Who Owns Your Social Media? Health Is Social, But Privately Owned and Operated
By John Mack
“Twitter just announced a complex, confusing, and developer-alienating system that restricts their once-open, always cherished but now apparently taken for granted API,” complained Michael Spitz, SVP and Managing Director at Zemoga. “The new rules change the playing field for third party developers, establish caps on number of users, and shift guidelines to requirements across four categories of businesses that Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Land humorously characterized in Star Trek terms.”
Spitz characterized this as #TWITTERFAIL and he thinks the new rules “ruin the spirit of social media” and are “bad for healthcare.”
Spitz’s “rant” raises a couple of interesting issues that I discussed with him in a live Pharma Marketing Talk podcast.
Topics include:
- What’s an API? What API changes are we specifically talking about? Discuss the details.
- What will be the result of these changes with regard to the “developer community?”
- How will this be “bad” for healthcare? Is Twitter now “good” for healthcare? How so?
- Are we giving Twitter and other social media too much credit for its ability to improve healthcare? Are we just talking about moneyed interests — eg, pharma marketing — or actual health outcomes?
- Bonus Content: Fake vs. Real Pharma Twitter Followers
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Issue: Vol. 11, No. 8: September 2012
