Google Provides a Virtual Focus Group of Sorts

As anyone who has watched this space knows, I am not only an advocate of social media, and personally enjoy it quite a bit, but I am particularly focused on the fact that pharma needs to be prepared to move more boldly into YouTube and must do so quickly. 

The potential uses of YouTube by pharma are numerous and varied - from brand promotion (DTC-like) to raising awareness about disease conditions to clinical trial recruitment to investigator recruitment to employee recruitment and I think, to risk management.  One of the essential components of risk management is the evaluation of interventions.  Google, in part, provides at least one pathway.

Google Insight was launched this past Spring provides essential metrics such as the demographics of those who watch your videos.  You can create a YouTube channel and see the demographics of your channel - who is watching, from what countries, gender and age groups and what is the popularity of the video compared to others on your channel.  You can also view the same information for each and every video you have posted.  But now - last week actually, Google has added Hot Spot!  Hot Spot allows you to look at each video and see at what point people stop watching.  It is like a mini-focus group.  You can produce a patient education vid or a risk management vid, and identify, for free, where you  lose your audience.  You can use YouTube to float some balloons. 

When you connect this to Google's YouTube TestTube where you can employ Streams which allows you to chat with other people watching the same video as you are.  That means a company could put up an educational video, capture the metrics on it, and chat with people who watch it, essentially blowing out a virtual focus group on your own.  You can test a video or a concept.  Pretty amazing stuff for the creative company.   

To keep up on these kind of developments, I highly recommend subscribing to the Google Blog and the YouTube blog.  And of course, I always encourage visits to the EyeonFDA YouTube channel, aggregating healthcare videos in several essential categories!