Archive for May, 2009

Social media is mom’s best friend

Being pregnant, especially for the first time, is a big deal.

I am just discovering this, being now 4 months pregnant. During this life changing time, you need someone to talk to. But before the magical 3 months margin, when you cross over to the “safer side”, it’s a custom not to reveal to anyone except your spouse that you are – hopefully – carrying life inside you. In their quest to share the good yet uncertain news, more and more young women find themselves looking for peer support and opening their hearts in different forms of social media. Myself included.

Discussion forums:

The great thing about discussion forums is that there are so many of them out there. Within one specific forum, there are different kinds of groups for different needs: those wanting to become pregnant, those not successful at becoming pregnant, those thinking they are pregnant but not so sure about it, and those who are surely pregnant and who are organized into different groups according to the months of their due dates.
The beauty of these forums is that you can sign in anonymously and talk to strangers in the same position, look for the same kind of symptoms and compare the most reliable pregnancy tests on the market. And while the information you get is subjective, it’s been filtered through the experiences of many moms-to-be just like yourself. This is exactly the information you need.
(Eg. BabyandBump,  Zappybaby Forum)

Mommy Bloggers:

In addition to forums, I also follow a few active moms-to-be-bloggers. What pulls me to these blogs are the funny and earnest day-to-day experiences these women, whether located in my town or the other side of the world, have to share with the rest of the readership in the web. Besides some acquaintances, none of my friends are pregnant at the moment, and frankly, those friends who have small children and who could have experiences to share, are too damn busy to meet face to face with me. So I happily turn to my fellow prospective mums online to hear their timely and often very personal experiences.
(Eg. moms.alltop.com, De Ultieme Mama Blogs Lijst!)

Social networks for moms:

In addition to blogs and forums, I’ve also visited social networks dedicated to moms. In addition to being able to create your own baby page with your most important pieces of information, these sites allow you to post pictures, answer polls and find lots of useful information ranging from healthy diets to problems school aged children come across with. In addition to the useful information, there’s also lots of fun, not-so-useful content to spend your time with.
(Eg. Café Mom, 9maand.com)

My thirst for knowledge around this phenomenon seems inexhaustible.  I’ve carried home stacks of books from the library and bought a bunch of baby magazines. While the library books give you good suggestions on baby names and professional advice on what to do in case some specific symptoms appear, these books are not going to tell you that the name Antarcticus you found in the book and are seriously considering, is actually ridiculous and your child will be forever bullied at school for his idiotic name if you are foolish enough to go with it. This is what the moms signed into the names-for-my-baby discussion group on my favorite discussion forum would tell me right off the bat.

Another problem with the magazines is that they are often packed with advertisements. It’s hard to know if the information is reliable and clinically tested when every other page is an add of a sponsor. No thanks; I’d rather adjust my purchasing plans according to the advice of the subjective unsponsored moms.

Social media sites are great sources of up-to-date and candid opinions about the best fitting pregnancy clothes, the safest strollers and multivitamins that are suited for pregnant mothers. A wealth of information for anyone interested in understanding babies, moms and whatever is essential in their world.

Photo from:http://www.medicalfacts.nl/wp-content/uploads/2008/12/baby.jpg

New Brand Dashboard features released!

Attentio released last week the latest improvements and additions to our Dashboard:

New features:

Centric Brand maps: now, using the brand positioning maps (MDS) users can also centre the brand or topic of their choice to see how other brand and topics relate to that one brand. The already available brand positioning maps display the relations of all brands and topics tracked, with the new brand map type these relations can be discovered referring to one brand in focus.

Email alerts 2.0: new type of email alert that allows Dashboard users to set up email notification for influential articles on a particular entity (brand) or topic. For example: users can request to be notified by email when a top influencer writes about your Brand AND Quality.

Event Detection with tag clouds: event detection is a feature that detects topics or events automatically. Now it’s also available in the form of tag clouds that allow users to quickly visualize the larger events (bigger font size) and drill down to the articles by clicking on the events. The darker the colour of the detected event the more recent it is; older events have lighter colours.

New data sources:

Twitter: users can add Twitter to their projects, and get an idea of how much their brand is mentioned within Twitter. Twitter works as blog or news source with all its functionalities – topic drill down, sentiment analysis, region classification and event detection. Also Brand Maps are generated for Twitter.

Daily Motion: an important European video site, comparable to YouTube. Daily Motion is especially important in French speaking countries. It can be selected to track brand visibility in viral videos.

FDA tweets too

The FDA is a very well known office for all Americans. As the Food and Drug Administration, it controls the safety of food, medications and cosmetics. The FDA is known for its rigorous rules regarding drugs’ approval. The rules force the pharma producers to apply very specific procedures and inform their customers about the risks of taking the drugs.

Healthcare marketers complain that the FDA does not provide them with clear guidance regarding drugs-related communication in social media. One might then be surprised by how much this regulatory agency is using social media! The first campaign in social media, the peanut-product recall list, reached the public via blogs, You Tube and Twitter. The @FDArecalls started in the end of March and has posted already over 600 tweets notifying its followers about the Food and Drug Administration’s recalls, market withdrawals and safety alerts.  The number of FDA followers is growing every day. Other social media tools in use by FDA include a blog, You Tube videos, podcasts, social networks, second life and widgets. It seems like FDA is doing more in social media then pharma companies themselves! European Medicines Agency on the other hand, a corresponding body to FDA in Europe, does not have a Twitter profile neither a blog. One may expect that official tweets about the swine flu would be of big interest at the moment.

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The power and disconnect of social media

There is a disconnect between the users of social media and the power of the content they create.

Users of Facebook, Twitter and MySpace don’t always realise that what they write can and will be used against them in evidence. What most write or share is harmless, a fun picture, a comment from a concert they went to, or who they’ll meet tonight. But…There is plenty that you don’t have to share IMHO. Here is my small (partial) checklist of what can stay private. 

1. Keep work environment discussions quiet, it can come back to haunt you. For example someone I follow on twitter, clearly works for IKEA. Sometimes they share too much about what goes on there. I’d say err on the side of caution and normally keep the content secret, unless you need to be a whistle blower or absolutely must share what is going on (its your job to do it etc.) 

2. If you don’t like a location (city, country), then don’t tweet about that and then apply for a job there. It doesn’t matter that you are highly qualified it just makes the employer concerned. What is really at play here is power of the written word versus spoken word. What is written doesn’t come with intonation and body language of interpersonal conversations so it lays heavier in the mind of the person that reads it. People have been fired or not hired because of twitter/facebook comments – see http://www.philgerbyshak.com/fired-for-facebook-and-twitter/

3. Don’t assume that anything you write or share will stay private. There are plenty of people who think @ replies in twitter are private. I would say even be careful with direct messages (yes this should have same etiquette as email). In sum, if you write something in Twitter or Facebook imagine it is part of your online brand and can add or detract to it.

4. Have fun. Even if there are concerns about what you write, most of the content people share is perfectly adorable, lovely, quirky insights from their life. 

In conclusion, I know that in years to come the rules of the game will change. No employer or journalist will have the same power by looking at social networks for juicy gossip. The goalposts will change for everyone, so if employers won’t hire someone with saucy Facebook pictures they’ll not be able to hire anyone at all… I suppose we need to be careful in the mean time before the masses all produce embarrassing content :)