If 2011 showed us anything, it’s that the people have the power.

Marketing messages and buying digital advertising is still important, but companies today are using advertising less to promote their products and more to direct consumers to their Facebook or Twitter pages. With conversations taking center stage for extending brand messages, it’s time for pharmaceutical companies to go culture casting and find brand influencers to support them in communicating key messages.

Pharmaceutical companies have long relied on other people to pitch their products and tell their story. Key opinion leaders such as physicians who hold academic titles at medical schools often partner with pharmaceutical companies to speak at industry events or participate in detailing prescription drugs to doctors. Physicians have also long been the conduit of information for patients. But, with more individuals going online for health information, their role is changing.

Physicians will continue to play an active role in influencing decisions, but having a doctor endorse a drug or treatment is similar to a mother giving advice to a teenager. While parents are often right, it’s the peer group that holds the most influence. The same is true for communicating with patients; other people may be the most influential opinion leaders. Going culture casting and finding the most active patient participants can help influence public opinion in an authentic manner.

Pharmaceutical advertising has incorporated the stories of real patients to connect with customers. Smoking-cessation drug Chantrix has people sharing their experiences quitting smoking. Long Island Jewish Medical Center uses a narrator to tell the tale of real patient encounters. New York Columbia Presbyterian hospital features actual patients who are undergoing treatment or have overcome an illness thanks to physician expertise and state-of-the-art facilities.

Market research supports the power of peer influence. Tapping into the power of empowered patients can play a meaningful role in other’s health care decisions.

Why should pharma cultivate more brand ambassadors?

*There will be negative stories. Transparency is a must, and that means patients will be posting about procedures that went wrong or drugs that weren’t effective. Encouraging patients who had a more positive experience to post and share their stories can provide balance and perpetuate positive messages.

*Buzz builds buzz. An expert word-of-mouth network can support the launch of a new drug, foster discussion around new health guidelines, or raise awareness of a clinical trial. Getting people talking – whether that’s posting comments on your blog, retweeting messages or interacting with their followers and sharing opinions and views – can provide the support patients need to help them make informed decisions. And, the more influential and vocal an individual becomes, the more their network listens to them and turns to them for advice.

*People remember stories. People tuned into your culture tell the most compelling stories – which are much more memorable than marketing messages. That’s because people remember stories that elicit an emotion and it’s sometimes hard to differentiate marketing messages. Plus, as people develop a following, they build trust and their opinions tend to be valued.

The current pharma landscape still doesn’t offer guidelines for social media participation, but it’s not stopping patients from talking and influencing their networks. Going culture casting and enlisting the help of the most influential patients can help companies establish an online presence, inform people of an unknown disease or treatment, elicit hope or provide support to patients and improve disease care.

What are you doing to engage patients and get people talking?

Palio is an advertising agency revolutionizing pharmaceutical and healthcare marketing to create experiences that will Never Be Forgotten.

(Image credit: biojobblog.com)

Some of the many things we tend to do with our global creative raves is to always try to bring fresh voices into the room, find fresh locations, tear down barriers and fail rapidly through hundreds of ideas until we succeed. And then, with a smaller portion of the group actively debating and editing the ideas, we push harder and deeper until we arrive at a set of discreet ideas. This is a lot of heavy lifting for the people involved, and one of the key aspects of making brainstorming work is to create a safe environment that encourages the rapid failure and spontaneity needed to spark fresh ideas.

But also there has to be a method to the madness.

Critical thinking is essential to success. An open critique that pressure tests the ideas through effective moderation of a strategic discussion is always needed. Effective critique is a lost art. Too often misunderstood and mislabeled as negative thinking, critique – when understood and harnessed as essential to the evaluation and elevation of ideas – plays a key role in all aspects of business, not just ideation. If the groups are a relatively small (10-15 people), then I think open critique can be effectively moderated. If your group is bigger than this, select a smaller, cross-sectional subgroup as your critical thinkers.

When brainstorming fails, when ideation fails, they can fail for countless reasons, many more reasons than those that exist to support why they succeed. There is a fine balance that is very difficult to maintain. Ideas are fragile things that are often doomed before they even begin to live due to the many, ultimately oppressive things an idea must overcome.

Some of the more common bailey wicks include briefs that are unclear, with too many objectives or key communication thoughts, making it near impossible to judge the success of any given idea. This problem is a sure sign the brief has become a parking lot for failure.

Ideas can also suffer from a lack of alignment across team members, where personal bias and opinion, no matter how worthy or potentially insightful, conflict with the tenets of the brief (assuming you have a solid brief).

Ideas also suffer from their own complexity, or I should say from becoming more complex. In a brainstorming session, it is easy to lose the big ideas.

Let me explain. Big ideas very often at first seem quite small and are easily overlooked. A word and a picture, one or the other, sitting alone on a big white sheet of paper can be the most fearsome of ideas. Other ideas, by comparison, can seem bigger at first because they have more going on they seem more dynamic, when in fact, they may simply be loaded down with what amounts to little more than window dressing. These are complexities and complex ideas most often have much less ability to be plastic. What do I mean by plastic? It’s the ability to be moldable, to move with your brand, and more important with how your consumer perceives, experiences, and ever more – communicates with your brand. So, the thought of big ideas being plastic is something to keep in mind – this is just one word to help describe a potentially big idea. It’s not the only word. The point is that a simple idea is an elegant solution. The simple idea – the big idea – is an idea that grows in meaning, depth, and definition the more it is used. When we work up a potentially big idea through our 360 worksheet, it is not limited by this exercise, but is expanded as a result of it. Lesser ideas reveal their vulnerabilities as a result of this exercise.

Ernest Hemingway said something about writing that I think applies to all creativity, “We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.”

Coming up with the big idea is not easy, nor is it any easier to recognize the big idea when you see it. This is one less obvious reason why time is such an important factor in creativity. The big idea might be the first idea you come up with, but it might also take days of ideation to see its true value.

If we approach our every day as a brainstorm, days lived without fear of being “wrong,” where failure is understood as part of a larger success – working together – we would more easily and consistently craft work of lasting value.

Highly functioning, idea-driven companies are built on this culture. They also have discipline and order and process and financial goals, but those things are all used to support the creation of a great product and not as rate limiting factors. When these instruments of any successful business become the business itself, then no manner of ideation will ever be truly and consistently successful.

In the end, culture trumps strategy, process, execution, and ideation. Even the most skillful and creative brainstorm session will fail to deliver success if the culture of the company (or teams involved) is not built on an open mind with complete alignment on the goal to be achieved.

Palio is an advertising agency revolutionizing pharmaceutical and healthcare marketing to create experiences that will Never Be Forgotten.

Todd LaRoche, EVP, Managing Director of Creative, Palio

Just last summer, Hyper Island brought their brains to Saratoga Springs and about 50 of us Palio folks devoured every minute of their Hyper Island Master Class – an intensive 3-day immersion into digital media and strategy development.

If you’ve never heard of Hyper Island, take a look at their Web site. In a nutshell, Hyper Island is a Swedish-based, global learning leader that helps companies “stay up to date with the latest trends in interactive media…” and “fully understand how to create efficiency within [their] organization.”

There was a lot of excitement and anticipation leading up to Hyper Island’s visit, and once they got here, things took off quickly. The three days we spent with the Hyper Island team had an immediate and lasting influence on our organization; one that is paying great dividends in terms of how we’re engaging our clients and how we’re structuring and managing our Agency resources and overall growth.

Overall, and among other things, the Hyper Island training has helped us:

• Identify ways we can jumpstart our digital thinking on any given brand,

• Brainstorm digital tactics as part of an integrated, 360-degree media plan, not simply as “add-ons,”

• Bring more depth to our strategic thinking,

• Attain a higher-level understanding of the Web and digital media,

• Wield practical tools that have helped us to better understand the interrelationships of social media and traditional media and bridge the two.

Here’s what some folks were saying once the training was underway. Following are a few post-Hyper Island learnings/observations.

Going Digital – It’s a Frame of Mind

One of the most important things we learned from our Hyper Island experience is that no one group or individual should, or can, own digital strategy and deployment. Today, no one can escape the grasp of digital (screen-based) technology, and no brand can ignore the power of social media as a communications conduit. Digital/social media is ubiquitous and it has to be something that all of us – in creative, account, planning, media and production – leverages and shapes in each of our brand engagements. In other words, everyone is, to some degree, an expert in digital communication because it impacts all of us constantly. And that leads to the realization that smart digital thinking can come from anywhere in the Agency – it’s a frame of mind, not a skill to which some siloed, techno-savvy group lays claim.

Fundamental Shifts

The furious growth of digital/social media has spurred some fundamental shifts in the marketing world, and these shifts, at a macro-level, need to be understood and embraced in order for any marketing or advertising agency to stay competitive. Here are some randomly related thoughts/learnings from our Master Class that capture this (and check out this footage of folks talking about their experience after the training):

• Digital technology is now allowing for content-based marketing strategies, designed to “pull” rather than “push” brand awareness and messaging, to become the rule rather than the exception

• Digital/social media has put never-before-seen power into the customer’s hands

• Having a digital footprint is essential to brand survival

• Marketing is now very much about conversations… and brands need to partake

• Don’t always be a slave to the big idea… thinking tactically first, in some cases, can be the best way to meet a specific marketing challenge

How Is Palio Different After The Island’s Visit?

In fundamental ways, Palio hasn’t changed at all: we’re still an idea company, we’re still all about connecting brands and consumers. But how we go about that has changed in places. Here are just a few examples of how the Hyper Island experience has brought change to Palio:

Now, when we present campaign concepts to our clients, we include what we call a 360-degree Worksheet. It’s a way for us to develop and present our creative thinking in the context of media channels, traditional and digital alike. If an idea doesn’t easily spawn executions around the media horn, it’s probably not something we’ll want to pursue.

We took what we were calling our Incubator, or our digital production group, and eliminated its name as a formal reference. This has served to help break down lines of distinction between digital and non-digital work teams. And though this might sound like an academic change, it has actually gone a long way to promote an efficient and homogenous work environment whereby all of us in the company, not just those in the “Incubator,” are engaged in developing digital strategy and tactics.

As well, we centralized our multichannel production services in the Project Management group and shifted our role definition of Project Managers to Producers. And we evolved the title of our Digital Strategists to, simply, Brand Strategists. Again, it’s pretty amazing how these rather academic-sounding changes have served to unify the company in a media-agnostic fashion.

We looked at our own brand’s digital footprint and made it bigger and more robust. In part, that included creating a new Website and deploying a more focused and active SEO strategy across all of our social media outlets, including Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube, Vimeo and Flickr. We also developed a pharmaceutical app wiki called Pharmapps. Right now we’re building the mobile app for it.

We founded our Social Media Council – a committee of cross-functional roles that is tapping people across the organization to help expand our brand’s awareness and develop messaging to potential clients and employees as well as industry watchdogs.

Internally, we’re using Facebook and Yammer more and more for various closed-group communications. That shift has created a more dialogue-driven type of thinking and behavior across our organization… one that also brings a more immediate sense of involvement among team members. How much longer will office e-mail be around?

In a nutshell, Hyper Island was a brilliant rallying cry that brought our organization a new focus on digital media and strategy. Check out the video here/above to get a sense of how inspiring the entire event was for us. In some respects, it was a reaffirmation of what we already knew: digital media is not rocket science, and since we’re not trying to put our clients’ brands on the moon, that’s a good thing. We’re still here to put our clients’ brands into the hearts and minds of the consumer, which digital media can help us with in more effective ways than anything we’ve seen in the past. As Guy Mastrion, Palio’s Chief Creative Officer, says in the video, “Now it’s just a matter of aligning the opportunities and the resources with the right clients.”

Palio is an advertising agency revolutionizing pharmaceutical and healthcare marketing to create experiences that will Never Be Forgotten.

Mike Smith, Digital Strategist, Palio

If you had asked a marketer back in 1990 whether digital marketing is right for the pharma industry, the most affirmative answer you’d probably get was: “It depends.”

After all, the regulatory framework was almost non-existent, fewer people were consuming online marketing and those that did were generally just part of a top-down messaging adaptation that followed a traditional one-to-many, broadcast-centric, message-and-channel orthodoxy at the time.

Fast forward two decades to today: One variable hasn’t changed much – We’re still looking at an uncertain regulatory framework for digital marketing. But the question of whether pharma should be marketing online is largely settled, and the answer is a resounding “yes.”

Make that a decided “yes, but…” There’s success to be found, but it often means overcoming internal inertia or hesitancy.

“Yes, but everything’s social these days and we can’t trust the sales force with social media.” OK, so keep social media – which is really nothing more than engaging target audiences with an authentic voice via interactive channels – squarely in marketing. Certainly, some companies are taking that approach and it won’t likely be the kiss of death for your next blockbuster product. But increasingly, the companies that can respond quickest and most effectively via social channels are the ones where many voices – often, voices closest to the prospects – are involved.

“Yes, but measuring ROI on digital marketing is hard/challenging/scary/voodoo.” No, it isn’t. In fact, online advertising delivers the sort of targeting and measurable results old-school advertisers would have only dreamed of having. When people talk about the challenges of measuring ROI in online marketing, they usually mean one of two things: Either the innate conundrum of relevant ROI numbers from social media or the relatively low click-through rates in some online ads. The former usually stems from treating social media as a retail campaign when most of it is more akin to branding efforts. The latter? Well, there are lots of reasons, but increasingly the first thing to look at in a poorly performing online campaign is whether or not there was a parallel social strategy to help extend it.

“Yes, but our domain expertise is in the non-digital world – we lack the human capital to fully leverage online marketing.” Then hire someone – or lots of people to implement, execute and manage your program. That may sound like a flippant answer, but here’s a non-flippant number: In 2010, 79% of the world’s 100 largest companies used at least once social media channel for their marketing. And another: Twitter adds 300,000 new users a day. Against that kind of momentum, online is no longer about “domain expertise” – it’s an immediate, strategic business imperative.

It’s not 1990 anymore – the question isn’t whether pharma should be fully immersed in digital marketing, but rather: “Who will change the game with the next big breakthrough campaign?”

Will it be you?

Palio is an advertising agency revolutionizing pharmaceutical and healthcare marketing to create experiences that will Never Be Forgotten.

Todd LaRoche, EVP, Managing Director of Creative, Palio

There is no slow season in health care. Whether seeing patients in between personal and professional appointments or a spike in patient visits during cold and flu season, doctors are always busy. For sales reps, this results in a greater challenge getting face time with doctors.

Sales reps may not be used to communicating in a two-minute window, but doctors, nurses and office staff are conditioned to interact that way. Last year on Pixels and Pills, I wrote about being brief and getting to the point when communicating with doctors. That still holds true, but with more doctors tethered to their smartphones and iPads, we need to use technology to change how we communicate with doctors.

Give them what they want. Sales reps need to get better at tracking information related to each sales call, including the doctor’s contact information and preferred mode of communication, patient population needs and prescription-writing activity. With a compressed amount of time to detail new medicines and deliver marketing messages, it’s important to address those most relevant to each practice. Having better information, sales reps can then implement more doctor-centric strategies and design more relevant campaigns.

Get your high tech game on. It’s important to identify creative ways to convey information. For doctors who are digitally savvy and prefer electronic communication, an interactive iPad app or digital brochure can deliver value and foster stronger relationships – all while providing an efficient and more cost-effective means of communicating beyond the traditional face-to-face call. And, physicians can review information at a time that is convenient to them – not when they have an office full of patients.

Speak in sound bites. If you can convey information in a 140-character tweet, you can do it in the real world. But if you have mere minutes of a physician’s time – whether in the office or at a virtual event – a succinct presentation style can be a real differentiator.

Recognize that it’s all in the details. While overall sales and market penetration matter immensely to the organization’s bottom line, at the individual sales rep’s level there are other metrics worth tracking in this limited-face-time environment. Average amount of time spent discussing products with a physician, requests for additional information, volume of sample product distributed or prescription-writing activity are just three of many ways to track messaging effectiveness by proxy measures. Understanding how physicians want to receive and interact information can help you determine the best technology solutions to facilitate information exchange and meet their needs.

Technology is creating new and exciting opportunities for communication that enable us to take evolving communication preferences into account when providing new product information, clinical alerts or product updates. By incorporating communication technology, electronic promotional activity, and virtual events into our communication arsenal and demonstrating depth and breadth of product knowledge, sales reps can provide valuable interactions with doctors and achieve their objectives.

Palio is an advertising agency revolutionizing pharmaceutical and healthcare marketing to create experiences that will Never Be Forgotten.

Gregory Alderisio, Senior Copywriter, Palio

Let’s say you see an ad in a magazine or on the Web and you absolutely hate the headline. Who do you blame? Naturally, the wretched, abominable writer. Or what if the art direction is so banal or so hideous you recoil in horror. Whose fault is that? Of course, the hapless, no-talent art director.

Pretty much everything wrong with an ad can be laid at the feet of two people: the AD and CW. It’s the same with the glory. A good headline: well, obviously that came from the unique mind of a gifted writer. An inspired visual? Kudos to the innovative genius of the art director. Why would it be any other way? A pair of people did the ad so let’s praise/stone them depending upon how it turned out. And of course at their year-end review, the creative team with too many boring, dull, moronically-simplistic ads gets labeled as lazy, timid or unimaginative. On the other hand, the team with award-winning work gets a raise, a bonus and a big fat ego.

Because that’s the way many agencies are run, it’s got to be a good system, right? Well, maybe not.

What if instead of praising or blaming two people for the work, we praised/blamed everyone? Not just in words, but in more tangible ways. Planners, account people, medical directors, creative directors, producers – what if all their raises, bonuses, perks and promotions depended upon the creativity of the work their accounts produced? Overnight agency output would improve. Because it can’t be just the creative team who’s motivated to do good work, that’s not enough. Two people alone can’t push good work through a sea of indifference and nitpickers. Every department has to want the good stuff and have a vested interest in getting it sold and seeing it produced.

This may sound self-serving but ultimately it serves the client because clients get better work that attracts more attention. And brands that get noticed are brands that have a better chance to succeed and make clients happy.

If we’re comfortable calling out creative work that’s dull and lifeless, we should be just as comfortable doing the same with a dull key thought, a me-too insight, or a toothless medical claim. We can’t just sleepwalk our way through customer research, message development and strategy generation then sell ho-hum ideas to our clients and expect the work produced to be brilliant.

When work is great, chances are it came from an inspired insight or a focused strategy and that contribution needs to be acknowledged. Great work is also impeccably produced so we have to recognize producers and art buyers when a finished idea looks just as cool as everyone imagined it would when it was merely a line drawing.

In other words, we all sink or swim together. The sooner every department is held accountable for the creative output in a concrete way, the quicker the entire agency will be devoted to bringing truly memorable ideas to the market.

Palio is an advertising agency revolutionizing pharmaceutical and healthcare marketing to create experiences that will Never Be Forgotten.

Bob Mason, EVP, Managing Director of Brand Strategy, Palio

Last year I wrote about the “Checking in” fad, but is it gaining momentum… especially in the pharmaceutical and healthcare marketing world?  Checking in is still a niche activity but with over 50 percent of mobile users armed with smartphone technology, this will be the year it’s moving to the masses as individuals use these apps to discover new places, people and information. Why are “geo-services” appealing? Because they are an exciting, interactive way to engage an audience, particularly in health care, and there is a pool of opportunity for all the applications and services out there as health care marketers look for new ways to engage consumers.

How does location-based information help?

Be in the Know Wherever you Go – Most people pack their prescriptions prior to traveling but there are times when you need a “vacation fill.” Years ago, being in an unfamiliar area meant driving in circles to find a neighborhood pharmacy. Today, with applications like Foursquare, not only can people find the nearest location, they can also access reviews, promotions, tips and driving directions.

Imagine needing emergency medicine such as an epinephrine pen. A mobile device with a geographical information system can help people find the nearest pharmacy, check drug availability and get required medication in time.

Map your Destination – Most rental car companies offer GPS tracking devices for an extra fee and most smartphones come with GPS pre-installed. Travelers and first-timers can also use location-based technology to find the nearest hospital, walk-in medical clinic or dialysis facility.

Connect Environmental Concerns with State of Health – Individuals that check in everywhere can uncover patterns that may provide insight about how their locations affect their state of health. Does Chinese Restaurant Syndrome strike whenever you visit your favorite take out?

Network with Like-Minded People – Newly diagnosed with diabetes, fibromyalgia or breast cancer? Social media applications bring together people from anywhere in the world, providing a forum for virtual support and exchange of ideas right from your iPhone, Blackberry or other handheld device. Want to meet in person? Location-based social apps can help you find people in your vicinity with the same concerns.

Location-based technology is changing how we shop, communicate and learn. Foursquare has surpassed six million users, but people are interested in more than checking in. Interest in on-the-spot mobile coupons is growing, and health care providers can use location-based technology to not just educate and inform consumers, but inspire them into action. Social mobile communication has a strong outlook for the future and should be a key component of the marketing strategy.

Palio is an advertising agency revolutionizing pharmaceutical and healthcare marketing to create experiences that will Never Be Forgotten.

Jessica Henkel, Assistant Account Executive, Palio

Are you concerned about your privacy? Nearly half of online users are, according to a 2010 Marist poll. Whether it’s fear of corporate spying, unwarranted access to private information, personal details landing in unscrupulous hands or breaching patient confidentiality, there are always sensitivities when sharing information online. Some people and companies have taken an extreme approach, choosing to limit or avoid participating in social networks. But what happens when you don’t participate?

Not having a social networking presence can severely limit your connections and cultural literacy. For companies this can be especially detrimental, especially as more people conduct internet research as their first point of contact when making decisions. Like the lottery, you can’t win it if you’re not in it, and if you’re not participating where your customers are interacting, you’re missing opportunities and potentially leaving money on the table.

We meet online. How relationships are formed is changing. It used to be community social events, business conferences or the racquetball court that brought people together. Today people hang out on online listservs, Facebook pages, Twitter chats or make connections as the result of reading and replying to blog posts. We know more people from around the globe, who speak different languages and enjoy different cultures. Not participating in social networks severely limits your connections and hampers your ability to form relationships with people outside your immediate geography.

Credibility can also be called into question. Patients considering a medical procedure or partners interested in working with a company and its employees go online to gather background information. They not only check your Website to learn what you do, but they’re searching social networks to see what you are posting and what your customers are saying about you. Social listening and support can boost credibility by showing how you respond to customer feedback. There’s also something to be said for approachability and accessibility – both of which are conveyed through social interactions.

Build trust and authority. Social media can make the difference between being found and not found because of its high SEO return. More contributions, discussions, and shared links lead to greater social influence. When you stay out of the conversation, you miss the opportunity to position company thought leaders as experts or establish your brand as the leading solution to your customers’ problems.

You give others control. Even if your stance to shun social media is firm, your customers are not going to follow your lead. Messages about your company, products or services will be broadcast by others and without your lead can contribute to misinformation at best or reputation damage at worst.

Building a strong brand presence requires social media participation. While it’s right to be concerned about privacy and take steps to protect it, it’s also important to realize that walling off your company or yourself can put you at a disadvantage.

With GPS technology on our smartphones, optical readers used by airports and government facilities and technology to monitor our online behavior, privacy isn’t what it used to be. Purposely avoiding the social networks – even under the guise of privacy concerns – is no longer feasible for companies that want to succeed.

What are you doing to increase social participation in your organization?

Palio is an advertising agency revolutionizing pharmaceutical and healthcare marketing to create experiences that will Never Be Forgotten.

Tess Okura, VP, Account Director, Palio

Like many children of the 70’s, I could rattle off the phone number of every person I knew and other random facts. Learning and memorizing things came easily, but it was a necessity – it was a time when there was no smart phone or Internet to look things up.

Today, however, technology has provided with so much information at our fingertips that our critical thinking skills are often less exercised or, perhaps, are over-stimulated, and that can be dangerous if you want to lead with thoughtful strategic thinking in the pharmaceutical and healthcare marketing space.

Though we’re now incredibly aided by technology, we’re also bombarded with more information than ever before. Everything we do from work to play to interacting with families and friends stimulates our brains, helping us learn and acquire new information each day. Add in the amount of digital information being created through emails, instant messages, blog posts, Web sites, Facebook updates, digital phone calls, podcasts and more, our brains are constantly in overdrive.

Technology has certainly made information more available and accessible, and it offers unprecedented convenience. Many technologies are sold on the promise that it will free up time to help us be more thoughtful and creative thinkers. While Google and ubiquitous access to a variety of media has put a world of knowledge at our fingertips, it may not necessarily be making us any smarter.

The decline of critical thinking skills is one area of concern. Education reporter Trip Gabriel recently discussed the quality of learning in online curriculum, where advocates cite its convenience and critics say that it’s all about saving money.

Jack London was the subject in Daterrius Hamilton’s online English 3 course. In a high school classroom packed with computers, he read a brief biography of London with single-paragraph excerpts from the author’s works. But the curriculum did not require him, as it had generations of English students, to wade through a tattered copy of “Call of the Wild” or “To Build a Fire.”

Hamilton, who had failed English 3 in a conventional classroom and was hoping to earn credit online to graduate, was asked a question about the meaning of social Darwinism. He pasted the question into Google and read a summary of a Wikipedia entry. He copied the language, spell-checked it and emailed it to his teacher.

Google may help speed the time to answer, but changing the depth and breadth of instruction can be detrimental to developing problem solving skills and memory recall. These proficiencies are important for intellectual development and fostering innovation.

Search efficiency is also changing how we interact. Whereas people might have deliberated at length over a given topic, being able to readily access information lessens the need for debate and argumentation. What’s the point when you can just Google for an answer? This can be potentially limiting because new ideas are born from looking at old concepts in a new light.

Gary Small, professor of Psychiatry and Aging at UCLA School of Medicine has looked at how search is affecting our brains and notes that it’s not making us smart or stupid, but it is changing how we think.  What search does, he says, is change how we use our memory.

Unlike children of the 70’s who had to memorize phone numbers, people today can simply look them up in their handheld device or press a button for speed dial. There is no need for active thinking. However, we still have to pick and choose what we need to remember. Individuals attending an industry trade show need to be able to remember people’s names, what company they work for and if and when they’ve interacted. It would be awkward to need to look up that information on a handheld device.

Our prior experiences, education and ability to activate short-term memory help us search online, but for interacting in the real world, technology can be used to encourage brain fitness. Small suggests activities such as Sudoku puzzles, games and other memory techniques in addition to physical training and healthy living to improve brain efficiency and brain health as we age.

Search and other technologies are indeed changing how we think. The way we use memory is being altered as we move to a society of searchers and gathers. Technology has created a world where information changes quickly, and ideas can be distributed almost instantaneously. Individuals need to develop and nurture critical thinking skills so they can continue to innovate, evaluate information and arrive at thoughtful conclusions.

Palio is an advertising agency revolutionizing pharmaceutical and healthcare marketing to create experiences that will Never Be Forgotten.

Michele Boxley, Account Director, Palio

Most businesses – certainly, most businesses that have been through a crisis – understand the value of a good disaster plan. Whether you’re an advertising agency like Palio that specializes in pharmaceutical and healthcare marketing, or any other kind of business, when trouble strikes, that’s exactly the wrong time to be sorting out how to talk to customers and the media, or how best to communicate with employees.

So, if we stipulate the value of having a plan in place, then what goes in it? Or, more specifically, how can you leverage the new social, digital and mobile communication tools when disaster strikes? And what should you watch out for? Consider the following:

Have a formal cascade of options. If disaster strikes and you need to communicate with a far-flung workforce, employees should have no question about which channel or tool is the right one for official company updates – that’s a core component of most disaster plans. But, what if your primary tool is damaged or unavailable? Depending on the scenario, it’s possible for email, phones and the company intranet to all be down simultaneously – and that’s when employees need to know what other official options exist.

Keep risk management front and center. The organizational imperative in a crisis is not to communicate with everyone and anyone who wants information – that’s a time sink, a risk and a distraction. Rather, the imperative is to manage risk at every turn. That means looking at social, digital and mobile communication tools through two lenses, at once both weighing their potential to quickly reach a dispersed and mobile workforce, and understanding their potential to generate distracting and counterproductive public chatter in a crisis if not properly managed.

Your vendor’s disaster could be your disaster as well. Many organizations have embraced enterprise-level social collaboration platforms like Socialtext, gaining great benefits from the software-as-a-service model. But, that begs the question: What happens when disaster strikes a core communications vendor? If your organization can’t afford the lost productivity of downtime, go beyond simple service level agreements with strategic communications vendors, and ask to see their actual disaster and business-continuity plans. Not only will you have more insight into their resiliency during a disaster, but you may walk away with ideas for how to better prepare your own organization.

Social and mobile media are an incredible asset in a time of crisis, particularly as today’s workforce gets out of the office and into the field in ever greater numbers. However, “social for the sake of social” is never a good idea – especially in crisis and disaster communications. So, explore your options, but don’t assume anything is a must-do just because social currently gets so much attention.

Palio is an advertising agency revolutionizing pharmaceutical and healthcare marketing to create experiences that will Never Be Forgotten.