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.
Conditions and symptoms dominate online health searches… Read more at http://tinyurl.com/ylc29cv
]]>Some interesting highlights:
- Consumers who visit product sites are nearly three times more likely than the average US adult to request prescriptions by name from their doctors.
- When consumers use search engines for pharmaceutical or health information online, they are most likely to search by the name of a specific condition/disease or the name of a specific product.
- The most common situation for which they use a search engine for this purpose is when they have symptoms for a condition.
One of ten great presentations on Social Media that can be found here:
http://www.digitalbuzzblog.com/the-top-10-social-media-presentations-online/
It looks like you can request an invite through the Inside Adwords blog.
Here’s a post from Tim Cohn that offers a brief preview with a screenshot.
At first glance, it looks like they plan to integrate more Google Analytics-like charting features and possibly more robust navigation.
Adwords is due for a UX upgrade. The current approach seems to be collapsing under the weight of all the new features. Some things I’d like to see:
- Easier exporting of tables and campaign information
- Better integration of reporting
- More robust integration with Google Analytics
- Improved role management between team members using MCC
- A better campaign or ad group comparison engine
Check out the screenshot of a SERP returned while searching for “Axure”. It was interesting to see that two of the top three paid search positions were filled by competitors blatantly using Axure’s corporate name as a call-to-action.
The trademark policy for Google Adwords is, at best, vague. The onus for filing a complaint falls is the responsibility of the company claiming a violation.
]]>I’ll explain.
Google has been moving towards more personalized search services for the last couple of years. Much of this is driven by new principles of the semantic web and the advent of web services and media types that compete with traditional web content for relevancy. Who’s to say, for example, that someone searching for Angelina Jolie will be interested in viewing news more so than her videos or photos?
Google’s New Personalization Tools
Google no longer wants to prioritize content for you—they want their users to do it themselves. This approach is now clearly apparent with the promote and remove functionality now showing up on a lot of search results.
Expect to see more of this technology in the coming months. I strongly believe that search personalization will only become more pronounced in future—both user-managed personalization and machine-generated based on your “personalization profile”: personalization based on both your prior activity and the behaviors of users similar to you.
So what does personalized search mean for the traditional SEO? If you deconstruct the process of SEO it breaks down into three parts:
- The ability to forecast and predict how search engines will assign relevancy
- The understanding of the terminology used by target users (and their search heuristics)
- Modification of web pages and content to optimize for the top two parts
The combination of these elements fundamentally drives search optimization. With personalized search, however, #1 and #3 lose their importance, while #2 because vital. The future of SEO hinges on user research.
User research and profiling has gained importance in user experience design, interactive strategy, and digital marketing. SEOs will also need to become user researchers if they hope to excel. Not only will they need to gain insights into how people search, they need to be able to understand who their users are, how they behave, and what their needs are. This goes way beyond traditional keyword and terminology research—SEOs will need to “get inside the heads” of their users—gaining understanding into demographics, psychographics, and technographics.
The future of SEO may hinge on the ability of marketers to truly understand the makeup of their target customers. This may kill off a good number of the traditional number-crunching SEOs, but the savvy and innovative players will find lucrative opportunities to optimize for the next generation of search experiences.
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In the past, the data had to be pulled into Excel and then graphed. This took up a lot of unneeded effort—especially when drafting a quick campaign report. It would great to see Google support comparison charting and more visualization exports in Analytics.
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I’ve been doing some research on Web 3.0 and semantic search. There are a lot of exciting and groundbreaking new technologies emerging that could reinvent the Internet. It will become increasingly important for web marketers and digital strategists to stay on top of these advances—there are numerous communications and marketing applications.
One of these new technologies is the Friend of a Friend project, or FOAF. FOAF is an XML-based method for organization and cataloging the relationships between people’s profiles. By understanding the relationships between people, data, and relationships, FOAF attempts to build a uniform method for sharing the types of information users store on social networking websites like Facebook and LinkedIn. In fact, a great example of FOAF-like technologies is the “People You May Know” feature on Facebook.
The real promise of FOAF is to create a new data model that will suggest connections between people and—more interestingly—people and information.
Just imagine the value this type of data and intelligence could have to marketers and advertisers. Online ad targeting hasn’t evolved much in the last five years. Protocols like FOAF may be the catalyst to take online advertising to the next level. Imagine being able to target a campaign based on psychographics. Understanding how your target market operates on the web is one thing that FOAF can help to define.
Clearly there are issues with the technologies. Not only has adoption been slow and held back by the confusion and inherent geekiness that’s held back the growth of the semantic web. There are also many issues about security and data protection. Regardless, these technologies are on the move and it won’t be long until the possibilities seen with FOAF (and similar protocols like XFN and SIOC) are realized.
Anyone can create a FOAF profile. You can use a this wizard to create the file and upload it to your website.
]]>This improvement has some wide-reaching implications for web developers. The “use of Flash vs. indexability” dialog that is an element of nearly all web projects just may eventually become a thing of the past.
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