Aurora Comms Blog

High definition blogging!

Posted on 11. Jun, 2009 by neilcrump in Communications, Health, Industry, Web 2.0

The pharmaceutical trade press here in the UK is ablaze with feature articles and commentary on web 2.0 at the moment.  Even our very own Aurora NW1er wrote an article for the May issue of PharmaTimes,* as well as writing about web 2.0 on everyone’s favourite blog [:+)].  Our own Phaedrus has also posted recently on the topic of cyberpanic in relation to health.

What we have been missing in the debate here in the UK is some hard facts and stats to ground our assumptions about the rise of web 2.0 in relation to the healthcare sector.  So it was great to see an article in Pharmaceutical Marketing,* from Eric Sharp of market research agency Opinion Health, based on some research that they have undertaken on the topic.  There are good stats on GP use of the web as well as an assessment of how useful they find it (it turns out very).

The article also had stats based on the pollster’s survey of 400 patients.  The numbers were interesting: 60% use social networking sites and 51% visit online forums.

Then the following figure appeared: 25% are blogging.  My eyes bugged out as I read this and I let out a yelp in the office.  Surely this figure was incorrect.  As a ‘poster’ on this blog (and as someone who loves writing and invests a lot of time on my own personal blog – no link :+]) I thought that surely this figure was wrong.  It just didn’t ring true to me – was it a typo?  I follow and hunt out blogs all the time.  There aren’t that many written by people with a specific illness, quite a lot, but not one in four.

I picked up the phone to the author to find out.  It turns out the definition that Opinion Health used for ‘blogging’ was people looking at blogs for health information rather than writing a web blog.  Phew I thought, my gut reaction was correct, and then I thought oh lord – this figure is going to start getting banded about and become an authoritative figure.  Only time will tell and if you have read this post then you can tell people this story.

I had a great chat with Eric, a smart chap – I love market researchers, they are always so precise and know their stuff.  It sounds like they have a great data set with this survey (wish I could trawl through it).  We had a chat about the cuts you could do with the data:

• Do people with asthma use different sources of information than say people with psoriasis?
• Do patients who are housebound spend more time online?

It would be great to learn more about this survey – what the demographics of the patients, blah, blah, blah.  So come on Eric – give us more of your great insights please…

* Sorry we cannot link to the copy in the articles – they are under password protection on the respective websites.  If you want a paper copy of the Aurora feature in PharmaTimes then just drop us a line.

Tags: blogging, engagement, Social media