The Facebook “like” button and it’s Google “Plus” clone has been the powerful engine of social media. It’s only a  few years old but it has an enormous impact on how we project our feelings and attitudes toward our social friends and brands. It even affects our attitudes towards other people  – reducing them to a binary plus or zero sum game. Someone can LIKE us . . . or not. Yes they can also leave a comment, however, on top of it all, there would be a big thumbs up that totals the amount of love we get.

Social media emotional markup has a long way to go. In real life sometimes we like someone or someone’s ideas. Then we might be annoyed at them and hate them just a few minutes later.  We are complex humans capable of loving and hating at the same time. Facebook already knows that relationships can get complicated (even Zuckerberg’s Harvard girlfriend can tell you that). So how about our attitudes and feelings towards ideas or brands? Just as we can LIKE a post on our wall we might really love it or hate it or be sad about it and change our minds from time to time.

What if instead of giving thumbs-up I want to give someone the finger? After cooling off,  I might be less angry just enough to downgrade the finger to a thumbs down.  After all, nothing is more dynamic than emotions and attitudes. That’s what makes us human. Instant messages and email already include the icon language to express a wide spectrum of feelings. Yet, social media has tried to flatten our emotions and attitudes to fit in their nice little binary compartments.

It’s time for us humans to fight back and unlike all this liking business. I am not sure Facebook will allow app developers to stream “the finger” through their API’s not even if it will be directed at the many hate groups that host their activities there. However, if someone out there is working on an advanced emotion markup language app and needs a great marketing dude – LIKE me on Facebook or just give me a call for a good emotionally charged chat.

* image courtesy of my nonews.co.il partner “Gurnischt”
This entry was written by Dror Gliksman.

This entry was written by Dror Gliksman.

1. It makes your site look up-to-date to both users and to the bots that will observe that your site is maintaining pace with the latest trends.
2. While I am sure Google will be careful not to give preference in rank to sites with Google+ , the fact is that once you add the button on your site, you have, in essence, established a dialog between your content and the Google database. As long as the page is live with the button, and the button gets clicks, it will flag to Google that a user interacted with the page, making it not just live but also alive. What the Gods of algorithmic search decide to do with that information and how to integrate it into search design is a topic for a whole new discussion. For now, why not participate in the game?
3. It is not a big deal to add it. There are already many plugins and widgets available to add it to dynamic sites.
4. It is a good excuse to clean up all the worthless share buttons you tried and left on.
5. It might actually become social one day. Who knows? Just like that “like” button you may be familiar with.

This entry was written by Dror Gliksman.

“The app takes a completely positive slant to letting our friends know about the things that are making our lives better, “ explains Dror Gliksman, the marketing manager for the MBS project. “It’s a different approach to the legacy user review and opinion sites. First, it’s completely integrated into Facebook, so easy to use. Second, it’s among friends, so there is a natural element of trust. I know which of my friends to trust on a music recommendation, for example. Third, it keeps a running tally of all the selections and comments, so app users can also see what the entire circle of Facebook users are saying about a particular place, charity, book, etc.”

my.bettersi.de

MBS tracks what is being said and compiles it into a kind of New York Best Seller List among friends. So instead of looking to see what the reviewers are saying about a book, and relying on a stranger, users can see where a particular book is ranking in the MBS charts. MBS is actually taking the idea of opinion and review sites several steps forward by turning it into a social experience among friends. As the most important and largest platform for social interaction, Facebook users trust their Facebook friends and are interested in what friends are doing, buying and saying. MBS, adds a layer of interaction, to provide a way to inform friends and to pool together what friends think about a given item.

The average Facebook user fills in his profile information once and then has no compelling reason to return. But people come across things that change them and excite them all of the time. Posting it on the Facebook Wall has a very limited reach. MBS provides an engaging platform for sharing those things and experiences among friends and finding new things that may interest or help us.

The potential of MBS is in make sharing insights a truly social experience. And it is all within a positive framework. We will  enhance users’ experiences by allowing them to better share their enthusiasm and even promote something that has effected them.

My Better Side is unique joint effort by VALIGAR, ZX900 and WebWhile.

About VALIGAR’s

Valigar specializes in development of web-oriented projects. We create complete solutions by combining abilities of various programming technologies: PHP, MySQL, Flash, JavaScript and more. visit www.valigar.com

zx900 combines passion, talent, and experience in planning, developing & executing cutting-edge, superstar software solutions for entrepreneurs and SMBs. Visit www.zx900.com

WebWhile provides online marketing strategy, management and implementation. Visit www.webwhile.com

A unique collaboration of 3 leading technology companies has launched a new Facebook application. Valigar, ZX900 and WebWhile have come together to create and launch the My Better Side Facebook application.

Take new initiatives like the website PatientsLikeMe, a platform on which patients can share information about their medical conditions and treatments. The site has already compiled a wealth of anecdotal information, patient by patient, and consolidated it into a useful interface with statistical analysis and personal insights. When prescribed a new medicine or seeking alternate treatments to a medical condition, who would not want to have access to such a wealth of data about other people’s experiences with those very same treatments?

Sites like PatientsLikeMe take social media in medicine several steps further. Already in 2006, the Pew Research Center reported that 80% of American Internet users reported using the Internet for health related search. It’s practically rare for someone not to go online to research a newly prescribed medication or suspected diseases they may have. For years, people have been joining forums and email groups and sharing personal details of their medical conditions. With social media, there is an even greater amount of information being shared and in public. And not surprisingly, sites like PatientsLikeMe are finding how to leverage the mental shift among patients and are methodically collecting the data being shared willingly to produce something scientific and useful, beyond a few anecdotal comments on a forum.

Add to this the US government’s plans to digitize medical records by 2014, and sharing medical information is likely to become commonplace and a powerful motivator for healthcare change in the very near future.
Of course many questions will be raised and many problems will have to be handled, but we believe the advantages far outweigh the disadvantages and we are set for some exciting developments. The empowerment of patients to participate more in their care and to have a direct pipeline to communicate with those developing the pharmaceuticals and treatments can have a significant impact on the healthcare industry. Just consider how many patients today, walk into their physician’s office armed with knowledge of their treatment options and with information about how patients, just like them, have responded to those treatments. They become their own advocates for attaining the best available healthcare and play a role in educating their doctors.
We are only at the tip of the iceberg right now. Stay tuned.

So what makes these crazy, violent fighters so smart? That’s just it, I am not sure they are so smart. They are just passionate. Passionate enough about what they do that they love to tell about it, to interact with fans and to be honest. Dana White, CEO of the Ultimate Fighting Championship, is behind the social media push. He has made himself completely accessible to fans and fans can smell his sincerity and passion. Then he took his top fighters and had them trained in social media purportedly telling them to “Tweet your asses off.”

So when mainstream media was not willing to provide the UFC with the platform they needed to reach their potential fanbase, social media did. They created a smart, effective strategy to promote their events and fighter personalities and fans are eating it up. Fans eat up the kind of stuff the UFC is providing – uncensored, behind the scenes looks at fighters lives and preparations for fights, for example. The engagement builds loyalty and trust — something that has probably almost disappeared in major league sports. Take a look at an NBA crowd -do those fans look passionate for the team they came to see or more like a bunch of people being entertained for the evening by a corporation with box seats? They do not feel like they know the players and it’s hard to care about someone who is so distant.

What lessons can us regular folk learn from the UFC fighters and from actors like Ashton Kutcher? A lot about tattoos and how to take a punch I suppose, but also about the value of passion and accessibility in marketing. Capturing mindshare today is only getting harder. Making that personal connection, and cutting through the corporate B.S. is what can make the difference.

So far, Google has tried to resolve the issue by analyzing my behavioral and geographic parameters and assuming they can make an educated guess about what I really want. Google can take into consideration a range of relevant data, such as whether I searching from France,  my search history and my online “habits”, given that I am logged in to my Google account when I do most of my searching. They know a hell of a lot about me from  – medical issues, to what I like to cook to which sports teams I probably root for. But unless I am logged into my Google account or Gmail, Google should not be nosing around in what I do online.

Many critics  accuse Google of building the world’s largest spyware. But relative to Facebook’s potential to enter the personal space of anyone with a Facebook account (is there anyone without one?), Google has only touched the behavioral data surface.

Consider our Paris Hilton dilemma once more. Google is forced to make a lot of (somewhat educated) guesses about what I am in search of, while Facebook is armed with a killer relevancy weapon – my Social Network data. Consider the type of data Facebook can access about me and track:

Have I recently connected with friends in Paris?

Am I a Paris Hilton Fan?

Are any of my friends her fan?

Have I recently searched for a related topic from the same tag cloud?

Did any of my close friends or family conduct such a search?

Is my girlfriend living in Paris?

Do I want to study French cooking?

Am I interested in travel applications or celebrity tracking applications?

Consider how powerful a tool the web is for you. You can use the Web, including social media, to listen to patients and better understand them. You can use the web to inform patients and reach out to them directly. And you can engage patients directly, on the Internet.

When we ran our first online patient recruitment campaign a few years ago, we were blown away by how candid potential patients were. We were approaching people in pain and we quickly understood, from the responses that we were receiving, that when people are in pain, and you appear to be a potential savior, they are willing to open up and share, with the hope that you may offer them relief. Of course with that said, it is very important to build credibility and to gain trust. Even over a short period of a few years, the Internet has changed drastically and users are more cautious today.

But when you get the opportunity to listen to the family members and patients, it is an incredible opportunity to align your messaging and your approach to what your audience really needs. It is becoming more and more critical in recruiting patients to recognize their concerns and needs. Consumer marketing departments do it all the time so it seems obvious that medical marketing should be doing it as well, to me anyway. Levis wants to know what I am looking for in a pair of jeans. Shouldn’t Merck take an interest in my concerns about insulin injections?

The Internet is an efficient platform for informing patients of ongoing studies. At the precise moment a patient is seeking information or solutions, you have an opportunity to be there to tell them what you are doing. Within seconds, when done right, you can capture the interest of a potential candidate and have them supplying all of the necessary pre-screening information.

Then you have the opportunity for engagement, where you can begin creating a relationship and communicating with your audience. This can support efforts to recruit patients for a study or, over a longer period of time, build a relationship with product advocates and patients.

Recruiting patients via the Internet may be the best ROI available in the market. A combination of online advertising and social media can be a truly powerful and cost-efficient methodology. For many areas of medicine, it is the best first effort a company can make. And once it has delivered as many people as it can reach, it is possible to move on to the more traditional, more expensive approaches.

In cases where the reach is not sufficient, this can be due to the nature of the study or of the geographical region. For example, certain types of medical conditions are more likely to be searched online by patients than others and certainly there are differences in how much the Internet is being used in certain regions. As basic as it may sound, if recruitment for a clinical trial is in a region that does not offer fast Internet, the pool of potential patients may be too small and other methods will likely be needed to reach out to enough patients. You need to have a good understanding of the target audience, what motivates them and with which media you may be able to capture their attention.