Joe Arcuri, Director of Multi-Channel Services, Palio

According to the Pew Internet and American Life Project eight in 10 people have gone online looking for health-related information. It seems everyone is hitting Google to research medical conditions, locate a physician, find new treatment therapies, or learn about the latest fad diet. Search is the gateway technology to other social media and inspires action. From search, people discover communities, make decisions about a prescription or treatment, increase their ability to perform self care, etc.

Beyond thinking about what someone would type into Google, getting the most from your search campaign requires understanding your target audience, knowing where they interact and gather information, and then getting them to do something, whether that’s visit your company website, make a purchase or enroll in a clinical trial.

How can companies get the most from their search campaign?

Increase digital landscape knowledge, gather information about the population you’re trying to attract and offer them something of value. The challenge is to figure out where your demographic is online and focus your communication strategy around it. Be careful not to pigeon-hole your strategy. Multichannel, multi-audience campaigns require customized SEO efforts. When you deliver value to your customers they’ll be encouraged to share their experience with others.

Create profiles on social networks such as Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Flickr, YouTube, and LinkedIn and take time to periodically review and update them. There are different places and opportunities to increase visibility. Search engines are just one way users find information – remember to think about other avenues such as social networks, linked data, mobile apps, social bookmarking sites like Reddit, StumbleUpon and Digg, online directories, and industry publications.

Know what words and phrases your reader is searching for and craft well-written copy for every Web page. High-quality information will ensure people return to your website and share it with their network. Well-written content creates higher levels of engagement, search engine rankings and promotes the likelihood of links from other sites. Create a list of targeted keywords and use them throughout your content and in various titles. Run keyword audits on competitor sites as well, particularly if they rank higher than yours in major search engines. Titles should be interesting to read, but clearly communicate what the reader can expect to learn.

First-page SEO ranking is important and requires ongoing management and optimization. If your site is appearing at page three for a given keyword phrase, it’s time to make some changes – most people don’t look beyond the first page of search results. Because rankings fluctuate, depending on competition and changes in the Google algorithm, it’s important to monitor rankings over time, and determine if you need to make changes in order to maintain top positions.

Measure everything. Providing value and information of interest to patients, medical professionals or other targets is of primary importance. Use these criteria to build searches on your company, products, and competitors and adjust your search strategy accordingly. Beyond rankings, measure conversations, engagement, brand advocates, influence and links. Appearing at the top of organic search results is a bonus, but achieving the goal you set out to achieve in the first place is a more important measure. Your position in search results or the number of followers on Twitter is meaningless if your campaign isn’t producing intended results.

Together, search and web analytics are important precisely because they are consistently and quantitatively measurable. They should be a top priority not only because they can drive your online marketing success, but because they can be a topline indicator of how successful your offline efforts are as well.

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

Meleik Goodwill, Medical Director, Palio

Here’s something we get asked all the time: “How can we learn this social media stuff?”

This question comes everywhere – at family barbecues and school functions, hissed in work hallways and mumbled shamefacedly in the back of conferences.

What if you’re not 16? What if you’re not a nerd? What if you’re not growing up with this social media stuff in your blood? What if you don’t work with a bunch of tech geeks? What if you don’t even know where to begin?

What if you blew it off, thought it was a fad, but have seen the light and now honestly DO want to learn more about social media? Are you too late? Is there no hope for you?

Relax, question-askers of the world, and follow our quick and easy five-step plan to becoming a successful social media enthusiast.

• Slideshare. This repository of Powerpoint presentations has more devoted to social media explanation than you can imagine. Go visit and search for “social media,” and you’ll be inundated with well-written, basic, informational presentations. I’m particularly fond of this one, salty langugage and all: “What the F*** Is Social Media?”
• Mashable. Arguably the preeminent social media blog, Mashable is a fire hose of social media news. It will be a good source for you to learn a lot, if you
• A. Accept that it’s going to overwhelm you with news, and therefore
• B. Do not try to read all of it, and
• C. Do not get frustrated when you don’t understand every article.
• Social Media Examiner. Another team blog on social media, it’s a bit higher-level and definitely lower-volume than Mashable.
• Google. It sounds obvious, but it’s one that people forget quite often. Anytime you see a social media term that you don’t understand, let me reassure you: at least half a dozen people have written blog posts defining it. RSS? Follow Friday? SEO? Hashtag? Just ask.
• Ask. Whoever you are in life, at this point in time a safe bet is that most every person who reads this post knows someone who is well versed in social media. They got that way by finding it interesting, and as such, are going to enjoy talking about it. Never be afraid to ask. (This is also a great way to sort out the people who actually do know a lot from the people who just like to use popular buzzwords.)

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.

Maureen Wendell, VP, Account Director, Palio

Tech pundits have been predicting the death of email for the last several years, but will social media be its killer?

Technology progression isn’t going to change. Just because something new comes along, it doesn’t mean we should start digging the grave on other technologies. The advent of television threatened the existence of radio, but here we are, decades later, still listening to radio, even if our choices abound with satellite stations.

It’s been an awfully long death march for email, but it isn’t going anywhere – at least not in the near future – and it’s still a viable part of the marketing mix. ComScore notes that while Web-based email is on the decline, mobile email is experiencing an uptick – 43.5 million users turn to their mobile devices on a nearly daily basis for their email communication needs.

In addition to remaining a cost-effective solution to drive lead generation efforts and build long-lasting relationships with clients, email is the original social animal. Email supports one-to-one communication, and while not public, it is also a mass communication tool. Thousands of Listservs still exist and messages are broadcast to groups of subscribers. Email is sharable, whether forwarded to an individual network or posted in whole or part on other digital media.

Email also lets you send attachments such as PowerPoint presentations, particularly important for business users sharing confidential collateral. While some social media platforms enable sharing of attachments via private messages, they’re not the most secure way to transmit information. In some cases users sign away their rights to ownership of any material posted, making it property of the social network.

New social media platforms such as Google+ are indeed social and collaborative, but do they offer more capability than email? Writer Brian Storms doesn’t think so. Recently he posted a side-by-side comparison of social media’s newest darling and email, illustrating similar functionality. Plus, how many people still look for their social notifications through email to learn someone responded to a Facebook post or were added to a Google+ circle?

The reality is one medium isn’t going to replace the other – both have an important place in the marketing agenda. However, knowing how and when to communicate with your target audience so your efforts work in your favor, garner more leads and open more lines of communication between you and your contacts is essential. More so, by combining the two, marketers can further extend their message, target communications to specific groups, encourage users to share and forward email through the social networks and capitalize on the many ways to capture their audiences’ attention.

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

Gillian Slattery, Interactive Producer, Palio

Everyone seems enamored with Google’s foray into social media, Google+, a social platform that enables users to segment followers and friends in circles and promises a richer social media experience. Unlike current online social models such as Facebook and Twitter, users can easily tailor messages for specific segments, resulting in greater control of their social networking participation. Google+ also incorporates video conference technology, enabling people to create “hangouts” using their webcam to chat with up to 10 members of their circles. And, it integrates a variety of online resources – RSS feeds, blogs, Google Reader, email, etc. – into a single interface.

Online enthusiasts and techno-geeks have embraced the new service in droves – Google+ has about 4.5 million users so far – and the service is still in beta. While I can respect that a beta version of anything needs to work through the kinks, I’m not yet sold on the value of this new platform.

Sure, people are snatching up invites as quickly as they’re made available, but that may be indicative of human nature’s need to access and try anything new. If it doesn’t deliver a better experience, users are going to stick with what they know. Tech writer Robert Scoble has praised Google+, yet he admits that it’s not likely to gain widespread adoption and doubts your mom will move from Facebook to Google+.

Several prominent technology pundits have professed their abandonment of other social platforms, but that may not be the smartest move for most people. Here’s why:

Your friends are not yet on it. Unless you work in or have friends with a deep love of technology, chances are they haven’t heard of this new service or they don’t see the reason to try it. Not everyone jumps to the next new shiny object. And, if your friends and colleagues aren’t on it, what’s the point? Even if they are, you may already be using LinkedIn for work, Facebook for friends and Twitter to blend the two. Do you really need another social network?

Control is subjective. Yes, you can control who you share content with, but you can’t edit the title and comments of videos and links that you post on Google+. On Facebook, you get much more control of how content is presented.

Video chat isn’t for everyone. If you work at home or “socialize” online in the evenings, you may not be camera-ready. Does your boss really need to see you in your bunny pajamas at two in the afternoon? While Google is pushing this as a revolutionary advantage, group chat is a bit reminiscent of 1992 and the option of adding a video component doesn’t make it more appealing.

Having everything in one place isn’t always a good idea. Sure, it’s convenient to have centralized access to all your information, but do you really want a single service knowing who you chat with, what you’re searching for and everything you deem sharable? Plus, in the event of a disaster, is it prudent to keep everything in one place?

You give up your right to ownership. Facebook has gotten a bad rap for using user-generated content, but if you’ve read Google+’s fine print, you know you’re selling your soul. Google owns the right to everything you post and has the ability to redistribute it as it sees fit. So, if you’re a budding photographer, you may not want to post your original images because once you do, they belong to Google, violating any copyright hold you may have on them (and thus limiting your ability to profit from content you share).

Maybe I don’t like Google+ because it’s the new kid or maybe because I’m not suffering from Facebook fatigue. While I’m dabbling around and still learning the nuances of Google+, I’m not yet ready to abandon the investment I’ve made in other social platforms.

Have you tried Google+? Will it be a category killer or go the way of Google Wave?

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

Alan Steele, VP, Head of Art, Managed Markets

Larry Page and Sergey Brin met as PhD candidates at Stanford in 1996. They founded Google in 1998. Google is a play on the word googol, a mathematical term for the number represented by the numeral 1 followed by 100 zeros. The word googol was invented by Milton Sirotta, the nephew of a well-known American mathematician Edward Kasner.

Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. Google Search is the dominant Web search engine. The numbers are staggering: Google runs over one million servers around the world, and processes over one billion search requests and about twenty-four petabytes of user-generated data every day. One petabyte is equal to 20 million four-drawer filing cabinets filled with text.

How search works: You aren’t actually searching the Web, you are searching Google’s index of the Web. Think of an index at the back of a book: the index is Google Search, the book is the Internet. Software programs called spiders (crawlers, googlebots) fetch a few Web pages, then they follow the links those pages point to, and so on, until hundreds of thousands of Web pages are selected across thousands of machines. Google decides which pages to prioritize by asking questions – more than 200 of them. How many times do the key words appear in the document? Is the document from a quality Web site or spam? How many outside links point to it, and how important are those links? Page are scored, or ranked, using these questions, and then prioritized in your search results. Each search result includes a link, the URL, and a “snippet” (short text summary). As you know, if you have entered a few keywords and hit return, all of this happens in 1/2 second!

Advertising. Google receives 90% of its revenue from advertising – over $10 billion. Ads appear to the right and above search results. Google Adwords is software that allows businesses to enter words and phrases relevant to their business, so when people are searching on Google and one of those keywords is picked up, the ad appears on the search page. A sister service, Google AdSense, allows Website owners to display these advertisements on their Website, and earn money every time ads are clicked.

Diversification. Google has grown from two computer scientists developing a Web search engine to 24,000 employees involved in innovative products such as Google Analytics, Google Earth, Google Maps, SketchUp (3D rendering), Picasa (photo sharing), GMail (email), Chrome (Web browser), YouTube, Talk (instant messaging), Buzz (social networking), Android (mobile phone app) and most recently, the Art Project (http://www.googleartproject.com/).

While researching Google, I came across one of their core beliefs: it is best to do one thing really, really well. Google does search really, really well. What is it that you, your organization, or your client do really, really well?

Extracts from Wikipedia, Google, and Gizmodo.

Palio is a full-spectrum global pharmaceutical and consumer advertising, marketing, and communications agency that excels in brand creation and specializes in brand strategy, product launches, global marketing, and digital and integrated media.

From Todd LaRoche, EVP, Managing Director of Creative, Palio

This post is a follow up to an earlier post titled Brand Reinforcement In The Digital Age. Previously, we referred to nine digital contexts that are now activating people around the world in incredibly powerful, quick and convenient ways: information, participation, conversation, application, transaction, location, diversion, aggregation/distribution, and visualization. Of course, the lines between these contexts are often rough when referenced in everyday application; there is often overlap between them and, as developers bring new thinking to market, there is often the intentional goal of fusing the contexts to make things even easier or more powerful for users.

As an example, Google has been continually ‘upgrading’ their map/location services with more and more information overlays, so that now users often go to Google maps for a lot more than just a location fix or driving directions; they will go there to find businesses like restaurants, which then links to reviews, etc. — location and information contexts merge. Twitter, which originally was a purely ‘conversation context’ based service, through the use of other applications, can now also avail you of a breakdown of other tweeters based on their proximity to you — conversation and location contexts merge.

So now, with digital contexts engaging more people every day and – as those contexts are fused and morphed – in more dimensional ways, there is a huge opportunity for marketers to find their brands’ presence right in the thick of their target’s psyche… but not as interruptive hawker; rather, as a service provider that offers what it is their target is interested in. In this way, not only is the line between promotion and content blurred, the lines between advertising and application, and product and service, are blurred as well.

Think about it… If you’re selling surfboards, don’t just spray your target with interruptive online/offline messages. Provide them with an experience – maybe an app that allows them to access real-time views of wave break at surfing sites… or that locates surfing equipment shops… or that allows surfers in local areas to communicate with each other about conditions… or that aggregates surfing videos, books etc. In doing so, you’ll be gaining the favor of your target by helping them do, and enjoy more, what it is they need your product for. And right there you have blurred the line between advertising and content or service. Selling your product is about giving your target a more involving way to appreciate your product.

So get out of the mind-set of talking about yourself (your product) and into the digital contexts that will draw your target to you because you’ve given him a deeper appreciation of, and a deeper involvement in, the activity for which your product was created.