Gavin Venters heads up Scottish Health on the Web and is one of the early pioneers of the Internet within the NHS in Scotland. Gavin shares his vision of the online health in the future and discusses current innovative practice within the NHS.

This interview was conducted over Skype as you can tell from my telephone voice.

Keep a look out in the New Year out for the patient video interviews mentioned by Gavin.

Here is very interesting seminar on Social Media by Mike Wesch of Kansas State University who produced the popular video ‘web 2.0 – what is and how to use it’ – you can watch this video in our favourites at w00tonomyTV.

Using YouTube as a case study it looks at why social media had become such a phenomenom in the world by appealing to humans need for individualism and community. Interestingly the audience demographics for YouTube for over 35 are 25%, the same as 12 -17 year olds; the largest group is 18 -24 year olds at 50%.

It is an academic video so you may not wish to watch it all the way through but the first 20 minutes is a very entertaining introduction to Social Media with examples of the viral effects of videos in Youtube – look out for the dance with the prisoners from the Phillippines.

Also for those of you who want to really understand ‘what social networks mean’ without the technical jargon he provides a very clear way to explain it all

• YouTube is user generated content
• Digg is user generated filtering
• del.icio.us is user generated organisation
• Technorati is user generated commentary

Hope you enjoy it!

[youtube TPAO-lZ4_hU]

[youtube o_V4EVHpEOg]

You can also watch the cast on YouTube at w00tonomy TV.

You will probably have done your audience segmentation and usability testing, designed your information architecture, created your taxonomies, produced creatives in line with corporate guidelines, selected your CMS, posted and reworked all those volumes of content and then gone through the agony of testing and change management.

Phew. Finally, it is accomplished. You have a site designed on sound principles compliant with all online standards. Surely such a well engineered solution must achieve the purpose it was set out to do. And to some extent it has – it has distributed your information in a structured format ready for your segmented audience to view.

Now how do you justify all that expenditure to senior management?

You supply monthly web statistics on page views, search terms and referring links – possibly, if you’re really sophisticated, broken down by audience segment.

And this is the evolutionary point where the best sites are today.

“So,” you may ask, “what is problem Mr Content Marketing?”

The answer is that after all this good work you need to start thinking about customer engagement and delivering value. In handling all those engineering and standard compliance problems, the actual marketing objective of engaging in a dialogue that delivers values got put to one side.

Why? Because it’s outside the expertise of many online agencies. And few agencies really want their performance tied to client business objectives. It’s far easier to deliver a website and job done.

Content marketing is the next step for anyone getting a message to an audience. It’s about putting the future of your site in the hands of marketers who think and act like publishers.

To illustrate this point: many health sector websites are the equivalent of a medical journal or text book. The information is well structured and all the information is there. But it’s static, sometimes hard to uncover and there is very little scope for change after publication. But if you marketed your organisation through online stories in a health, fitness and lifestyle magazine you would have something that was refreshed regularly and caught the attention and interest of your audience.

That’s content marketing.

That’s a lot of work to get a lot of traffic for not much cash. That’s a key problem for commercial publishers online. Another key problem is the way that online has moved in the past two years or so.

Thanks to the phenomenon known as Web 2.0, the focus has shifted to individual items of content not to where they are displayed. Blogs, RSS feeds, widgets, wikis, social network and umpteen other phenomena take content out of its context and share, manipulate and distribute it in more ways than seem possible. If the content is interesting enough, that is.

This presents a bijout problemette for commercial content producers. While it’s great to have lots of people reading their stories or watching their videos it’s hard to generate revenue unless you can drag those users under an advertising banner or beside a sponsor’s logo. This mission is not impossible but it is damn hard.

But this is all great news if your aim is not to make money from attracting people but to demonstrate value for money and getting the right message out there. And this is where the public sector wins big, especially when it comes to delivering public service messages.

Online is now about distribution and content. If you can embed your message in interesting content then the natural flow of the web will take it to the people for you.