I am very excited to announce that CIC and Edelman China have partnered to release a white paper on IWOM and health care.

* The paper is here.
* The Chinese language press release is here.
* The English language press release is here.

Over the last few months, we have worked closely with the Edelman health care team in Shanghai to make sense of the 1,427,853 messages we collected from 429 forums written by 176,373 screen names during Q3 2006. For this edition, we focused on cancer discussions.

It is clear from our findings that there is a thirst for information from alternative, but credible sources about health care. Consumers are talking to consumers, consumers to doctors, and doctors to doctors. This presents a great opportunity for health care companies to learn what some of the most informed and influential consumers and doctors think about particular health care issues. With such understanding, they can develop more appropriate and effective communication strategies that can educate with the information that is really wanted in a way that will be appropriate and acceptable to them.

Of course, we think this is great help for health care companies, but we also think what we do is helpful to consumers. We are helping their voices be heard so the companies can get out the information they really need.

While PR is not the only function we work in (we also work within branding, marketing, market research, digital marketing functions), it is an important one. And while we work with a wide variety of clients and could have easily written white papers for the automotive, mobile phone, cosmetics, parenting, consumer electronics, computer, software industries (industries with tons of rich data), we think the health care industry is particularly compelling and relevant.

I won't go into details, as they are all in the paper. Would love to hear your feedback.