Hashtag history

Apparently, hashtags started life as group and topic headings in internet relay chat (IRC) boards in the days before the Web (yes, I looked that up on Wikipedia when researching this post). However, they didn’t hit the mainstream until Twitter popularized them, pretty much as soon as it was started (that I didn’t need to look up). Over the years many channels have supported them, but official support is not needed to see hashtags used. For example, the popular hashtag for “healthcare social media” (#hcsm) shows up over 250 thousand times over the past year:

• 249,448 Twitter
• 824 Blogs
• 757 Forums
• 446 News Channels
• 321 Facebook (37 over 6 weeks)

#hcsm usage on Twitter over 12 months – Data supplied by Sysomos MAP

Looking into #hcsm you can see that it is used somewhere around the world (albeit 70+% in the US) almost once every two minutes. That is a lot of relevant material for someone researching social media in healthcare and is supplied for free by the individuals creating the posts. Think about the condition that your products treat, how useful would it be to know what hashtags that population is using?

Platform support

While platforms do not need to officially support hashtags to make them useful, try a search on Google for #hcsm and you’ll find the “home” of the hashtag which is a blog that uses the hashtag to promote a weekly Twitter chat (I assume it was the originator of the tag).

YouTube

YouTube had support for an odd version of hashtags that would convert mobile abbreviations such as LOL and OMG to graphical tags. This is no longer supported, and the quality of most comments has not changed.

Facebook

Facebook has announced hashtag support but has not given a date that it will be released. This will be a fairly important feature once its made public, especially since it is easy to connect a Twitter account to a Facebook profile and many hashtags get used on the platform in that way.

Google+

Google launched hashtag support as part of its user experience redesign. While the graphical and screen-resolution upgrades are interesting, this has the potential to make the largest difference for the platform. For example, try the hashtag search on Google+ and you’ll get the results in the new format plus:

• Personalities
• Communities
• Trending hashtags

Google+ hashtag search

This feature won’t make Google+ more relevant when it suffers from having only 0.1% of the page views of Facebook (custom comScore data) but may help the struggling platform provide more relevance to the small audience that does use it.

Note that, while user numbers do show that Google+ has 25.8 million monthly viewers, their engagement measured by page views is almost non-existent when compared to Facebook.

Google vs. Facebook – data from comScore

Your uses

Healthcare brands can look at hashtags in two ways, depending on the level of social engagement they are using:

• Social listening: use hashtags to find the “focal points” of discussion for users and incorporate these learnings into the brand editorial strategy.
• Social engagement: if you can “own” your own hashtag and drive usage you can end up with the #hcsm example and represent the go-to destination for that tag.

Healthcare lags

Well, it turns out no. If we look into Knotice’s report on email stats for H2 2012 we find a wide variation between industries in terms of mobile opens:

Knotice – mobile email opens by industry Q3 & Q4 2012

The industry also lags the average on opens, but not as badly as opens. This possibly speaks to higher engagement with healthcare users with messages that relate to their conditions:

Knotice – email click-through rates on mobile devices Q3 & Q4 2012

What is going on in healthcare? Our industry has the lowest open rates for smartphones and the second lowest for tablets only slightly behind B2B industries. What could be driving the industry’s poor uptake of the new mobile technologies? Some possible reasons:

The audience is older. As much as we like to read the tea leaves and convince ourselves that everyone on the planet is adopting the new technologies the reality is that there is an adoption curve for smartphones and tablets and that curve skews younger. Yes, the baby boomer demographic actually looks for more health information online than anyone else, but they seem to be doing it on their PCs.

The experiences are not optimized. This is the chicken and egg issue mentioned in the title. What reason is there to look for health information on a mobile device if 99% of the experiences are just desktop-optimized websites? Even if the user can zoom in easily that doesn’t mean they will. Also, older users may not be as adept at device usage as younger users (have you watched a 15-year-old teach their grandparents how to search on a mobile phone lately?). If the users are taught that the experience is poor they may prefer to use their PC.

Solution

The audience will catch up with the other industries, even if it does lag. We need to ensure that our experiences are created in a way that works for our audiences. Anyone reading this blog knows the drill:

1. Discovery
2. Insights
3. Ideation
4. Design
5. Build
6. Launch
7. Test and Optimize

It’s Apple’s world, we just live in it

The second insight from this report is that iOS dominates actual usage. We see a lot of data from comScore that shows that Android devices outsell iOS in terms of units, but this report shows that when it comes to actual usage, iOS wins.

In the following chart the iPhone and iPod Touch are both listed which makes sense for our purposes. Many smartphones are used on Wi-Fi and the iPod touch really is the same device sans cell phone capabilities. In the chart an astounding 78% of email opens are happening on Apple products:

Knotice – email opens on smartphones Q3 & Q4 2012

When we look at tablets the Apple story continues with an amazing 95% of opens happening on the iOS devices:

Knotice – tablet email opens Q3 & Q4 2012

Solution

There is no solution because this isn’t really a problem. These numbers reinforce that the Apple platform should be first on the list of supported devices with Google’s Android second. Other activities such as web browsing are not as extreme as these numbers but for email, for now, Apple’s iOS rules the roost.

• Voalte One by Voalte – integrated communications
• Nursing Central by Unbound Medicine – medical reference
• NurseTabs: Fundamentals by AusQuinn, LLC – procedures reference for students
• PatientTouch by PatientSafe Solutions – patient and EHR integration
• Medigram by Medigram, Inc. – group messaging app
• NurseTabs: Medsurge by AusQuinn, LLC – disease reference for students
• Lab Values Reference by Imago LLC – lab tests reference
• NCSBN Learning Extension Medication Flashcards by National Council of the State Boards of Nursing – NCLEX study aid
• The Merck Manuals for Mobile + Web by Unbound Medicine, Inc. – disease treatment reference
• Shots by STFM by Group on Immunization Education of the Society of Teachers of Family Medicine – immunization reference
• Lexicomp by Wolters Kluwer Health – drug reference

It is interesting that Apple does not recommend Epocrates for nurses. For those interested in metrics, that makes:

• 7 reference apps
• 2 communications apps
• 1 study aid app
• 1 patient tracker app

Other stories from MobiHealthNews:

• Apple’s picks for top 42 iPhone fitness apps
• Half of US physicians use Epocrates on tablets
• Michael J. Fox Foundation takes first step toward crowdsourced research

Source: MobiHealthNews

• Lists of tests and therapies that the major associations and societies consider questionable (is yours there?)
• Consumer partners who are working with Consumer Reports to distribute information, including Wikipedia, Alliance Health Networks, and the AARP

Source: Choose Wisely Website

Source: MedAdNews

eMarketer expects total US search spending to reach nearly $20 billion this year and top $25 billion in 2017. Mobile search spending tripled last year, according to eMarketer, and is expected to increase another 80% this year, to reach $3.6 billion. By 2017, more than half of search spending will go toward mobile formats.

Other eMarketer stories:

• Mobile video’s growing audience lures advertiser investment
• Social, digital video drive further growth in time spent online

Source: eMarketer

Waze shows user alerts, both passive such as movement detected on the smartphone GPS, and active such as police activity added by users on maps and as part of its routing software:

Source: Reuters

The chart shows social ads (blue) at or near the top in both reach efficiency and user quality.

Also in Marketing Charts:

• Top 5 “creepy and weird” loyalty program uses of member information

Source: Marketing Charts

Schlanger said in Tuesday’s call, WebMD is “aggressively promoting to advertisers multi-screen solutions . . . to encourage them to include mobile as one of their marketing tactics.” WebMD’s analytics indicate the mobile push is where advertisers should be.

Source: MM&M

Michael Sneed, VP-Global Corporate Affairs at J&J, told Ad Age that the new campaign wasn’t going to just “paper over” all of J&J’s recent troubles. “I would say that it is a campaign that emphasizes our strategy for reconnecting with consumers when our business is really taking measurable strides to overcome the past challenges,” he said. “We want to make sure people think of J&J as a long-term provider of health care, as a company that’s going to be there day in and day out. While we’re still considered among the best, there’s nothing wrong with being the best. And we want to make sure we get back to that.”

Source: BrandChannel