Insurers trick Facebookers into writing Congress
This year, Facebook launched a virtual currency that allows users to buy extra items in popular games. Now, according to Silicon Alley Insider’s Nicholas Carlson, health reform opponents are using that currency to lure Facebookers into sending a prefabricated anti-health reform letter to their congressman.
Astroturf, everyone’s favorite descriptive for a phony grassroots effort. Photo by purpleslog via Flickr.
“Get Health Reform Right” requires gamers to take a survey, which, upon completion, automatically sends the following email to their Congressional Rep:
“I am concerned a new government plan could cause me to lose the employer coverage I have today. More government bureaucracy will only create more problems, not solve the ones we have.”
The organization behind the scheme, Get Health Reform Right, seems to be funded primarily by insurance companies.
Pfizer tentatively tackles tweets
James Chase reports in Medical Marketing & Media that Pfizer has opened a Twitter account, @pfizer_news. The pharmaceutical behemoth will use the microblogging service for interacting and opening dialog with customers, rather than for product promotion or advertising, Chase reports. While Pfizer has been monitoring Twitter for months, executives were afraid to engage directly for fear that they would be “ripped to shreds” by the Twitterati.
“We’re trying to become transparent, but we’re doing it slowly and cautiously,” said (Ray Kerins, VP worldwide communications). “For us to jump in with two feet would be stupid. The first task was to get the communications team cleaned up because we’ve had a bad rap in that area.”
Pfizer hopes to increase its social media presence, but plans to do so cautiously and in gradual steps.
For now, Pfizer’s media relations team is charged with controlling all corporate tweeting, but Kerins said he hopes to expand the pool soon. “I would love to have by the end of the summer 100 people, from medical to public affairs, who have been anointed by the company and who can go out and Twitter.”
As of Monday morning (July 27), @Pfizer_News had gained 565 followers and was in turn following 225 users, many of them major media outlets.
Hospitals harness social media
Jackie Fox writes in the Omaha World-Herald about local institutions’ use of social media to reach out to consumers and to provide information in the formats and locations in which consumers are likely to look.
One institution views social media as a customer service, providing patients with blogs they can use to share health updates with family and friends. Some find and reply to relevant blog posts or tweets.
Others, such as the Nebraska Medical Center, post videos on YouTube of treatments or procedures.
“It’s a good educational tool for procedures people may not be familiar with. People may decide this is someone they’d like an appointment with, or doctors in other parts of the state learn they can send patients to a specialist closer to home,” [media relations lead Paul ]Baltes said.
Journal spotlights science journalism
The latest issue of Nature explores the present and future of the relationship between media and science. Coverage includes balanced and constructive critiques of social media and journalists who aren’t themselves scientists as well as some obligatory questioning of the future of journalism as an industry.
In one article, Geoff Brumfiel details the rising role of Twitter-style social media in chronicling and commenting upon scientific conferences, saying that while providing for open and easy exchange of information, it also blurs the line between scientist and journalist. Additionally, the instantaneous and far-reaching broadcast of ideas makes competitive researchers even warier of revealing groundbreaking findings at conferences, on the grounds that they may then be snatched by any rival with Web access.
In another piece, journalist Toby Murcott questions the efficacy of press release-based science journalism and calls for reporters learn the expertise necessary to understand the fields on which they are reporting, and for journals to publish review comments that will provide more context for each article.
In a more focused editorial, Nature calls attention to tuberculosis and suggests that TB sufferers and researchers need to follow the example of AIDS and “capture the world’s imagination and support” by reaching out and finding “highly effective champions.” Globally, 9 million people develop active cases of TB each year.
Other pieces that may be of interest to health journalists:
- Editorial: Cheerleader or watchdog? – Science journalism is under threat. What can scientists do to help?
- Boyce Rensberger tracks the progression of scientific correspondents from cheerleaders to watchdogs.
- Editorial: Raising the standards – A fledgling effort in China will show people what is happening on the environmental front.
- The Arab boom – As research increases in Arab countries, the media is stepping up to report on it. Nadia El-Awady says the local journalism has much room for improvement.
- From the newsroom – The Washington Post’s national environmental reporter Juliet Eilperin and its executive editor Marcus Brauchli discuss the future of science coverage in their newspaper.
Doc: Medicine, journalism face similar challenges
In a world where opinions and insights pop up exponentially, to what extent can we rely on experts? And, moreover, just who is an expert? Ken Kosik, M.D., who co-directs the Neuroscience Research Institute at the University of California at Santa Barbara, raises these questions in a thoughtful essay in Harvard University’s Neiman Reports and suggests that, with the abundance of information available to us, no one is an infallible expert anymore.
In what he calls the ‘wikification of knowledge,’ Kosik maintains that medicine and journalism increasingly share the same challenges when it comes to gathering information and reaching conclusions in this new era of social media. At issue is a balancing act when it comes to weighing the wisdom of an expert with the modern-day equivalent of collective folk medicine.
“Within the potential of social networks lies untapped wiki knowledge poised to challenge the experts by opening wide the collective knowledge gate,” Kosik writes. “Wiki knowledge derived from a social network offers a fluid, open source, ongoing meta-analysis - a virtual collection of experiences that can be constantly updated as users enter more individual data. Social networks empower the ‘expert,’ be it a doctor or a journalist, because access to this community-generated knowledge is shared by all.”
Navigating this terrain, however, can be tricky, given the pitfalls he identifies: For one, those on a social network tend to be younger and not economically disadvantaged, which amounts to selection bias. Privacy is another factor, because networks of people can limit information that is shared. And entering false data on a social network can, of course, distort outcomes.
“While flickers of hope appear on the Web through encounters with others and a shared experience, judging the reliability of this experience - and its fit with our own - can be difficult. But to have the opportunity to find information and test its reliability means that no longer is one person - an expert - expected to know everything and render infallible judgment,” Kosik concludes. “That view is the no-longer tenable burden of the expert physician; nor can it any longer be the guiding belief of the trained journalist.”
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