Looking forward to the FDA hearing on social media

I’m one of the lucky 300 who’ll be attending in person at the FDA’s public hearing on social media. The meeting represents an unprecedented step by the FDA to provide the digital pharma community with an opportunity to offer insights about how medical information and marketing is delivered through online channels.

The agenda and speaker list was released this morning. Many of the likely suspects will be in attendance, and the speaking roster includes representatives from big (and small) pharma (surprised not to see more!), healthcare marketing agencies, consultants, and technology companies. It will be interesting to see how the meeting unfolds.

My wishlist:

• I hope the agency folks keep the pitches and business development to a minimum (and I’m an agency guy). This meeting provides an opportunity to communicate about issues that may have long-term implications on our businesses. Let’s hope it doesn’t turn into an agency pitch/bitch.
• Focus on the future, and don’t try to fix the past (or present). Yes — we need to look at the current state of social media, but most of us believe we’re at the onset of the revolution; let’s talk about what’s coming down the pike and prepare–not focus on current roadblocks.
• Meaningful discussion about search marketing, with feasible outcomes. The FDA’s unexpected crack-down on pharmaceutical search ads last Spring sent a collective shutter down the spines of pharmaceutical companies and agencies alike. Healthcare is one the top online spenders and search marketing has become a critical component in any campaign. When will the FDA offer meaningful and substantial guidelines?
• Let’s talk personalized medicine. How will this emerging area be addressed by the FDA?

More to come…

Note: all the information on the event has been gathered in one place by @Skypen over here.

Related posts:

• Some Updates
• Notes on an Acquisition
• Meet the Legends of Pharmaceutical Advertising…

Kudos to my friends and colleagues at Cambridge BioMarketing Group on the launch of their awesome new web presence.

Cambridge BioMarketing is an integrated communications agency serving clients in the healthcare, pharmaceutical, biotech, and life sciences industries.

Check out the Legends of Pharmaceutical Advertising campaign–help bid a fond farewell to hall-of-famers like “The Empty Suit” and the “The Final Tchotchke”…

Related posts:

• Some Updates
• The team at the 2009 Healthcare Clio Awards
• Looking forward to the FDA hearing on social media

Before they became great American writers, Ernest Hemingway, Mark Twain, Theodore Dreiser and Sinclair Lewis shared one thing in common: they all worked as beat reporters for the Kansas City Star.

While he only worked at the newspaper for six months, Hemingway credited The Kansas City Star stylebook as “the best rules I ever learned for the business of writing.” The full stylebook doesn’t appear to be available in public domain. However, there are several high-level guidelines and excerpts that any modern writer will find valuable and striking in their simplicity:

The three tenets:

• Use short sentences. Use short first paragraphs. Use vigorous English. Be positive, not negative.
• Never use old slang.
• Eliminate every superfluous word.

More dogma:

• Be careful of the word also. It usually modifies the word it follows closest. “He, also, went” means “He, too, went.” “He went also” means he went in addition to taking some other action.
• Be careful of the word “only.” “He only had $10″ means he alone was the possessor of such wealth; “He had only $10,” means the ten was all the cash he possessed.
• In writing of animals, use the neuter gender except when you are writing of a pet that has a name.
• Try to preserve the atmosphere of the speech in your quotation. For instance, in quoting a child, do not let him say “Inadvertently, I picked up the stone and threw it.”

You can get more info on proper writing styles and mechanic from the Elements of Style, by Strunk and White, and the Associated Press Stylebook, which was influenced by classics stylebooks from the Kansas City Star, The Boston Globe, and others.

Related posts:

• Want to be a better writer? Start with these five posts…

Twitter….seemingly so much promise, but for those of us who aren’t social media experts…what’s the real deal?

Pear Analytics released a new study on Twitter usage trends. They tracked 2,000 tweets over a 2-week period and then categorized them into six usage buckets: news tweets, spam, self-promotion (my favorite), pointless babble, conversational tweets, and pass-along value. Tweets containing “RT” were categorized as “pass along”, and those using “@” were considered conversational.

The study revealed that over two thirds of tracked tweets were either “pointless babble” or “conversational”. I suppose this isn’t too surprising. However, the study found that news-related tweets constituted the smallest category; less than 4% of tweets are news-related.

The study is provided in whitepaper format on Pear’s website and is worth a read. There are also some interesting findings on user demographics and the overall reach of Twitter.

I’ve been a Twitter user for a couple of years now. My usage is casual at best. Maybe I’ll check once or twice a day and perhaps post a handful of tweets a week. I’ve never really used it for promotion, nor have I made any effort to recruit followers. I find it useful for tracking news and updates on industries I’m interested in—hash tags are the most useful feature to me. But getting to the good stuff requires a lot of sifting. Several months ago I removed all the so-called “social media experts” from my follow list and the results were remarkable. It’s amazing how such a small group of power-users can create so much useless static.

Check out the visualization below (from Gizmodo). Despite the hype and promise, it’s easy to make the case that Twitter has become a soapbox for a select group of loud mouths. This statistic is likely one that keeps the Twitter founders up at night—it points to unsustainable business model.

The Pear Analytics study is one of several that have clearly illustrated that Twitter provides value in terms of reach, trend-tracking, and marketing. However, the majority of content is either pointless or conversational and likely not of interest to the largest Twitter population: relatively passive users like me. The study highlighted a new service called Philtro that uses preferences and complex algorithms to serve up only the Tweets that you real care about—supposedly leaving the junk behind.

Related posts:

• Looking forward to the FDA hearing on social media
• The Hierarchy Of Digital Distractions | Information Is Beautiful
• The Venn Diagram of Social Media