Two New Online Sites Worth Watching for Healthcare Marketing Potential
In the time it takes to read this post, a handful of new concept, Internet startups will launch with as much splash as they can muster. And, in the same brief amount of time, last week’s crop of “latest-and-greatest” social media, Facebook-clones and “community” sites will have vaporized.
We don’t know if the lifecycle of PINTEREST or PAR8O will do better than most such newbies, but these emerging enterprise sites are clearly worth monitoring for their healthcare marketing potential. What’s more, although these are both early-stage operations, they both have an open door to “be invited,” so you can test-drive each for yourself.
PAR8O (as in Wilfreid Pareto and the concept of Pareto efficiency) is in the process of building an online collaborative community of physician/providers and patients. Two of the founders of the physician-only Sermo community—Daniel Palestrant and Adam Sharp—are co-founders of Par8o, and both are MDs. The objective of Par8o is to improve the efficiency of the patient referral process.
“Having built the largest physician community in the world, we’ve seen first-hand what is happening to our profession and understand what it is doing to our colleagues, and most importantly, our patients,” according to the founders.
PINTEREST (a “virtual pinboard” platform) is also open “by invitation.” It’s highly visual and a new spin on social media with common-interest meeting places. “Pinterest allows you to organize and share all the beautiful things you find on the web. You can browse pinboards created by other people to discover new things and get inspiration from people who share your interests.”
Several corporate brands have created pinboard pages, and so have a few healthcare entities. It’s an open canvas for healthcare marketing to (as some of their literature suggests) to create boards for healthy living or disease-specific boards for patients and caregivers.
It’s far too early for us to recommend for or against the healthcare marketing merits of either of these startups. And in the interest of disclosure, we have no business connection with either site. We do, however, have an interest in monitoring both of these new enterprises. They might develop quickly into something big and beneficial to healthcare, hospital and/or doctor marketing. We'll see.
