Aurora Comms Blog

[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Neil Crump, Aurora Comms. Aurora Comms said: Understanding sidewikis - the important implications for healthcare communications and pharma: http://tinyurl.com/yg525lm [...]

Hi. Has anyone done a sidewiki on this page? I don’t think I can run the google toolbar from my work pc, so I can’t check. Great update. Matthew

Thanks for the linkback Neil. Agree that it’s a really important one to watch, although as of yet most of the sidewiki comments on pharma sites only seem to be coming from industry bods. These commentators are being pretty vocal in a way the sites on which they comment would not actively encourage. However, there do not seem to be any issues arising from sidewiki comments from patients using the treatments/products themselves … yet. This is the point at which pharma would be in a lot more bother, given the legal/regulatory restriction on us talking back!

While sidewiki is in its early stages, it probably won’t take long before the wider public gets a hold on this. (Twitter took a while to spread its wings and now it’s flapping all over the place!) Interestingly, the fifth highest ranked site on Google under a ‘google sidewiki’ search is an AdAge.com article on ‘Big Pharma and Google Sidewiki’ (http://tinyurl.com/yfwkugm). The piece highlights ways in which to minimise the potential damage of sidewiki – definitely worth taking on board since we could be heading to unchartered - and likely choppy - waters!

Thanks for your comment Matthew and yes there is a sidewiki on this post (and one on the homepage of this blog) from Aurora.

To view a sidewiki s you need to have done the following things:
+ have a Google account (if you have Google mail then you have a Google account)
+ have downloaded the latest toolbar (the best way to spot if a sidewiki is to enable the notification bar that appears on the left hand side of the browser page)

The functionality is (as I mentioned in my post) in the development phase and currently only works with Internet Explorer (not Google Chrome for example) and Firefox. There was an online Google product consultation on this last week where those that wanted to (including me) could add ideas for development and these ideas and these could be voted upon. There were lots of suggestions and many of them related to making the system more open.

As Angie mentions in her comment on this post, the level of sidewiki comments out there are low – so no one should panic. It is however important to understand the implications, establish a company policy on how to respond to comments (that falls within sensible industry standards – as much as they currently are) and keep an eye on any web pages that you are responsible for.

I hope that this helps. If you are struggling then get in contact with me and I will happily walk you through the process. Also if there are web pages you want me to have a quick look at for you then let me know.

Thanks for your comments Angie - the Ad Age post is really interesting. I don’t think that folk should panic - bit it is important to raise the topic internally and start to consider how this might be handled. I have spoken to a few global pharma comms people on this subject and they are working out how they need to respond. Interestingly I shifted my searching on this topic from pharma / healthcare implications to the webmaster and techie world - they are up in arms about it and on the whole VERY angry. It will be interesting to see how this all develops.

Hi Neil, thanks for your thoughtful post.
“Another interesting point to note is that Google released the sidewiki gadget with no way to monitor it (with something like Google Alerts). This means that to check if people have filed an entry against any page on your site, you have to (with the sidewiki gadget enabled) check every page individually!!! ..”

Not entirely accurate While not completely perfect, you can fairly easily generate an RSS feed to monitor Sidewiki comments about pages on your site. (The not perfect part being that the feeds don’t cover your whole domain). Either way, details here:
http://code.google.com/apis/sidewiki/docs/2.0/developers_guide_protocol.html

Sidewiki Entry highlighting the important parts of the API/RSS functionality above: http://bit.ly/2HDPU7

Hi Bryan - thanks for your comment and clarification on this. I have written a couple of news articles since my original post for the trade press and mentioned the Google code. The problem still remains that you need to set up the RSS feed for EACH page - not really ideal that it cannot be achieved for the whole domain. Do you think that developers (such as yourself) will be able to come up with some wizardry to overcome this?