The future of tying health into social networks

I just finished reading a report compiled by the California Health Foundation titled The Wisdom of Patients: Health Care Meets Online Social Media and it got me thinking about the future of tying health into social networks.

The United States is aging, rapidly. The country’s largest demographic segment, the boomers are beginning to enter their 60s. In 2003 12% of the US population was aged 65+, in 2030 that number increases to 20% (a jump from 35.9 million people to 72 million people). 80% of this age cohort has at least one chronic condition while 50% have at least two. Couple this with Hitwise’s recent report that shows share of traffic to social networking & forum sites by those aged 55+ has increased from 6% in 2006 to 11% in 2008 and you’re (or at least I) thinking that taking a closer look at tying in targeted health content with social networking could be lucrative.

Eons.com, a social networking site for boomers claims the #4 spot in Time Spent on Social Networks by US Internet Users (again brought to us by Hitwise). That tells us the largest demographic population is spending a lot of time engaging in social networks. The challenge is to encourage more boomers to participate in the space. But to some degree we’ll be able to rely on the technology adoption curve to boost the numbers.

There are already some early players, Diabetesmine, Wego Health, and Patientslikeme to name a few (read more about them in The Wisdom of Patients), but there’s certainly room in the Long Tail for more players.

If you’re interested in pursuing this space I would suggest defining a target audience (ex., women boomers who are single, have professional careers and are 10 years from retirement) and researching what the most common chronic disease is among that target. Be careful to define a niche that’s large enough where only a small percentage of people will need to engage with your site to make it meaningful, but large enough that the community grows organically over time and becomes a vibrant on-line community. You may want to define a niche that is not currently being spoken to or one that isn’t being spoken to well. Engage with individuals that make up your niche and build a relationship so that your final end product (and it can morph along the way) becomes community minded and community built. These are just some recommendations; you’re likely to have more. Add them to the comments and help to define a better working list.



image credit: Social Network Mangement System by Aristocrat on Flickr

Who's using social networks?

My intrigue in social networks is recent. I've spent the past few months trying to gain a better understanding of who is using them and why. Admittedly I'm not big on social networks. I have a Facebook page that I never update and I'm on Linked In, which I tend to update only after receiving an invitation to join a colleague's network. I don't see a lot of value in the premise of having hundreds of "friends" whom I don't know, but happened to come by their email address at one time or another. It's akin to building a permission based marketing database. Yes, someone has agreed to hear from me, but that doesn't necessarily mean they're hoping I take them up on the offer. The other reason I don't see a lot of value in social networking is because the majority of my friends aren't there, and most don't have a desire to participate in the space. It makes me wonder if my set of friends is so unique to be immune to what is purportedly exploding all around us or if the use of social networks is being over-projected to a larger demographic than the active user base. When I ask people why they don't use social networking sites, twitter, blog, etc. (and we go through the explanations of what I'm talking about) it becomes apparent - my friends, much like myself, are too busy to maintain the effort. Between careers, family and a social life there isn't a lot of time left to participate in an on-line life. From there I think about the people that I know that do use the technology and it always comes down to two major categories - marketers (who are there to figure out why other people are there and to figure out a way to capitalize on that) and the people in their mid-20s that I met while in my graduate degree program. What will be interesting to follow is if the people that were active Facebook users while going to school (and not working) continue to be as active once they graduate and land full-time jobs. It's at that point that the real value of social networking may become clearer.

Intellectual Property Maps

Business Week recently reported a new intellectual property mapping tool developed by Boston Consulting Group (BCG). The mapping software conducts searches of patent and scholarly databases and then connects the information via circles and connecting lines. 

Say you're about to begin researching a new drug for diabetes, using the BCG mapping tool you'll be able to see what other researchers and organizations are researching the same subject.  A tool like this could help researchers find starting points and sources for their own research and make it easier for them to make a name for themselves in their areas of expertise, think social networking for the research crowd. 

It's not clear how much this tool costs or if it's available outside a BCG consulting contract but it brings an interesting premise for advanced social networks for the professional realm. Perhaps we'll see the creation of a mainstream version of this tool in the future.