We now know that for Web engagement, it’s smart to create solutions that are better when shared. However, sharing in health and wellness gives rise to concerns of privacy and being inundated with posts that require Adverse Event Reporting.

During the past several years, we at Wellness Layers, Inc. have met with a number of pharmaceutical companies, and we typically hear the same thing.  They love our approach, integrating three layers of personal plans ("Me"), community ("We") and personalized information ("Info").  However, today, pharma companies opt not to utilize social media platforms because of legal and regulatory implications that require Adverse Event Reporting.  For the most part, even moderated communities are perceived to be unworkable.  The pharmaceutical companies' marketing departments and their agencies are obviously frustrated with these constraints, but they see little in the way of alternatives. 

In taking a closer look at the Web, there are many types of sharing that require no free user generated written content at all, such as ratings, responding to polls, and Facebook’s famous ‘Like’ button. This led us to consider: How can we provide a community without consumers being able to freely communicate?

We finally concluded that we could redefine what "communication" can be. While pharma companies would not want to allow consumers to freely enter comments, this does not mean that they cannot communicate at all.  So we worked backwards to re-define what communication would look like without the ability to freely enter comments. 

We now have created a new social pharma platform, utilizing a "controlled community" whereby consumers can communicate with each other using a wide range of pre-defined verbal responses and emotions, to encourage feedback and support.  This patent pending approach will allow and encourage consumers to establish personal pages, update their "friends," support their friends, find friends, establish groups/teams, receive rewards/badges, etc., all without the opportunity to freely share private information or post something that may need to be reported to the FDA.
 
The challenge, of course, is to make this controlled community as valuable, given its limitations, so that users in fact will continue to frequent the site.  This is our challenge and our opportunity, and Wellness Layers is uniquely positioned to make this happen successfully and to highly customize each of our projects to our individual clients.

The simplicity of messaging is not a simple matter.  It takes a lot of thought to pair down a message and eliminate anything extraneous.  And it takes courage to deliver the key message and make all other messages subsidiary, if at all.  But when the message becomes simple, it becomes powerful.  Enough said.

I recently helped my client, CCC Diagnostics, launch a new website for DirectHit Test Panel for Breast Cancer .  This new test panel helps physicians determine which therapies are more likely to work for individual patients.

The challenge was to revamp their current, "scientific-focused" CCC Diagnostics Site so as to appeal to and be understood by both physicians and patients.  On the new site , I helped my client accomplish the following:

1.  Shift their brand from CCC Diagnostics to their trade name, "DirectHit" which included migrating their messaging from cccdiag.com to directhittest.com .

2.  Tighten up and focus the messaging to appeal to both physicians and patients.

3.  Working with the web designer, we significantly changed the "look and feel" of the site to make it friendlier and approachable.

4.  Simplified the navigation on the site by condensing sections and reducing the number of tabs.

I believe that we accomplished our goal.  The new site is clear, simple, attractive, and easy to navigate.

Now we will concentrate our efforts in driving traffic to the site, including through the use of social media.

The folks at CCC Diagnostics were a pleasure to work with.  They are really smart scientists, but their message needed to be refocused so that a larger body of potential clients and patients could understand.  We worked well together, and, I believe, everyone is thrilled with the end result.

The fact that it essentially costs nothing to add text to a website has encouraged many companies to take all of their print materials and "dump" them onto their websites.  This has caused a virtual text swamp in which websites are less effective than they should be.

Cutting through this mess involves two steps:

1. Setting goals for the website as a whole and for each page on the site, and
2. A serious editing job on each website page to fulfill those goals while delivering a good user experience.

The editing process can be difficult for the company because certain "excess" messaging has to be discarded or, if it is important, it can be moved to secondary pages or accessed with links.

But the benefits of doing so more than outweigh the challenges.  The end result of this process should yield a compelling message for the company, a website that "breathes," and, most important, a satisfying experience for the user.

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