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Marketing

HealthTap: Where Saving Lives is Just Another Marketing Message

by John M. Grohol, Psy.D. 10/21/2024

After receiving a generic, form email suggesting that I could become a “Founding Influencer” for a company called HealthTap, I decided to pop on over to the company’s website to remind myself what it was all about. It’s like an Answers.com for health and medical conditions. Except that doctors are doing the answering (for free!).

And except the answers are, in my opinion, so generic as to be far less helpful than a simple Google search could provide most users. After all, it’s unethical for doctors to provide personalized medical advice to someone they haven’t seen.

What I saw when I got to the HealthTap homepage, however, bowled me over. Smack there front-and-center was the claim, “12,044 lives saved.” As though “lives saved” was just one more accolade to market their services by.

10/21/2024 0 comment

Increasing Mental Health Awareness: Too Much of a Good Thing?

by John M. Grohol, Psy.D. 11/9/2023

written by John M. Grohol, Psy.D.

Increasing Mental Health Awareness: Too Much of a Good Thing? Today is the American Psychological Association’s “Blog Party” in recognition of May being mental health month. The marketing effort behind designating a specific month a time to recognize and help increase awareness of a certain disease, disorder or condition is intended to help people learn more about various medical and mental health concerns.

But a few weeks ago, physician H. Gilbert Welch wrote an op-ed in the LA Times that questioned whether the pendulum has swung too far the other way. Have we become a nation of people who will get diagnosed for all sorts of sub-clinical problems at the drop of a hat?

Indeed, I think there is a very real danger of that becoming the case. And nowhere is that more likely than in mental health.

11/9/2023 10 comments

How Facebook, Social Networks Leak Your Privacy

by John M. Grohol, Psy.D. 1/15/2023

written by John M. Grohol, Psy.D.

An article in the Boston Globe yesterday demonstrated how social networks like Facebook can “leak” privacy.

Devising a simple algorithm, two MIT students came up with a method for analyzing a person’s network on the social networking website Facebook. They discovered that they could fairly reliably determine whether a man was gay or not by the friends he kept, regardless of whether he identified his sexual orientation on Facebook:

Using data from the social network Facebook, they made a striking discovery: just by looking at a person’s online friends, they could predict whether the person was gay. They did this with a software program that looked at the gender and sexuality of a person’s friends and, using statistical analysis, made a prediction. The two students had no way of checking all of their predictions, but based on their own knowledge outside the Facebook world, their computer program appeared quite accurate for men, they said. People may be effectively “outing” themselves just by the virtual company they keep.

The method was not reliable for lesbians or bisexuals.

What this episode demonstrates is not so much the expertise of the MIT students, but the “leakiness” of the information we provide to social networking websites. Even when we don’t explicitly state facts about our life (e.g., diagnosed and being treated for major depression for 2 years), such characteristics may be discovered simply by other indications in our online profiles (friending Psych Central, for instance, and being a member of a Facebook depression support group).

Every passing month, our online lives become more and more entangled with our real lives — we no longer have separate online personas (and when we think we do, researchers can usually discover our real identity with enough searching). Social networking websites like Facebook, while offering a the powerful and usually-positive ability to interconnect with our friends and acquaintances, also tells the world more about us than perhaps we intended.

And that’s the key takeaway — we’re sharing more information than we had intended or meant to share because of social network analysis. While perhaps providing some potential insights into human behavior for researchers, its unintended consequences suggest that our lives are being mined for data. While this analysis is nothing particularly new in the marketing world, websites like Facebook take such analysis to a new level.

The project, given the name “Gaydar” by the students, Carter Jernigan and Behram Mistree, is part of the fast-moving field of social network analysis, which examines what the connections between people can tell us. The applications run the gamut, from predicting who might be a terrorist to the likelihood a person is happy or fat. The idea of making assumptions about people by looking at their relationships is not new, but the sudden availability of information online means the field’s powerful tools can now be applied to just about anyone.

For example, Murat Kantarcioglu, an assistant professor of computer science at the University of Texas at Dallas, found he could make decent predictions about a person’s political affiliation. He and a student – who later went to work for Facebook – took 167,000 profiles and 3 million links between people from the Dallas-Fort Worth network. They used three methods to predict a person’s political views. One prediction model used only the details in their profiles. Another used only friendship links. And the third combined the two sets of data.

The researchers found that certain traits, such as knowing what groups people belonged to or their favorite music, were quite predictive of political affiliation. But they also found that they did better than a random guess when only using friendship connections. The best results came from combining the two approaches.

When used for academic research, such efforts seem harmless. But what’s to stop a company from using these types of analysis for individual, investigative research? Imagine, for instance, large insurance companies compiling complex and complete profiles on individuals — including what their social networks say about their health and mental health — in seconds by using such analysis, and then setting your insurance rates accordingly? Or a background checking firm providing not only their usual basic background information on an individual, but a whole page of “inferred” information from such analyses? It could readily jeopardize careers, job advancement, and maybe someday, even romantic relationships (“Click here to understand what your date’s Facebook profile really says about them and their likely interest/compatibility with you!”).

This isn’t something most people think about (much less agreed to) when they signed up for Facebook or another social network. Surprisingly, social networks like Facebook don’t place any limits on people mining their network for such data. And while it seems harmless right now, history has shown us the many ways such tools can be used and abused for other people’s interests over our own.

There is a way to stop this from happening to you — set your profile to “private,” so only people you specifically choose can see your information.

Read the Globe article: Project â€˜Gaydar’: An MIT experiment raises new questions about online privacy

Read the Mind Hacks entry about additional social network analysis: Unweaving the tangled web

1/15/2023 2 comments

APA: Website Design Tips Circa 1997

by John M. Grohol, Psy.D. 12/17/2022

written by John M. Grohol, Psy.D.

Since I decided not to attend this year’s annual convention of American psychologists (held, ironically, in Toronto this year), I’ve been following their blog. This is the first year the APA has done a blog about the convention, 10 years after blogs become popular. I guess better late than never is the theme.

And I can’t help but think that’s the theme for some of the approved talks, like their cutting-edge talk about Enhancing Your Web Site. I’m sorry, but really? I don’t mean to be critical, but this is the kind of advice I’d expect to see (and that I think I actually gave to a previous convention) circa 1997. Not 2009. You could’ve saved yourself the 50 minute talk with it being boiled down to:

Website design is like any other professional service — you get what you pay for. If you try and “do it yourself” (e.g., doing it for “free”), your results may very well reflect your abilities. Most people wouldn’t think of redoing the plumbing in their house themselves, so why would one think website design and search engine optimization (SEO) is any different?
If you do decide to “do it yourself,” look at other professionally-done psychologists’ pages. Make your site look like theirs, without wholesale copying of their look and feel, or content. (Remember, “Good artists copy. Great artists steal” — Picasso.)
Forget trying to become “well positioned on search engines.” Unless you’re willing to learn a whole additional profession — online marketing and search engine optimization (SEO) — you’re deluding yourself if you believe you can affect search engine results by simply changing the keywords in your page’s title. Yes, that can help, but that’s the tip of the iceberg when it comes to SEO.
Avoid the need for scrolling? Really? Again, this isn’t 1997, and while that may have been the advice at one time, people know how to scroll on a web browser and in a Word document. They don’t mind doing so if the content you’re offering is useful and helpful in their making a decision about something.
Along the same lines — one should always use the exact amount of words necessary to convey the information necessary. Being “brief and relevant” tells a potential client very little about the kind of tone to expect from your therapy sessions or what-not. So while this may or may not work for information-driven websites (it really depends on the website), it definitely isn’t great advice for a professional looking to differentiate themselves in a crowded marketplace.

In terms of my additional advice not mentioned that you likely didn’t gain from attending the APA or reading the APA blog entry:

Make sure you appear in the biggest online therapist directories, like Psychology Today’s (which we license to use on Psych Central). More and more people turn to these kinds of directories, because they aren’t profession-specific. If you’re not listed in them, you won’t be found.
You could spend, literally, years trying to understand and improve your search engine rankings. Hire this part out, unless you really have that kind of spare time. Or worry less about it, especially if you’re appearing in a number of online therapist directories.
Web design is a profession, just like psychology. Professionals generally hire out other professional services; they don’t try and do it all themselves. Psychologists tend to make poor marketing professionals (unless you went and got your marketing degree too), and they often make even worse web designers (unless you’ve spent 10 years designing for others, or got your web design degree too).
A website complements a comprehensive marketing plan; it is not a substitute for one. Your website serves a purpose, to give you an online presence. It, however, cannot substitute for a comprehensive and well thought-out total marketing plan that includes local print advertising, yellow pages, being on the right provider panels (if you take insurance), etc. Most professionals’ websites are simply electronic brochures, and for most people, that’s sufficient and all you need.
Enhance your website by adding simple, free “widgets” that display things like psychology and mental health news. For instance, here’s Psych Central’s free news widget you can add to your website and here’s a list of all the Psych Central free widgets we have available. Visitors who come to your site will appreciate the simple addition of these kinds of tools.
Point your clients and visitors on your website to resources and other websites that you recommend. I’ve seen time and time again research that points to the fact that most patients appreciate their doctor’s (and therapist’s) recommendations for online resources. For instance, many clients would benefit from joining a support group. There’s thousands of them online, including the 150+ support groups we host in the Psych Central Community.
Consider adding a video introduction to your website. YouTube is popular for a reason — people love online videos. Introduce yourself! Talk about how you work with clients. Make yourself known to them in a direct and personal manner through a simple 1 or 2 minute video (and really, it doesn’t have to be any longer than that). If you have a newer digital camera, some cell phones, or even a video recorder, you can upload a video to YouTube, and then embed it in your website. Seem like too much to do? Enlist the help of a more technically-experienced son or daughter, or nephew or niece, or other professional who can do the uploading part for you (although video tools have gotten so easy to use nowadays, you can try it yourself).
If you like to write and find yourself wanting to share your thoughts on a regular basis, considering blogging. Blogger.com and WordPress.com offer individuals a free blog. You can link from the blog back to your website. While it rarely drives many referrals to your practice, it can help to get your name out there and become a little more recognized for the areas you practice in (or are a researcher in).
Get on the social networking sites like Facebook and consider Twitter (a micro-blogging service that doesn’t require as much work as a regular blog does). Many potential clients will conduct research on a future therapist on Facebook or Google. If you have no Facebook profile, some clients may take that as a sign that you’re not very on top of your game. (I know this may be a controversial point amongst some professionals, but yes, you should be on Facebook. Don’t worry, it’s already on the way out amongst teens and other young adults.)

Hope these additional tips help someone.

12/17/2022 5 comments