When seeking permission from their mothers, children often employ the argument, “But everyone’s doing it!”

To which the mother automatically replies, “If everyone was jumping off a cliff, would you want to do that too?”

Today, many of us are faced with a situation where seemingly “everyone is doing it,” but we’re still uncertain if simple popularity is a good enough reason to join the trend. What if it’s a cliff?

That situation is called social media. And, especially if you’re considering using it to promote your business (rather than just share photos with friends) it’s all together worthwhile to look before you leap. By now, we’ve all heard horror stories about public relations disasters related to inappropriate use of social media such as Twitter and Facebook. These risks can be even greater in the field of healthcare, where unsubstantiated claims and “loose lips” can quickly spiral out of control. Nobody wants that, but everybody wants customers.

…be assured, your customers and potential customers are indeed using social media

And, be assured, your medical device customers and potential customers are indeed using social media – and not just person-to-person. Everyday, millions are turning to social media to get the latest information from and about product and services providers.

So, the short answer:  Join in. But you don’t have to go in headfirst. You can stick your toe in water first, to see how you like it. That minimizes risk while giving you ample opportunity to learn what works and what your customer (and the medical professional, patient/caregiver community) wants from you.

Here are some ways to stick your toe in the water of social media:

• Post videos to YouTube. Record the presentation you’re giving at the next industry event (professional production standards, please). If it’s long, edit it into smaller segments and post to YouTube. Put links to the videos on your web site.

• Start following other companies on Twitter and Facebook, including (perhaps especially) your competitors. Watch for comments. See what they do right and wrong.

• Start your own company Facebook account. Again, the key here is to remember this is social media, not a place to put overtly self-serving comments or commercials. (You can advertise on Facebook, but that’s a different subject.) Always think of your followers first. Give them something of value. Play it safe. Pretend it’s Thanksgiving Dinner. No politics or religion.

Once you find out the water’s fine, you’ll soon be swimming on your own.

For over a year now, my worldview has been dominated by issues related to mobile healthcare. When you’re in it as deep as I am, it’s easy to lose sight of the fact that, to most folks, this is an entirely new field. And like any new endeavor, there are bound to be mistakes made, and wrong (or at least unproductive) paths followed.

I was reminded of this the other day when I came across the article, Healthcare Marketing Goes Mobile. It prognosticated trends in device usage (smartphones lead the way, with tablets close behind, yawn), but what really caught me was a demographic profile extrapolated from the Pew Internet & American Life Project.

It wasn’t the data itself that concerned me. Instead, it was the idea that one of the wrong paths that mobile healthcare innovators might follow is one of creating products only in response to market research.

Is the best product really an app targeting 25–29 year-old urban black males with some college, making $50k–$75k a year?

Retrospectives of the life of Steve Jobs overflow with delight and admiration for his rare form of innovation. He brought the world products that, until he introduced them, we didn’t know we needed. (I didn’t know I couldn’t live without my iPad until I had one. Now you’d have to pry it from my cold, dead…etc.) Like another super-innovator, Henry Ford opined, “If I had asked people what they wanted, they’d have said ‘faster horses.’”

So the potential mistake I foresee is a company “making faster horses,” in response to polling data. For example, an mHealth developer, acting on the Pew demographic profile, deciding the best product to make is an app specifically targeting 25-29 year old urban black males with some college who make $50k to $75k a year.

I’m definitely not taking the position that market research is useless. My worry is that people will proceed cart-before-horse method and develop apps for a market based on volume (a population responding to a survey) rather than an innovative needs-based (physician/patient insight) concept.

A friend and I were talking recently about a home health monitoring system, an early entry into the burgeoning field of mobile health (mHealth). We both expressed doubt that the product would ever become popular.

My friend said it reminded him of other short-lived tech products he had seen over the years. Like a deck-of-cards-sized device that had a dim green and gray screen on which was displayed (for a modest monthly fee) traffic conditions on the local freeways. Or the cat-shaped input device that would sit by your computer mouse (get it?) and be used – its inventors envisioned – to scan special bar codes in newspapers and magazines, which would direct the user to a web site.

Common to these failed products was their narrowness of application. It occurred to me that, while it may be fool’s game to predict exactly where the mobile health market will go and what specific technologies will succeed, wide acceptance will come only to those products and services that include three key characteristics:

1. General appeal in terms of usability (e.g. GUIs; compatible operating systems).

2. The ability to perform specific, precise tasks to meet the needs of the individual (patient, healthcare provider or both).

3. Connectivity to a central source of comprehensive healthcare information relevant to the condition in question.

If I’m right, it means that a product or service that makes a really big splash in the mHealth universe will be more than just, for example, creating a smart phone app that lets a user track their daily exercise and calories. It will be more than a system that sends a user a text reminding them when to take medication. It will be more than a central database of healthcare information. It will, instead, be all these and more.

Will such a product or service build on an existing platform such as smart phones or the iPad? Without question, some will. But just as the introduction and spectacularly fast acceptance of the iPad seemed to come as a surprise to many, there may very well be an analogous, equally surprising mHealth product being developed right now. It remains my position, however, that whatever system achieves dominance, it will be one that combines these three key characteristics.

Summing up the SXSWi held in Austin, TX from March 12-15th I’d have to say ‘opportunity’ and ‘uncertainty’ were the two words that came up the most following the Social Health sessions at this event.

Opportunity lies ahead for mHealth application development and healthcare IT, as pointed out by Tim O’Reilly, CEO of O’Reilly Media, considered to be a thought leader in emerging technology trends.   At the end of his keynote interview he turned to the audience and encouraged all the entrepreneurs to seriously consider Healthcare IT for start-up opportunities there.

And on the mHealth app development front John Pettengill at Razorfish rightly pointed out, mHealth apps need to be patient focused not technology focused, especially when dealing with chronic conditions.  Just because coders can pull out lots of charts and graphs from the data doesn’t mean that it will be useful or attractive to paitents.  As for healthcare IT, the best sessions dealing with Health 2.0, EHRs and the huge gray area of how this uncertain market will develop were the #health2dev session moderated by Indu Subaiya and following session on health apps with BJ Fogg from Stanford University.

At one point Professor Fogg asked how many gamers/app developers were in the audience and one lone guy raised his hand in a room of 100+ people.  I’ll be interested to see how many more gamers will make their into this audience next year.  I think there will be many more.

This week I attended a webinar hosted by IBM on the trends for in-home medical devices based on research done in 2010 with over 1,300 US and UK consumers by IBM’s Institute for Business Value. (Here’s the link to the webinar http://bit.ly/bSgY73 )

What I found most interesting was that the research toppled some well-established assumptions such as: 1) consumers are unhappy with their current in-home wellness devices; and 2) in-home devices are mainly used for known health conditions (vs. preventative care devices).  On both counts the research results came back opposite of the ‘common assumptions’.  It seems that consumers are satisfied with their current devices and are ready for more, especially as people become so attuned to using small hand-held electronic devices.  And it seems that the message about preventative care and the benefits it affords is making its way into the home. That to me equates to market opportunities for ‘prevention devices’ (like tracking exercise and physical activity) and even remote monitoring of “someone’s changing health conditions”.