How to stop smoking: internet marketing

Facebook passed 400 million active users in February and continued its ascent throughout the year. As at date of writing, Facebook boasts more than 500 million active users, half of whom log on to Facebook on any given day. The average user has 130 friends and, in aggregate, Facebook users spend "over 700 billion minutes per month" on the site. In November, Hitwise reported that Facebook gets nearly 25% of page views in the United States.

With such scale, Facebook hasn't been without its controversies. The biggest in 2010 was a significant change to privacy settings, which Facebook announced right at the end of last year. Previously, most of a user's information was private by default. But heading into 2010, a large swath of the average Facebook user's data was made public: name, profile photo, gender, current city, networks, friends list, and all of the pages they subscribe to. Later, in May, Facebook reluctantly reversed some of those changes - but the
default setting for most content published on Facebook remains public.

Despite concerns ranging from privacy to de-emphasizing third party content, Facebook is a source of joy for many millions of people. It helps keep families and friends stay connected, enables users to track news from their social network, keeps people amused with games, and much more. In 2010, there was no other Internet company as influential as Facebook.

Runners-Up: Apple, Google

After winning Best BigCo in 2008, Apple was a runner-up last year and has been very impressive again in 2010. The launch of the iPad was the highlight - another groundbreaking consumer Internet device that re-defined a market! Apple also released a new version of the iPhone this year, along with improvements to its iPhone OS such as multi-tasking. The new phone had technical issues with the antenna, but still sold extremely well.

Apple's App Store continued to dominate the mobile app market in 2010, although the Android marketplace is catching up. Overall, another great year for Steve Jobs and co.

Google has won our BigCo award 3 times over 7 years and never fails to impress. This year Google made great strides in the all-important mobile market, with Android making up ground on iPhone. It continued to dominate search, despite a big marketing push from Microsoft's Bing. Google showed that it can still innovate in search, with enhancements such as Instant Search. It also made progress in key markets such as enterprise (with Google Apps) and Internet TV (with Google TV).

Things didn't go all Google's way this year, however. Its innovative Wave product was farmed out as an open source project, the launch of a social media tracking service called Google Buzz was a flub, and Google had many critics in the privacy debate (for Google Street View in particular). Overall though, it was a strong year for Google - albeit with some speed wobbles.

Honorable Mentions

Unity Stoakes is the co-founder and president of OrganizedWisdom, an expert-driven digital media company focused on health and wellness. OrganizedWisdom is building the world’s first digital mapping of online health experts to help people easily discover and connect with credible health resources.

Is your doctor easily accessible online, or does he or she believe that the Internet isn’t a resource for accessing health information?

If it’s the latter, it may be time to find another doctor. With nearly 90% of online Americans searching the Internet for health resources, it’s likely you and your friends and family already use the Internet to research health issues. It’s true that the web has a jumble of health information, and engaging online takes time, which most health experts don’t have. The good news, however, is that the increasing number of health professionals now embracing the Internet as an important and useful tool for health and wellness is beginning to change your options as a consumer.

Read on for some ways that social media can help doctors, health experts and everyday users.

Social Wellness Trends/>

An exciting new social media trend is emerging that disrupts the standard view of health care delivery and will have a profound impact on us all. Thousands of doctors, nurses, allied health professionals, and health advocates are publicly engaging with people online. In fact, nearly 40% of Americans turn to social media for health information.

Patients (and a few early adopter health pros) moved online years ago to share health guidance, give support and find answers. But until recently, many health professionals have avoided using the Internet and social media as a way to help patients. This reluctance is changing, as savvy physicians, nurses, dentists and other health pros are realizing that if their patients are online, then perhaps they should be too. Health practitioners who were once too busy, inexperienced or afraid to share their expertise online, now actively share links on Twitter and Facebook, blog, write for online medical journals, engage on Q&A sites, or contribute to online health sites and forums.

For too long, health and wellness has been a do-it-yourself proposition for patients online, and people have been left on their own to determine how to effectively utilize empty search boxes. People have great access to lots of information, but they must sort through the billions of articles to determine the credible from redundant health encyclopedias, marketing web sites or sites with potentially unknown sources. Then, the task of deciding the credibility of the sources and articles has fallen on the patient alone.

While the number of health experts interacting with patients online is relatively small, there is a clear trend taking shape. A recent Manhattan Research survey of U.S. physicians shows an increase of Internet usage for professional purposes up from 2.5 hours per week in 2002 to 8 hours per week in 2010. More strikingly, while more than 100,000 doctors are using closed social health networks like Sermo.com and publishing in peer-reviewed journals online, thousands of health professionals are now blogging, using Twitter, and connecting with patients on Facebook in very public ways. So much so that this November, for the first time, the American Medical Association released a set of guidelines to direct physicians communicating and engaging with patients via social media. And earlier this year, the CDC also published its own best practices toolkit for how health professionals should be using social media.

Given that so many people now go to the Internet before, during and after their visit to the doctor’s office, the lack of guidance from credible and trusted health experts online is a growing problem. In fact, Manhattan Research shows that 61% of people now use the Internet instead of visiting a doctor. Thankfully, the tide is turning as thousands of health practitioners move online to do much more than interact with friends, family and colleagues and are instead using the social web to dispense their particular health expertise.

What This Means for Health Information Seekers/>

We are standing at the precipice of a new online revolution in health care. As more and more health experts embrace the Internet and increase their social media activity, health information seekers will undoubtedly benefit in profound ways. Based on conversations and surveys conducted with experts and health information seekers, here are some of the benefits associated with a robust online community of active health experts:

Interaction With Experts: In the real world, people seeking answers to important health, financial or legal matters look for guidance from the best experts. With a growing community of health experts participating in online discussions, people have access to more expertise than ever before at their fingertips.

Credibility and Trust: With doctors and other health professionals contributing information online in increasing numbers, it is important for a trust filter to separate credible information and sources from information that is not credible. The community of health professionals that is forming online will act as a system of checks and balances to separate good information and sources from the bad.

Transparency: It’s been a watershed year for increased transparency as government, big business, the financial services industry and other sectors have been shining a light into their operations like never before. Healthcare is taking a major step forward in this regard at the grassroots level, with an expert community being formed online by doctors, nurses and other health professionals across the country. As more doctors view social media as an extension of their professional reputation, you can be sure that they will treat their online interactions with the same care as they do in the offline world.

While the increase in the online activity of health experts is a welcome development, searching for crucial health information online remains an overwhelming and intimidating process for many. In the offline world, people searching for health information seek out the best experts — and now with more health professionals moving online, people will finally be able to connect with credible experts they can trust.

More Social Media Resources from Mashable:

- 4 Effective Tools for Monitoring Your Child’s Online Safety/> - Social Media Parenting: Raising the Digital Generation/> - 5 Fun and Safe Social Networks for Children/> - HOW TO: Help Your Child Set Up a Blog/> - The Case For Social Media in Schools

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, dcdr

For more Social Media coverage:

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Thursday 23 December 2010

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