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Who Follows Big Pharma On Twitter?

Do “normal” people – patients, doctors, nurses, pharmacists, life scientists, etc – follow Big Pharma on Twitter? I’ve long had a hunch that most of the followers (and by followers I mean people who are actually paying attention) of Pharma accounts are primarily consultants, marketers, PR pros, social media evangelists and others interested in Pharma’s use of the Web (including myself).

So I decided to gather the key words in the profiles of a select group of Pharma companies. I used the service TwitterSheep to generate tag clouds of these profiles. This isn’t a purely scientific approach, but it’s reasonable enough to provide some insight into whose following Pharma. My friends Silja Chouquet (@Whydotpharma) and Andrew Spong (@AndrewSpong) each provided great insight into Pharma and Twitter. You can read their posts here and here, respectively.

Based on the tag clouds, here are the top ten key words in the profiles of followers of selected Pharma companies: Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at Phil Baumann*

Online Advertising 3.0: Harnessing Social Media Users For Precision Targeting Of Friends

Do you advertise on your social networks? You might not think that you do, but every time you tweet or update your status on Facebook or post a picture to Flickr, you’re advertising – perhaps not with commercial or self-promotional intent, but you are advertising something: an item of news, a humorous post or a moment from your vacation. I don’t believe that Advertising is bad; but there is bad advertising, the kind that pointlessly interrupts and annoys and leads to no action.

As the Web expands and evolves from a tangle of static web pages towards social and real time streams, Advertising will need to evolve into a suppler and friendlier animal. Google may have perfected Advertising on the traditional web platform, but the door is open to new players who can socialize advertising. It’s not an easy task: the bull’s eye of targeting customers is getting tinier everyday. Enter MyLikes, a start up which has taken on the task of helping advertisers reach their base. Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at Phil Baumann*

Top 12 Features That Twitter Should Offer

Image representing Twitter as depicted in Crun...
Image via CrunchBase

After returning to Twitter after a week-long break, I’ve had the chance to look at the service with a freshened perspective. Twitter needs to stay simple – that’s what drives its success. Nevertheless, I believe Twitter needs to mature and provide exploits of its service. While the basics of Twitter aught to remain, Twitter, Inc. can build a wider ecosystem around those basics which could make it a true contender as an important part of the Web.

Services like Posterous and Friendfeed offer features such as replying via email. Although third-parties could develop similar features via Twitter’s API, it’s time that Twitter mature a bit. If Twitter plays its cards right, it could offer itself as much more than just as the modern equivalent of a telecommunications utility (which it is).

  1. Email content, replies, DMs. We should have an option to respond to replies & DMs via email. There are services out there such as Topify but they don’t provide the most secure methods. Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at Phil Baumann*

Thyroid Awareness: Dr. Val Tells ABC News To Check Their Necks

January is thyroid disease awareness month, and I was invited to educate the good people at Let’s Talk Live about this often-forgotten little gland. For this segment, I used Twitter to poll my friends about interesting thyroid factoids. Thanks to Nick Genes @blogborygmi who reminded me of the connection between carpal tunnel syndrome and hypothyroidism and to Meredith Gould @meredithgould who mentioned that depression sometimes has a thyroid-related cause.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uCk1MA5dhjY

Read more »

Dr. Val Tells Lee Aase (At Mayo Clinic) About Her Innovative Primary Care Practice

valabcThanks to my friends at #HCSM (a Twitter group created to spark discussion about healthcare and social media) for inviting me as a guest speaker on their 1 year anniversary. We had a special Blog Talk Radio event, moderated by Lee Aase (Mayo Clinic’s social media guru) and Dana Lewis. Tom Stitt and Meredith Gould were also critical in coordinating programming and technical arrangements.

The goal of the show was to discuss how social media and healthcare intersect – with a diverse group of 8 speakers (from patients, to physicians, to industry and insurance stakeholders). I’ve edited my clip for your listening pleasure (please excuse the technical glitch near the end – you’ll know it when you hear it). The full 2 hour show may be downloaded from Blog Talk Radio.

[Audio:https://getbetterhealth.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/leeaasedrval.mp3]

For more information about my practice, check out DocTalker.com Read more »

Latest Interviews

IDEA Labs: Medical Students Take The Lead In Healthcare Innovation

It’s no secret that doctors are disappointed with the way that the U.S. healthcare system is evolving. Most feel helpless about improving their work conditions or solving technical problems in patient care. Fortunately one young medical student was undeterred by the mountain of disappointment carried by his senior clinician mentors…

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How To Be A Successful Patient: Young Doctors Offer Some Advice

I am proud to be a part of the American Resident Project an initiative that promotes the writing of medical students residents and new physicians as they explore ideas for transforming American health care delivery. I recently had the opportunity to interview three of the writing fellows about how to…

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Latest Book Reviews

Book Review: Is Empathy Learned By Faking It Till It’s Real?

I m often asked to do book reviews on my blog and I rarely agree to them. This is because it takes me a long time to read a book and then if I don t enjoy it I figure the author would rather me remain silent than publish my…

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The Spirit Of The Place: Samuel Shem’s New Book May Depress You

When I was in medical school I read Samuel Shem s House Of God as a right of passage. At the time I found it to be a cynical yet eerily accurate portrayal of the underbelly of academic medicine. I gained comfort from its gallows humor and it made me…

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Eat To Save Your Life: Another Half-True Diet Book

I am hesitant to review diet books because they are so often a tangled mess of fact and fiction. Teasing out their truth from falsehood is about as exhausting as delousing a long-haired elementary school student. However after being approached by the authors’ PR agency with the promise of a…

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