Thank you, Health Tweeder

February 2, 2010 – 12:57 pm by Joshua Slatko

I have been to the future, and it looks a lot like this.

This past Thursday, we received an e-mail teaser previewing the launch of Pixels & Pills, a joint service offering by Zemoga and Palio. The offering was “designed to fulfill the pharmaceutical industry’s demand for digital communications strategies combined with expertise on regulatory compliance issues.”

My response was a loud yawn. We’re always getting press releases about new digital agencies, new digital partnerships, new digital this or that or the other thing, and none of them seem very different from the rest. So I thought no more about it.

Then, yesterday, we found out about Pixels & Pills’ little science project, The Health Tweeder. And in about the amount of time it takes a Manhattan cabbie to honk at you after the light turns green, I knew that this was serious business.

In the words of its creators, Health Tweeder “aggregates Twitter content on various disease states. Using the laboratory that is social media and Twitter, we’re visually and metaphorically using petri dishes to culture cells of dialogue on specific disease states. Each cell in a petri dish represents a distinct tweet that has been gathered using relevant disease search terms, hashtags, and people we’ve identified to follow. Growing and shrinking based on the volume of content at any one time, each dish, and all of them combined, provide a dynamic view of disease state dialogue in real time.”

Social media is the buzzword of the year in pharma marketing. I spend a lot of time volunteering with a college organization, and the 18-year-olds I work with there spend less time talking about social media than pharma marketers do. They just spend time actually using it – and that’s the big difference.

Here, though, we have a creative, visually interesting, and actually useful experiment in social media monitoring. And it, the bigwigs say, is only the beginning.

“We’re currently working on a couple of projects that revolve around semantic filtering of content,” DJ Edgerton, the CEO of Zemoga and a co-founder of Pixels & Pills, told us. “So if a user goes into a site, I’ll use Facebook for an example, and acknowledges terms and conditions of interaction and provides us with contact information, that individual is allowed to participate in a conversation on a Facebook wall post. Any wall post will go through an algorithm and an application that is pre-built with a myriad of warning signs and flags for adverse event reporting, et cetera.

“And this is a very, very large database; it’s like a conversational scrubbing tool. The tool allows a post to either be presented immediately on a Facebook wall or be responded to with an auto response that addresses a particular concern and then flagged another way, or it gets put in a queue for human intervention. Currently, either wall posts are not allowed or Twitter feeds are not allowed at all because nobody wants to manage it and it’s too much of a bear – or the monitoring is such a slow process, days in some cases, that the novelty and the immediacy of social media and the conversation dies. It’s that regular customer service immediacy that people are looking for. What we’re hoping to do is build applications for customers that take a little of the weight off their shoulders in managing that conversation and reducing the risk as much as possible.”

Health Tweeder, DJ told us, was created for a long list of reasons…but mostly because it was fun and interesting and a great way to stretch the muscles and show off the abilities of the Palio/Zemoga collaboration. His fellow co-founder, Palio president Mike Myers, agreed.

“This is an exemplification and illustration of the type of work we can do and the type of thinking we’re bringing to the marketplace,” Mike told us. “So in many ways the monetization of it comes through our ability to use it to illustrate what we can do and what we can deliver for customers. We looked at this as something that would have value to the market, that we would continue to work with, that we were building, frankly, to have something to play with, because we thought it was interesting. It’s something to demonstrate who we are and what we can do.”

To this I say – thank you. In the torrent of words that pours out of our industry every day about “uniqueness” and “core competencies” and Lord knows what else, here we have something creative and cutting-edge and interesting in its own right.

Speaking of things that are interesting in their own right, our editor in chief Chris Truelove’s interview with DJ Edgerton and Mike Myers about Health Tweeder and Pixels & Pills will be appearing as an online extra to an article on the subject in the Interactive & Digital Marketing section of the March issue of Med Ad News. How’s that for a tease?