Twitter for Health?
An Introduction to Twitter for Health and Marketing - Episode 24
Meredith Abreu Ressi, VP of research

There's a lot of talk in the marketing world about understanding the online influencers or consumer opinion leaders. Well McNeil consumer healthcare - the makers of the painkiller Motrin, recently had the opportunity to witness the power of social media firsthand.

It all started with an ad for Motrin, themed around the idea of “baby wearing” and the backache that can come with it. Unfortunately, the tone of the ad – with phrases like “it totally makes me look like an official mom” – struck a nerve with some “mommy bloggers” who were offended by the ad. But when the conversation hit Twitter, that's when it took off like wildfire – with Motrin becoming the most talked about topic on Twitter within a matter of days. (At the time, it was even more popular than “Christmas” or “Obama”). McNeil eventually pulled the ad, and replaced it with an apology from the VP of Marketing. Clearly, this small – but influential – group of consumers had a big impact.

If you're looking for online influencers, the micro-blogging site Twitter is a great place to start. For the uninitiated, Twitter is a somewhat confounding concept: Twitter users "tweet" out messages of 140 characters or less. You select whose Tweets you follow, and who is allowed to follow you.

If you're just getting started with Twitter, it's actually kind of tough to "get it" until you start following someone. If you're looking for suggestions, you can follow me I'm @meredithressi or Manhattan Research is @manhattanresear.
From there, it's easiest to start by looking for people you know, or people in your field. You can review who other people follow to look for ideas.

Once you have a network of people you're following (and who may be following you), you have a feed of sorts of "tweets" on various topics. At first, Twitter was primarily known for people "micro-blogging" by sending messages about what they're doing throughout the course of their day. Somehow, the idea of knowing what your friends ate for breakfast and when they're taking out the garbage wasn't necessarily the most appealing idea to most people. But for a core group of the hyper-connected, Twitter became a new way of communicating.

But the Twitter audience has evolved from these early days - and today you can find a network of people interested in a certain topic, or even businesses, and have a bit of an open source conversation. The value of these ongoing conversations becomes clear in a few different situations. For instance, if you're attending a conference (especially one focused on technology or marketing) - chances are there will be audience members "tweeting" the conference. So someone will send a tweet out with commentary about the presentation, add a keyword with a hashtag to identify it as being from that conference, and then you can follow what everyone is saying. It's a virtual peanut gallery that really makes conference-going a whole new experience. Conference Tweeting is so popular, that events such as Apple's MacWorld conference would crash the Twitter servers (which are much better at handling traffic these days).

Twitter has also proved useful in disaster situations. During the terror attacks in Mumbai, many news outlets were following Twitter for updates from the streets and hotels about what was going on. The Indian government requested that people stop posting updates on Twitter for security purposes - but that request was not met with much success.

As you use the service, you realize that it amounts to being able to tap into a sort of quantifiable collective consciousness of what people are thinking, doing, and seeing. So how can that consciousness be harnessed for healthcare?

The applications are mainly apparent for those who are already using Twitter as part of how they communicate - which admittedly is a relatively small audience. But within that audience, there are clear applications of the platform for public health alerts, disaster response, and education. Many applications also exist which seek to parse out the vast stores of data exchanged through Twitter into some sort of quantifiable format.

Some examples of Twitter being used for health are sites such as Qwitter, which was created by Tobacco Free Florida, which encourages users to track their cigarette smoking, and keep a journal of their progress. Another example is a site called TweetWhatYouEat (which, in the interest of full disclosure, was built by my husband). This site allows people to send “tweets” with the foods they eat, then tracks them in an online food diary. This site even boasts a crowd-sourced calorie database – so if you don’t know the calorie value of a food, it will enter it for you based on the most popular calorie value for that entry among other site users.

Many hospitals have begun offering Twitter feeds (which generally amount to feeds of information about the hospital) as do some physicians. The most common use seems to be to discuss healthcare issues and ideas – people with like interests follow one another, and start ongoing discussions, links to interesting articles, and ideas.

Currently, this seems to be the main use of Twitter – a combination of an RSS feed and a community for discussion. However, as the site gathers a critical mass of users, or becomes a part of how someone communicates or interacts with the world, the potential for using the site for research, behavioral change, or personal tracking is unprecedented.



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