Many companies have jumped onto the Facebook application bandwagon. Most of these apps bomb and the ROI must surely be negative. However, there are some great apps out there. Here’s a case study about an app we found that ticks the right boxes.

Social media. It is thought of by many companies as the domain of the clinically bored, and by many marketers as being actively dangerous towards the corporate image.

In the right or wrong hands, social media (that is, blogging and the use of social network sites such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube) can be the difference between a company being accepted as cool and being a laughing stock. When marketers only use social media to throw out the company line, they quite often miss the point of the medium.

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More and more healthcare companies are building their presence on Twitter. Johnson & Johnson, Novartis, Roche, Astra Zeneca, GE Healthcare and Boehringer Ingelheim are all tweeting and being tweeted at. Some companies are even using Twitter to promote specific branded treatments: Novo Nordisk call attention to their Novolog and Levemir diabetes treatments.

In spite of all the hype surrounding Twitter, it looks like these early adopters might be on to something. Whilst still small in comparison to Facebook, Twitter offers something unique: it attracts a lot of content creators and critics – the minority of people who actually create content on the internet as opposed to the majority who merely browse and consume content. These creators are the ones most likely to discuss your brand, either on Twitter itself or on other social networks, such as blogs, message boards, YouTube and so on. For companies, the benefit of Twitter is clear: it’s about seeding your message to the creators so that it finds its way all over the web. It’s all about PR.

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At Content Formula we like to keep an eye on developments within our sector and, now that we’re all merrily tweeting away, I thought I’d do a quick, dirty search of other agency websites to see who else we could follow on Twitter.

I thought that my 20 minutes scanning the NMA Top 100 list would be rewarded with dozens of new accounts to follow, but I was really quite disappointed – out of 113 agencies, I could only find 14 Twitter accounts and a rather lonely Facebook account. This was not quite what I expected from a group who collectively evangelise the cutting edge of web development and often offer social media services. I accept I was only scanning home pages and contact pages, but then if the information isn’t there, then where is it?

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