Digital Marketing Commentary (Now With 15% More Snark!)

July 18, 2011

possible futures for google plus

Filed under: Digital Media, Google, Search, State of the Internet — jilliantate @ 5:00 am

I keep trying to explain Google Plus, and everyone keeps telling me it isn’t important. Well, I think it is. Or rather, it will be, once it is integrated into more Google products. So I put together some slides with my imagined future for Google Plus, and how it will be a lot more than “another Facebook” or “another Twitter” down the line.

Right now, Google+ is just a social network with some cool features: Circles, Hangouts, and instant photo upload being the closest to “killer apps”. But in the future, it will be a backbone for how people navigate the Internet through Google Products, and will include your Circles and social connections in every action possible. THAT is when people will start to care about it, and THAT is when it will hit critical mass. (Or at least, that’s what I think)

Let me know what you think in the comments.

September 2, 2010

Pharma Info & Responsibility

Filed under: Google, Pharma — jilliantate @ 5:05 am

I was chiming in on the #socpharm Twitter chat tonight, and the topic came up: how do patients find the right information?

We all know that patients are turning more and more to the Interwebs for their health research. Ever since the first people self-diagnosed on DrKoop.com, millions of people have relied on the easily accessible Internet as a source of information. But how do you find the right information on it? It’s one thing to turn to the reliable sites like WebMD.com, but even there, it’s easy to get sucked into communities and user posts by non-doctors that may not be the best reference. It’s another to do a blind Google search, especially when it comes to pharma products. There’s a lot of for-profit sites out there. Cheap drugs! Canadian pharmacies!*

* As a Canadian, I apologize for the Canadian pharmacy ads

So how do the pharma companies provide that clear & concise information? How do you just make sure that patients get the right information? My suggestions were:

- Standardize the information on product pages. Make the information on both benefits & risks clear & concise.
- Accept questions from patients. Allowing patients to submit questions will ensure they get that info from a reliable, accredited source – NOT from a non-doctor on Twitter.
- Work with Google to be sure the ‘official’ site for a product is marked as such, and imitators or false claims are not listed
- SEO enhance product sites so they are easy to find by patients

And that’s just a start. How much responsibility do pharma companies really have to disseminate the correct information about their products though? What are your thoughts? (And note that I don’t say “their conditions”, because I know pharma commentary on conditions will be biased)

June 9, 2010

Am I The Only Person Who Is Confused By Google’s Caffeine Diagram?

Filed under: Google, Search — Tags: , , , , , , — jilliantate @ 5:02 am

Here’s the diagram Google put out in their actual official blog explaining how Caffeine works:

My research chemist husband says that apparently Google is now a boron atom.

Seriously, in this case, the picture isn’t worth 1,000 words, but it may take 1,000 words to explain it.

At least Google included a series of fun facts to help me understand how much data is being processed:

    Caffeine lets us index web pages on an enormous scale. In fact, every second Caffeine processes hundreds of thousands of pages in parallel. If this were a pile of paper it would grow three miles taller every second. Caffeine takes up nearly 100 million gigabytes of storage in one database and adds new information at a rate of hundreds of thousands of gigabytes per day. You would need 625,000 of the largest iPods to store that much information; if these were stacked end-to-end they would go for more than 40 miles

I’m still kind of confused, so I’ll hope this isn’t a question on the next Google certification test.

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