Creating Digital Environments Around Content

Last week, I moderated a panel session at the American Business Media (ABM) Boston regional program on the topic of content marketing.  Larry Weber, the PR and marketing strategy guru, kicked off the morning with an inspiring talk about how marketing communications and advertising agencies are changing and how that will impact the future of publishing.  Quotable outtakes included:

“Marketers have to be content creators.”

“Content first, then transactions.”

“The Web is becoming more mobile, more emotive, more experiential.”

Weber set the stage perfectly for our panel that followed: How Content Marketing is Shifting the Role of Publishers. In the changing landscape he described [1], all marketers are becoming publishers, and the content they produce creates new opportunities for publishers to aggregate information. Our panel of three digital publishing leaders provided great examples of how to this can be done.  For most B2B publishers, the ultimate goal of their digital environment (or community) is to bring together the buyers and sellers in their market segment to inform buying decisions and facilitate transactions.  The markets represented on the panel ranged from medical products, non-alcoholic beverages, commercial marine professionals, integrative practitioners , to even brides-to-be.

Some key recommendations for creating digital environments from our session:

• Listen to your customers. This may seem obvious, but most B2B publishers aren’t using social media and the interactive nature of the Web to its full extent to gain understanding of the characteristics and needs of their buyer and seller audiences.

• Facilitate communications between audience members to create a community. Prospects and buyers are more likely to exchange views on a neutral publisher’s site than on an individual vendor company’s website.

• Once you have an engaged community, consider live events that enable the community members to interact in person. The quality of the event is enhanced when attendees have already interacted online.

• Try including video interviews on your site. The shelf-life of video interviews is much longer than that of current news, and video has become much easier to produce. Put them on YouTube and they may go viral!

• Final practical tip: check your company’s profile on LinkedIn. It’s there whether you know it or not; you may as well take control of it.

The many other ideas presented and discussed in the Q&A reflected two mindsets. 1) New media tools are to be feared because they turn marketers into competitors; or 2) content produced by marketers creates new opportunities for publishers to aggregate and add value. However, this session underscored that, instead of fearing and resisting new technologies, publishers should seize the day and use them to improve relationships with customers, suppliers, advertisers, and sponsors.

Note, although this post is written for a general B2B audience, the pharmaceutical sector where pharma-sponsored content is growing at the expense of pharma advertising, would make an excellent case study on how content marketing is affecting publishers.

[1] See Roger Wilson’s summary of the ABM event  for additional perspectives on the program. 

I would like to thank the panelists who participated in the session: Melissa Chang, President, Pure Incubation; John Craven, President, BevNet.com; and Brian Randall, VP, e-media, Diversified Business Communications. 

Changing the Healthcare Story

“The world view is a narrative - it’s a narrative we got from our parents, our teachers, our employers and our culture, and to change that narrative with good data and good statistics takes more than numbers. But it can’t be done without the good numbers.”[1]Hans Rosling, Director, Gapminder Foundation.

Last week, I attended Patient-Centered IT ‘10 produced by the health and wellness team of Capstone Partners, an investment bank that serves middle market companies.  The quality of speakers and the interesting mix of health IT and health content start-ups combined to make it one of the better healthcare conferences I’ve attended in a while.

Among the highlights:

Jim Champy-of Reenginering the Corporation fame–opened the meeting with a preview of his new book, Reengineering Health Care, co-authored by Harry Greenspun, MD, CMO of Dell. Available in June, it is targeted to clinicians and exhorts them to take a stronger role in calling for improvements in our healthcare delivery system.   In Champy’s words, we “need proof to convince clinicians” of the benefits of changing and automating processes in healthcare provider institutions. 

Toward of the end of his talk, Champy expressed surprise that more consumers are not clamoring for change in our healthcare delivery system.   Why aren’t they?  I think it’s because they don’t have enough information about the often dangerous flaws in our current system or enough knowledge of how much better the system could be with improvements that are eminently doable with existing information sources and IT resources. 

Another speaker, Katrina Firlik, MD, CMO of HealthPrize, brought up the point that “data can drive better behavior“.    Her company uses techniques from human behavior studies to create engaging programs to improve patient adherence to prescription drug treatments.   

Both speakers emphasized the role of “evidence-based narratives” in changing human behavior.  We are producing and collecting increasing amounts of health-related data, and we’re making good progress in introducing standards and improving the interoperability between currently fragmented data sets, though the need for aggregators and consolidators will remain strong for the foreseeable future.

What is needed are compelling stories based on the data-stories that link back to the source data and exhibit a solid understanding of it. But Rosling warns that misrepresentations will be rampant as access to data becomes more open.  I recommend watching Rosling’s presentation that is referenced below–especially the first 20 minutes–for an entertaining and inspiring view of the power of data to change the healthcare story.

[1] Hans Rosling from the Gapminder Foundation in a presentation at World Bank, May 24, 2010.  Rosling uses examples from public health, but his descriptions of building narrative from data bases, especially using graphics, equally applies to other situations. 

Health Content: There’s an App for That in EHRs

Approximately 30,000 people convened in Atlanta last week for the HIMSS conference. HIMSS stands for Health Information Management Systems Society, and its annual event has become the meeting place for vendors and users of electronic medical and electronic health records systems (EMR/EHR). This year’s conference program had a major focus on the impact of the ARRA HITECH[1] funding and incentives for adoption of new EHR systems. One of the most common topics of discussion at the event was “meaningful use” of EHRs.

I’ll reveal my bias upfront. My background is in digital information services, and I’ve always viewed information management systems as tools for increasing the utility of the content that flows through these systems. An information system that doesn’t optimize the utility of the content in a way that adds efficiency to a process or leads to better outcomes is not all that compelling to a user.

With EHR systems, it has been long apparent to me that their value would be far higher to the clinicians who use them if the knowledge embedded in medical textbooks, scholarly research publications, and other reference sources were incorporated into the EHR systems at or near the point of care. Over the past 10-15 years, we’ve witnessed the gradual migration of information that had been stored in separate online reference systems to systems that physicians and other clinicians can access on their handheld devices or EHR/EMR screens. Epocrates for drug reference information on early PDA devices was a pioneer. Now, nearly all the reference and research content is digitized, but most of it hasn’t been incorporated into EHRs in a manner that maximizes its utility for clinicians. 

At this year’s HIMSS conference, there were myriad signs of accelerating convergence of EHR systems and health content. EHR vendors are eager to embed clinical information into their systems to demonstrate the value of incorporating accepted clinical guidelines, procedures, lab values, drug dosing suggestions, regulatory benchmarks and any other useful clinical reference content that would save the clinician’s time and lead to improved outcomes. Embedding the accepted rules and guidelines into an EHR system also provides the ability to customize recommendations based on the patient’s characteristics (sex, weight, other drugs being taken, allergies, and increasingly personal genome). The advantages of having the appropriate rules and guidelines embedded in the software are obvious. Just think TurboTax. [Note, I am focusing on clinical content in this post; benefits for administrative/performance improvement applications are equally compelling.]

Granted, medicine is more complex than the tax code. (It may be hard to believe anything is more complex than the tax code, even taking into account the state-wide variations, but it’s true!). Hospitals will continue to follow different procedures, guidelines will remain suggested guidelines to allow for individual variations, and new medical knowledge will be acquired daily. Nonetheless, the value of automating the practice of applying widely accepted medical rules and guidelines is immense-for practitioners and patients.

Medical publishers have been slow to adapt their content for usage in EHR/EMRs. Zynx Health, a Hearst Business company, was a leader in providing order set workflow systems that incorporate content. Their sister company, First DataBank, also proved the ground for transforming drug information to medication management systems. Based on my discussions at HIMSS, other medical publishers are accelerating their efforts to create clinical decision support systems from their collections of content that can be embedded in EHR/EMR systems. Elsevier, Thomson Reuters, and Wolters Kluwer, the big 3, have made great strides.

HIMSS is still a very technology-centric event with limited focus on health content and relatively few publishers exhibiting. Along with the big 3, a handful of other publishers, including EBSCO/DynaMed, Lexi-Comp, PEPID, and several patient education publishers (ExitCare, Healthwise, Patientedu.com) were present. And, of course, MedTech, the publisher of Healthcare IT New and Healthcare Finance News, which also publishes the Exhibit Guide and the daily HIMSS10 Guide, was there. BNA, a publisher of regulatory information, had a booth, too.

However, I see 2010 as a turning point for health content publishers. They have to learn to adapt their information for inclusion in EHRs. A digital version of a reference work is no longer good enough. The content has to become an “app” that can be incorporated into electronic systems.[2] Standalone content that doesn’t plug in to a user’s system or get embedded into clinical decision support systems will be left on the sidelines. By the time HIMSS11 rolls around next year, expect to see more health content publishers among the exhibitors and more clinical decision applications that can be integrated into healthcare information systems on display. Soon it will be difficult to identify where the content ends and the technology begins.

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1 Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act (HITECH Act) is part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) bill of 2009 (aka, the Stimulus Bill). For details see: http://healthit.gov/.
2 Official standards for Meaningful Use that include use of evidence-based order sets and other clinical decision support systems by 2012-2015 will fuel this trend. 

Content and Technology: A Love-Hate Relationship

In late October I participated in a couple of conferences that underscored how information technology (IT) has changed business publishing.  The first event, e-Patient Connections 2009, had a diverse audience comprised of Pharma marketers, medical communications agencies, health literacy experts, and health care publishers.  Special guests included e-Patients who spoke about their use of community, content, medical expertise, drugs and devices to manage their conditions to allow them to live life as ordinarily (or extraordinarily) as they would if they didn’t have their disease or condition. 

The second event, Data Content09, was the InfoCommerce Group’s 17th annual event for b2b directory and data publishers.  Themes ranged from improving lead-generation applications of directories, the importance of understanding the workflow needs of your customers, and the overarching theme of how over time technology is commoditizing content.

The keynote speaker at Data Content09, Sharon Rowlands, CEO of Penton Media, described how she has aligned Penton by markets and is undertaking a thorough customer analysis to understand how the company’s information can be integrated into customer workflow and improve productivity.  Sharon described why in today’s economy, in order to rise above commodity status, publishers need to offer point-of-need solutions that are tailored to each segment of their user base.   Standalone reference works and print publications may still play a role, but it is an increasingly marginal one.   

The final session of Data Content09 presented four examples of companies that are employing IT to their advantage.  These companies (Capterra, KnowWho , Skyscape, and EDA)  effectively use technology to move up the value chain.  Publishers need to ask themselves how their data can be put to use to make their customers more productive: for example, can their data be integrated into the customer’s supply chain process or sales pipeline process?  Or can technology and Web 2.0 tools help improve the quality of the data that are provided, through reviews and ratings, deeper verification, or mash-ups with related content?  In some cases, it’s as simple as offering a mobile version or including video or interactive quizzes to enhance the experience for the user. 

Forward-looking publishers recognize the inevitability of commoditization of information due to better, cheaper, and faster IT and digital distribution.  These leaders use the commoditization trend (“the race to the bottom” in the words of Barry Graubart from Alacra) to their advantage by scouting more and more free inputs for their higher value information packages,  and they know how to use commodity-level information as a marketing tool.

For more on the topic of content commoditization and the importance of moving up the content value chain, see the slides from my e-Patient Connections 2009 presentation (esp. slides 7-11).  Although focused on the opportunities in the health content sector, these slides apply to all types of information. 

Free is Not a Business Model

“Free” is an attention grabber, not a business model.   Chris Anderson, author of the recently introduced book, Free! The Future of a Radical Price , understands the power of the word “free” on many levels (including using it as a catchy title).  But even he can’t justify giving away intellectual property as a business model.  Rather, he frequently recommends a “freemium” model, where some content is widely available for free with revenue coming from upselling leads.

I wrote my last article on the commoditization of health content, before the release of  Anderson’s book.  While I agree with most of his points—especially the fact that digitized content is subject to commoditization because of low marginal costs – it’s important to keep in mind that Anderson and others are only talking about a part of the picture.  Digital content and digital distribution may drive down prices over time, but they also increase the options available for packaging content for different audiences and applications.  So, while the basic bits may be commoditized, helping customers apply those bits to solve problems, close sales, or become more efficient remains a very valuable service. 

There is a range of options available to publishers to differentiate their content in the marketplace to retain value.  The best mix of free content, premium content, tools, subsidies, and value-added services will differ depending on the nature of the content and the size of the potential audience.  Very specialized content with a limited audience may do better with a premium subscription model; news content with mass appeal may be better suited to an ad-supported free-to-the-reader model.  In both cases, some content may be used for marketing purposes to attract and retain users.

To thrive in the digital economy, publishers need to rethink how their users value the information they provide.  What do these users do with the content?  What can you do to help these users become more productive or work more efficiently?  This is the essence of infocommerce, and many publishers still have not harnessed its full potential. Some are still stuck in the old mindset that they produce “textbooks” or “newspapers” or “journals”. Instead, they should be thinking about how their content can be integrated with software to offer decision-support systems, or how their content could be used by an online marketer to shorten the sales cycle.  

In the past week, infocommerce has been the subject on Andrew Savikas’s blog at TOC at O’Reilly Publishing - Content as a Service and  Matt Dickman, a digital marketer at Fleishman-Hillard  -  Content as  Commerce  . Both  stretch their ideas a bit too far in order to make their point, but they represent creative thinking about how to readjust the way we view the value of content.

Another phrase should be added to the discussion:  “Content as Advertising”.  Publishers need to gain a renewed understanding of their advertisers’ needs and consider how content can be used as a vehicle to engage prospects.  Using free content to attract leads and build brand equity isn’t all that radical if one looks at how this “content as advertising” is supporting (and in some cases supplanting) traditional branding and lead-generation methods.  We predict that as “content as advertising” and “content as commerce” continue to evolve,  the lines between publishers and marketers will blur as marketers learn new methods for using content online to attract new customers. 

[Note, although not specifically focused on health content, this article is particularly relevant to pharmaceutical marketers and OTC health and beauty marketers.]