Healthcare communications and marketing news and information

I've recently come across a few news nuggets about social media that I found interesting.  While they don't focus on healthcare, they have implications for people looking at how social media can be used in this area and the pros and cons of these technologies. 

-Text 100 Gets Into A Flap In Second Life:  The virtual world of Second Life has been all the rage and communicators are viewing it as an opportunity to communicate with engaged audiences.  However, they still have a lot to learn.  Text 100, which has opened an office in Second Life (SL), received a compliant from a SLer about an e-mail sent from the company.  The e-mail was unwelcome and sent to his personal address.  This incident should remind us all of the importance of conducting appropriate outreach to audiences on- and offline.  Text 100 has apologized for sending the e-mail.

-Charlene Li Talks ROI Of Blogging:  Last week I attended an interesting Webinar sponsored by Cymfony and featuring Forrester's Charlene Li on the ROI of business blogging.  It was a great session filled with insights about how to make the case for blogging using hard metrics.  As Li notes, blogging takes significant human resources and organizations large and small need to understand how and why it will benefit them and the costs asociated with it.  To learn more, please see this insightful post on Li's blog.

-Podcasting Still Slow To Catch On:  According to Fred Barnako, podcasts have an average of 70 subscribers.  Clearly, this number is not huge and it will take a long time for podcasting to increase in popularity.  However, what is promising is that podcasts may provide opportunities for communicators to reach influential, niche audiences.  However, the ROI of podcasting, like blogging, needs to be quantified if organizations and marketers are going to view it as a viable means of reaching audiences.