Virology in healthcare social media
Posted on 06. Jun, 2010 by neilcrump in Communications, Health, Industry, Web 2.0
As Nike’s World Cup Writes the Future (WtF) campaign, which Aurora loves, continues to trump their previous viral success, I posed the following questions to the #hcsmeu community at the week before last’s Friday (28 May 2010) tweet-up: What are the best examples of a healthcare campaign in Europe going viral and whether we have anything to learn from Nike’s success?
What I found interesting about the discussion that took place during the tweet-up is that there are very few genuinely good examples of EU health campaigns that could be cited by the group. This post points out some interesting thoughts and insights from the #hcsmeu community with some commentary from me…
So what makes a campaign ‘viral’?
@andrewspong felt that a campaign ‘going viral’ is a signifier of interest, approval or trendiness or as @pharmaguapa put it ‘a campaign that connects with people (whether trendy or not)’. Whether the campaign achieves its outcome is clearly important however the virality (I don’t think that is a real word) is measured by the numbers of views.
How can you tell if a campaign with viral aspirations is actually successful?
YouTube view rates are an indicator of how ‘viral’ the campaign has gone. I think that the view rate also plays a part in giving you a sense that you are watching something important and that as a result you are encouraged to share it with others (and hence make the content even more viral). Numbers are important and clearly why you say the campaign has gone ‘viral’, as @pharmaguapa put it: ‘a campaign that gets passed on like a virus, great numbers and end result’.
My feeling is that it is always great to get good numbers with any campaign but it is important to know if (other than watching a video) people have actually responded to a call to action. On this point this is often a downside of many campaigns (whether health-related or not), there is often no clear call to action once viewing the content, this can feel like a real let down – you want to start engaging, you want to spread the word but come to a dead end).
What are the important ingredients of a viral campaign?
@sammielw pointed out that integration across several media channels is important to create awareness and drive views. Interestingly my interest in the Nike WtF campaign was captured with a picture of Wayne Rooney (sporting a crazy beard) on the cover of a national newspaper. @andrewspong thinks it is about a cause that connects personal / family / friends experience. On the Nike WtF football certainly evokes passion in millions.
Examples of good ‘viral’ campaigns raised by the community were:
Arm against cervical cancer, the NHS HPV campaign on Facebook at which has 2,619 Likes. The associated YouTube channel which has the TV (cinema?) advert on it has 284 video views since January 2010. It is not surprising that the views are so low – it is just the advert after all.
The Pfizer Get Real, Get a Prescription counterfeit medicine advert with the rat (which I blogged about previously here) has great YouTube metrics with an impressive 211,434 view since October 2009. I wonder what the cost per view on YouTube has been compared with the cinema advertising spend? The campaign website has been improved dramatically since I looked at this last time I viewed it back in February last year. Having had a look at the website I tweeted and Facebook shared it using the very prominent ‘Share this page with people’ functionality (that is what viral is all about after all).
Time to change campaign was highlighted as a good campaign (currently had 6,897 pledges on the website – one of them mine) although no one in the #hcsmeu community were sure if this went viral. I saw the ads for this campaign with Frank Bruno on the London Underground a month or so ago. The launch campaign that ran in cinemas is excellent (840 views on YouTube – which seems quite low as I think this is really good). See what you think…
Based on the tweet-up the best campaign highlighted that meets all the principles discussed is the Leicester Teenage Pregnancy and Parenthood Partnership with the central campaign website called Hey Babe. This campaign certainly hit the numbers with just shy of one million views of the video on YouTube. Here is the video – it is a bit disturbing to watch but this is why is resonates with the youth audience it is intended for. It is really smart…
@sammielw wrote about on her personal blog for some further background on this campaign.
So what is best practice and what can we learn?
We are clearly in the early days in the use of social media in the health arena, we collectively have a lot to learn and while still at the toddler stage some great steps are being taken (see my past blog post on this topic here). To learn about best practice we need to see metrics (such as YouTube views) but ultimately we need to find out if the campaign has had the desired outcome and met objectives. The more we share and discuss best practice (with groups such as #hcsmeu) the better job we are going to do. It is often tough to have our work critiqued. The In Bed campaign post- award discussion at www.stwem.com being a case in point. However as @andrewspong has been heard to say (and write) on more than one occasion ‘Let’s all #failbetter’. This is the spirit in which we all need to learn.
If anyone has anything more to add (or disagrees with my summary of the tweet-up) then let me know with a comment. I would be delighted if any of the originators of the highlighted campaigns would be willing to share more learning here or point us in the direction where we could find out more about them.
Thanks, Neil (@aurorahealthpr ^NC)
Request to #hcsmeu community: At the London #hcsmeu drinks last Wednesday (6 June), I suggested to the assembled group that it would be really useful if the person that submitted a question for the Friday tweet-up also took on the voluntary role of writing up the discussion and posts it up in their own web space (as I have attempted to do for my recent question). The collective response was that this was a good idea as it meant that the dialogue would be searchable (tweets in a PDF aren’t) and also when the #hcsmeu hub is established the content can be linked to / copied across. I don’t want to deter anyone from submitting questions and the task of summarising people’s insightful tweets is not a simple one but it might be one worth doing. Over to my fellow #hcsmeu community members…
Tip about the tweet up: I have learnt from writing this summary is that it is really useful to go through the transcript of a tweet up. In the fast paced tweet-up environment you can miss some of the information. Reading through the transcript drew my attention to some important points that had previously passed me by in the heat of tweeting. @andrewspong creates and files the #hcsmeu transcripts here.
