Google Streaming Medical Data via Wi-Fi

Today, Google and IBM will release a new plan for streaming medical data directly from your body to Google Health. The Google Health service allows for the storage and retrieval of important medical history on the Internet. The new plan between Google and IBM is aimed at providing real-time streaming of the medical data directly from Google enabled Wi-Fi radios in medical devices such as glucose meters, heart monitors, and others.

According to an article by Forbes.com titled “Letting Google Take Your Pulse”, Andy Greenberg wrote: “Hooking up those devices to the Web, IBM argues, will offer a new immediacy and granularity of health monitoring. A user can remotely track the blood pressure readings or glucose levels of a diabetic parent living alone, or stream his or her medical information like weight or heart rate directly to a doctor or physical trainer.”

Streaming Medical Data: The Advantages

Advantages to real-time streaming of medical data are obviously the immediacy in an emergency, and a potential to be proactive with treatment. When the data is acquired and analized sooner, there is clearly a much greater chance of mitigating health concerns. The advantages to patients could mean the difference between life and death. From a business perspective, there is a great potential for savings on the part of patients, insurance companies, and medicare.

Similar technology has been developed and used in Denmark and Canada, and it is now targeted to be used in the United States.

Streaming Medical Data to Google Health: Security Implications

The security implications of streaming medical data via Wi-Fi to Google are an obvious concern for many people. In the article by Forbes.com, it was compared to GM’s OnStar service, but for a patient. Like the commercials you see on television where the operator dispatches an ambulance after receiving an airbag alert, the technology would be sending health data alerts before a problem is too late to control. Personally, I own three GM vehicles with OnStar, and I am not fond of the fact that unnecessary people have access to where I go and what I do. I would feel far more invaded if my medical records were treated the same way.

There will always be a large segment of people reluctant to adopt new technologies, and when medicine is involved, there should be a reasonable level of caution. This is why acts of congress such as HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) have taken place. I have to imagine that a similar level of scrutiny and details to security are taken into account with the new technology of Wi-Fi streaming of health data. In any case, the the public’s security concerns will likely be a much greater obstacle to the Google Health and IBM efforts than the technology of medical data acquisition.

What do you think?

Building Referral Business: Referrals Build Business

Building your referral business is probably not a new concept to you, but are you implementing it properly? Most people in business can understand the value of referrals and that referral business leads to greater customer satisfaction, which leads to more referral business. This is not limited to sales referrals. A good referral can be for a supplier, a lead for a new employee, a sales lead, or a referral of a good SEO (search engine optimization) professional.

The Value of Referral Business

If you put a pencil to the value of referral business, you will find that the value far exceeds the cost. The list of benefits is long, but here are just a few of the ways referrals can benefit your business.

  • Shorter sales cycle
  • Lower sales or recruiting cost
  • Greater customer satisfaction
  • Potential for more referrals
  • Increased market share
  • Improved image from the word of mouth
  • Improved trust

Referrals Go Both Ways

When we think about referrals, it is common to imagine somebody telling their friend about your product or service, saying that you will call the referral soon, and the deal will be a sure thing. This is a great business referral, but also consider the referral that you may be able to provide them. You may think that you do not know a lot of people who would be a great fit for their business need, but you may be surprised. Often, the referral of a potential employee who may work harder, or a supplier who may provide a better fit for them can be just as useful. It is important that you do not close your mind to opportunities to offer referrals, because when you give a referral, you are much closer to receiving referrals for your business.

Building Referral Business Using the Internet

Of course, because my blog is centered on improving Internet marketing and SEO, I want to point out the value of referral business as it applies to the Internet and your Website. Many people neglect or underestimate the value the referral business coming from people linking to your Website. Any search engine optimizer knows the importance of incoming links from other Websites, but do you? One of the top factors in the success of your Internet marketing is how many other Websites link to yours. Each link pointing to your Website is, as Google describes it, like a vote from that Website for yours. It is a primary factor in Google’s vaunted PageRank technology, which estimates the importance of a given Website. Although you may not look at this as a business referral, it is likely only because the referrals often come in without your even knowing it, thus, neglecting the value of these referrals is common. Perhaps if you truly understood the value, you would send a nice thank you note to the sites linking to your Website … wouldn’t that be a neat idea? It would probably take you less than an hour to thank each and every site owner or Webmaster with a link pointing to you. This brings me to another point on thanking those who give you referral business.

Give Thanks for Referral Business

If you are not giving great thanks for the referral business you receive, you are making a big mistake. I occasionally see an attitude that a referral is just something that the giver was not going to use anyway, so it is no skin off the giver’s back. The reality is that when you are given a referral, you should respect it as if they just gave you a family heirloom. After all, they not only gave you their confidence that you will be respectful and caring to the person they referred, but they also gave you something that you can measure in your success.

Asking for Referral Business

Asking for referral business should be a daily practice. It is not like asking for a birthday present. Although a referral is a highly treasured gift, referrals are often something that your clients and friends will be happy to give. This is especially true if they know the value you place on them.

What is your plan to ask for referrals? Are you sending letters requesting referrals? Are you asking for referrals by sending email to your existing client base? Are you blogging about it?

Referrals Welcome

Your referrals are welcomed by me. I understand the value of your referrals, and I will not only thank you very sincerely, I will write you a check of no less than 10 percent of the initial value of contracts I receive from your referral leading to a SEO (search engine optimization) project. As for Website link referrals, I will thank you kindly, and in many cases return the favor.

Nub Cigars by Oliva Cigar Company Fall Short

Nub Cigars by Oliva Cigar Company is a brand of four inch short cigars created by Sam Leccia and Oliva. The concept of a short cigar is that every cigar has a “sweet spot” that begins in the area of four inches long. If you could get to that cigar sweet spot sooner, it would be possible that the whole cigar could be more enjoyable. After many prototypes and a lot of hard work, Sam Leccia and the Oliva Family got it just right.

Nub Cigar is an example of a great product with mass appeal that will practically sell itself. Really, though, does anything sell itself, or is there more to the story?

Nub Cigar Marketing

The reason I use Nub cigars as a marketing example is not only because I am a cigar smoker who chose Nub as a favorite smoke, or because I happened to have a box of Nub Cigar matches in my hand while I was contemplating a new blog topic. I use them as an example of much marketing brilliance, and a product perfectly suited to an Internet marketing and SEO campaign, but that may fall short of goals and expectations by overlooking usability. This is a good example of how you must look at the whole picture, including the effectiveness and usability of existing efforts.

From my first introduction to Nub Cigar in 2008, I was met with a fantastic product, and a team that showed great dedication to branding and marketing of their cigars. When I met Sam Leccia, he was visiting my hometown of Topeka, Kansas during a long circuit around America with a campaign centered around giving away a new Nub Cigar Mini Cooper. The campaign drew cigar smokers from all around to try the cigars, and to buy more cigars and be given an even greater chance to win the Mini Cooper. The Cooper and the Nub were a great pairing, both being short in size but long on delivery.

Sam Leccia Video: Rolling a Cigar

In this video, Sam Leccia shows how to roll a great cigar.

Nub Cigar Webcast and Social Networking

Sam, along with Oliva Cigar Company have been brilliant in their marketing and branding in many ways. During their visit to Topeka, we talked about their online marketing, and I was surprised when they asked me what I knew about Webcasting. Since we were outside the cigar shop and standing near my car, I simply pointed to the hood of the 2008 Corvette Z06 which reads “CopMagnet.com Live Webcast” and explained that I had recently produced a nine day live mobile Webcast crossing approximately 6,000 miles. These guys were making great strides to reaching a demographic of existing cigar smokers online, as well as a younger demographic that has often been overlooked by cigar companies. They produced online profiles, including a Nub Cigar Facebook page, and they launched the Nub Cigar Lounge, an online forum for other Nub fans to discuss the fine cigars they offer. There did not seem to be a lot which was overlooked by Oliva Cigar Company when it came to marketing … or was there?

Nub Cigar Search Engine Visibility

Although a quick search for Nub Cigar will yield much information about their brand, it mostly serves only to reach the people who are already aware of their products. As with too many companies, their online marketing falls short of reaching others who do not know who they are. I often compare this to a yellow pages vs white pages approach to an Internet market. In the white pages, you can find a known business by name, whereas, in the yellow pages, you seek for a company by their product or service offering. It should not take a lot of thought to guess which method is more valuable.

Nub Cigar Website Usability

Although I give great credit to Sam and the Oliva Cigar Company for their marketing efforts, I have to point out where they fall short. They are not alone by any means. I find this to be the case with most companies’ online marketing, so I not picking on anybody.

If you visit the Nub Cigar Website, a couple things to notice are that it is arguably too graphics-laden, causing it to be slow to load for users and search engine spiders alike. Also, the keyword usage is all but non-existent, and the keyword selection does not embrace the many possible lateral keywords people will use to find cigars online. In fact, all of the pages share the same page title, which is one of the easiest and most important places for improvement. These, along with many other usability issues and a lack of a clear call for action make it seem like there is a lot of potential business and market share left on the table.

In as much as these guys have been brilliant in their efforts, it seems that they did not go all the way. I often see this when a company makes a lot of effort to reach their market online, but when it does not all pan out the way they expect, they stop just short of a potential landslide because the initial efforts did not match with their goals. This speaks to the fact that when you do almost everything just right, the one or two missing links in the chain can make the difference between disappointment and utter success.

Related Article: Cigar Prices Rising With Bad SEO and Social Media Marketing

PETA Commercial Banned From Super Bowl

PETA has long been known for risky marketing tactics. Following the PETA marketing folks’ trend, they have produced yet another commercial banned from airing on television during the upcoming 2009 Super Bowl XLIII. Although the PETA commercial will not be aired during Super Bowl XLIII, the banned commercial’s video “Veggie Love” will surely circulate across the Internet enough, and at a lower cost to PETA, to make up for much of its lacking television airplay.

The cause for the commercial being banned is due to the overtly sexual nature of the video, but that is seldom a concern on the Internet. Regardless of the airing on Super Bowl XLIII, PETA’s “Veggie Love” advertising campaign is poised to become a bigger hit online than expected. When I recently visited their Website, the video would not play. However, it is also available for download, and on YouTube. For that matter, it is not so unlikely that somebody has already tried to email it to you.

What is PETA?

People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. Just in case you are not familiar with the PETA organization, it is a group set to end unethical treatment of animals, including for food, clothing, or just about anything other than to raise as one’s own family. You will find more information about PETA on their Website, PeTA.org.

Watch PETA Commercial Banned by NBC

I did not personally find the commercial to be offensive. It is perhaps in poor taste for the message they are serving, but there is no nudity or outrageously offensive content. However, if you are easily offended by a woman licking a pumpkin or making out with broccoli and asparagus, simply don’t press play.

PETA Viral Marketing

Although I disagree with the methods and the message represented by PETA, as a marketing guy, I must give great respect to the marketing group for their viral marketing campaigns. If only the team had a better project to work with, they would surely see greater success.

My Personal Take on PETA

I used to think PETA stood for People Eating Tasty Animals, and I still prefer that version. If animals were not for eating, why do I keep seeing them at the grocery store? I am not out to treat them unethically, and I can certainly respect the animals I ingest (some more than others). I will perhaps never understand how it is unethical to follow one’s own nature to eat animals, but it makes me wonder what crafty things would happen to the human body as it evolved to their vegetarian views if we stopped. I also wonder what we would do to deal with the huge influx of animal population if we so broadly disrupted the food chain.

Keep Eating Animals!

It is my goal, and surely that of many of my readers, to keep eating those yummy animals we have come to love. In fact, I think I will now make a special trip to the grocery and pick up some extra dead animals to enjoy with my beer as I watch Super Bowl XLIII this coming Sunday.

Target Layoffs

I often keep an eye on Google Trends to find the hot searches of the moment. This is a great way to find interesting news articles, and since I am a search engine optimization guy, it makes good sense. When “Target layoffs” became a leading search phrase at Google today, I could not help but wonder how it may affect my hometown of Topeka, Kansas. It was only a few years ago that the economy was strong and Target built a new distribution center in Topeka. Fortunately for many, Target says it will only plan layoffs at the corporate headquarters in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

The topic of mass layoffs got me to questioning how bad it has become. What I found was that The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports mass layoffs (defined as “establishments which have at least 50 initial claims for unemployment insurance (UI) filed against them during a 5-week period” ) are at an ever-increasing rate with totals as follows:

Month Mass Layoff Actions
January 2008 1438
February 2008 1672
March 2008 1571
April 2008 1308
May 2008 1626
June 2008 1643
July 2008 1512
August 2008 1772
September 2008 2269
October 2008 2140
November 2008 2328
December 2008 N/A

Recent and Upcoming Mass Layoffs

Layoffs seem to be unavoidable with large corporations recently. A few of the companies joining Target with massive recent and upcoming layoffs include Sprint Nextel, Caterpillar, Home Depot, Pfizer, and Texas Instruments. This makes the Target layoffs seem like only a raindrop in a sea of recently unemployed, estimated at roughly 170,000 American layoffs in January 2009.

Internet Job Searches: Self-Promotion

Considering all of these layoffs, surely the number of people using the internet for job searches will be at an all-time high. It is an “employer’s market” due to the flood of available talent, which reminded me of my recent blog article on marketing in a recession. I realized that not only must companies develop a stronger marketing presence by embracing the Internet during a recession, this also applies to marketing an individual’s talents while seeking employment. I am very thankful that I am not seeking a job, but for anybody who is, a look at my list of social networks on the left of my blog would be a good start for the person wanting to make themself more visible for potential job opportunities. Using social networking and the power of search engines may be just what it takes to help you to stand out in a crowd. It only takes a few minutes to join and create a profile, and will likely be time well spent.